Retro Reel: Boudu Saved From Drowning

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Criterion Collection, 1932, 84 minutes) - add this title to your Netflix queue.

Remade in 1986 as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and again in 2005 as, simply, Boudu, Jean Renoir's dark comedy about an ungrateful vagabond features a shaggy black mutt who's only slightly less scruffy than the bearded title character, played to the hilt by legendary character actor Michel Simon. Boudu tries to end it all by throwing himself into the Seine, but is rescued by bookseller Monsieur Lestingois, who insists on moving the big, outrageously rude, very un-Chaplinesque tramp into his house.

What ensues after that, as this ur-bourgeois Parisian household is turned on its head, proves two things: 1) that nobody does social satire like Renoir and 2) the wisdom of Mark Twain's witticism, "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." Criterion Collection's restored, high-definition digital transfer features, among other things, an archival introduction by the great Renoir himself.

Presence of dogs:
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