In 1936, it is often forgotten, Jean Renoir made a propaganda film, La Vie est a nous, for the French Communist Party, starring Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos etc; in 1937, he made La Marseillaise for the Trade Union movement (cgt). Then the war and exile in Hollywood. The heady days of the Popular Front never returned. In 1950, he made The River in India (his last American film), explaining that, whereas before the war he had tried to raise ‘a protesting voice’, he now thought that both the times and he himself had changed: his new mood was one of ‘love’, of the ‘indulgent smile’. Following films seemed to confirm the trend: French-Cancan, Elena et les hommes. Betrayal? Or maturity? The critics split. One camp praised the pre-war Renoir, the Renoir ‘of the left’; the other praised post-war Renoir, the Renoir of ‘pure cinema’. One school, leaning on the authority of Andre Bazin, remembered ‘French’ Renoir; another, headed by the emerging critics of Cahiers du Cinema, heralded ‘American’ Renoir. As Renoir grew older, the Cahiers critics argued, he grew more personal, hence more of an author, a greater director. Debate turned acrimonious. Renoir, one anti-Cahiers critic wrote, ‘deified by imbeciles, has lost all sense of values’. And so on.

The truth is that Renoir’s work is a coherent whole. The mainspring of his thought has always been the question of the natural man: nature and artifice, Pan and Faust, natural harmony. His differing attitudes to society have been the result of the ‘natural’ naiveté he has cherished. The Popular Front appealed to him, he has confessed, partly because it seemed to presage an era of harmony between classes, a national idyll; after the war the forces which had made up the Front showed discord rather than concord and Renoir retreated from political life, away from camps and blocs into the countryside, his father’s estate, nostalgia and a kind of pantheism. Vet Renoir the pantheist is none other than Renoir the communist, Renoir the ‘red’ propagandist. His first allegiance has always been to the ordinary man, asking nothing more than to eat, drink, sleep, make love and live in harmony with all the other millions of ordinary men throughout the world. He dislikes regimentation, systematization—anything which threatens the natural, human qualities to which he is attached. He detests the conditions imposed on man by capital—at its furthest limit his detestation has led him to anarchism and pacifism—but he cannot accept the conflict or the discipline necessary for the overthrow of the capitalist system. His great philosophical ancestor is Rousseau; at one time his preoccupation has been the General will, at another the Noble Savage.