Volume 21, Number 15 · October 3, 1974
That's Entertainment
By Robert Mazzocco
Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir
directed by Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
by Raymond Durgnat
University of California Press, 450 pp., $15.00
Harold and Maude
directed by Hal Ashby
The Long View
by Basil Wright
Knopf, 752 pp., $15.00 (to be published in November)
Hugo says that forty is the old age of youth and that fifty is the youth of old age. These summer and autumn moods where perhaps one is most aware of the poignancy of what has been or what is to come, these seasons of accommodation where one plants and where one reaps, seem to me the apt setting, the characteristic boundaries, of Jean Renoir's gently radiant, gravely humorous art. In the best of his films—even the Indian exoticism of The River, where three nubile girls stand on the threshold of love, the elegant eleventh-hour romps of The Rules of the Game, the last flings and follies of Boudou Saved from Drowning—there's always that typical Renoir ripeness, the authority of natural forces, natural events, those strains of lyric simplicity and dark but mellow accountability which Renoir makes so much his own.
Review, 5284 words
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