Ophuls and Renoir

JEAN-LOUP BOURGET Ophuls and Renoir hat I propose t? do is threefold: first, outline a broad parallel between Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir, two filmmakers with profoundly European roots, whose masterpieces are primarily associated with French cinema, before and after World War II, and who were both active in Hollywood where they had gone into temporary exile in the intervening war years; second, question the relevance of such a parallel; third, take a closer look at a number of possible pairings between specific works by the two filmmakers. In the process I hope to demonstrate that the comparison between the two artists' careers and œuvres, far from being a gratuitous rhetorical device, is justified historically and susceptible of sharpening our understanding of the aesthetics of two major filmmakers. THE BROAD PARALLEL Ophuls and Renoir are nearly exact contemporaries, less than eight years apart (Renoir was born in 1894, Ophuls in 1902). Admittedly, Renoir's film career covers a much longer period than that of Ophuls, spanning forty-five years from La Fille de Veau (1924) to Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969), as opposed to the twenty-four year period from Nie wieder Liebe! (193 1) to Lola Montes (1955), and Renoir, who died in 1979, outlived Ophuls (who died in 1957) by twenty-two years. Nevertheless, if we disregard Renoir's Petit Théâtre, a decidedly minor work, it seems to me that the broad synchronic parallel between the two careers holds true, at least as far as their late periods are concerned. The same is true of the careers' general pattern, from Europe to Hollywood and back. Until World War II Renoir's career is almost exclusively French, with the exception of Tosca, which he started in Italy in Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 hy Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 W 128 fean-Loup Bourget 1940 (I say almost exclusively for another reason, which is the fact that Nana [1925-26] was partly shot in Berlin, a point to which I shall return ). After five feature films made in Hollywood between 1941 and 1947 (Swamp Water, This Land Is Mine, The Southerner, The Diary of a Chambermaid and The Woman on the Beach), Renoir made The River in India (1951), then returned to Europe to shoot The Golden Coach in Italy (1953) and the remainder of his films in France, though he eventually chose to reside and die in Los Angeles. As we know, Ophuls' career is more cosmopolitan, but entirely European, until 1941, with also one film, La signora di tutti, made in Italy in 1934; then, after a long gap (not present in Renoir's career) come the four American features of the late forties (not counting Vendetta), namely The Exile, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught and The Reckless Moment. Ophuls' late period , in the fifties, is again exclusively European; it is often described as French, although we should remember that Madame de . . . (1953) is a French-Italian production and that the "French" description is too restrictive for Lola Montes. Similarly, whilst I have no desire to engage in polemics and question Marcel Ophuls' oft repeated statement that his father "wished to live and die in his adopted country," France,1 I'd like to point out not just that he died in Hamburg after staging Beaumarchais 's The Marriage of Figaro in that city, but also that recent research has concluded that "although Ophuls never returned to America [after 1949], he maintained close ties to its film industry, hoping until the end of his life to continue making films in Hollywood" (Bacher 326). Beaumarchais provides me with my transition since we are all familiar with the famous "fickle love" epigraph to Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), which the filmmaker borrowed from the very same play, The Marriage ofFigaro, and which is one among many pieces of evidence attesting to Renoir's abiding interest in the theater, an interest obviously shared by Ophuls. Here again the parallel is of the "compare and contrast" type: like so many of his German contemporaries, Ophuls worked in the legitimate theater (first as an actor, then...