Renoir is not a studio hack who turns into images whatever script a producer hands him…. Renoir is a seeker who is not complacent about past achievements, but who regards each new film as a challenge, as an opportunity to make actors project the way Jean Renoir thinks human beings ought to be, in atmospheres congenial to Renoir—i.e., those in which reality and dreams intermingle.

This last is the key to all his films. (p. 140)

In Les Bas Fonds (1936), in which Renoir's favorite themes are played in the keys of despair and "realism" then fashionable, there is the character of an actor, who, caught in the conflict of dream with reality, recited a few lines of Shakespeare and then hanged himself. I don't recall whether the actor's suicide had a dramatic purpose, but obviously that character bothered Renoir, for it now reappears in and furnishes the...