Renoir's post-American films, from 1950 onwards, present genuine difficulties, though of a peculiar kind, just because they do not seem difficult or obscure at all. They appear to be, if anything, too easy—light, comic and sometimes farcical in spirit, colourful (only two of the seven films are in black and white) and almost self-indulgently sensuous, 'commercial' rather than 'art' films….

[However,] the peculiar quality of the later films, their combination of a high degree of abstraction with a strongly sensuous realisation, was already latent in the pre-war films; and … Renoir's diversified output has a resonant inner unity. (p. 136)

The moral seriousness and social commitments of the pre-war films are transformed in the late films into moral schemas, set against romanticised but not sentimentalised social backgrounds…. Renoir's full-blooded humanism, while not inhibiting anger and a clear-eyed knowledge of moral failings, has largely precluded any metaphysical concept of evil, and...