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List Price: $29.95Amazon.com's Price: $26.99 You Save: $2.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780780030121
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
ISBN: 0780030125
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: August 23, 2005
Running Time: 84 minutes
Sales Rank: 47168
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: February 23, 1967
Editorial Review:
Description:
After well-to-do bookseller Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval) rescues a tramp from a suicidal plunge into the Seine, his family adopts the bum and dedicates itself to reforming him. The irrepressible Boudu (Michel Simon) shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations, challenging the hidebound principles of his hosts and seducing them with his anarchic charm. With Boudu Saved from Drowning, legendary director Jean Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and a brilliant performance by Simon to create an effervescent satire of bourgeois complacency.
Amazon.com essential video:
Long before there were hippies, there was, sublimely, Boudu. In 1932 director Jean Renoir and French star Michel Simon, fresh from their early-sound triumph La Chienne, decided to re-team in adapting a stage farce about a derelict rescued from the river by a bookseller and groomed for bourgeois society. The bookseller's idea proves to be disastrous, though working through all the possibilities for disruption and catastrophe is a slow-gathering and hilarious process. Simon always seemed as much force of nature as mere actor, and his and Renoir's inspiration is to make Boudu the vagabond not a satyr or opportunist or noble savage or de facto sociopolitical anarchist, but simply an oversized manchild with no more guile or conscious agenda than the shaggy dog whose sudden defection led him to throw himself into the Seine. If his insistence on leaving a downy-soft bed to sleep in the hall happens to block the door to the maid's room, where his benefactor Lestingois is wont to sneak after the wife's asleep, well, Boudu doesn't really plan it that way. And if he leaves a wet lugie between the pages of a first-edition Balzac, well, they asked him not to spit on the floor, after all!
We can see that the original farce (by René Fauchois) was probably pretty funny to begin with, but Renoir makes of it much, much more. Boudu Saved from Drowning--arguably the first French New Wave film, nearly 30 years before there was a New Wave--is one of those cardinal works in which we can see, and experience anew, a great filmmaker inventing the cinema. Without jettisoning the formal qualities of the theatrical farce, Renoir opens his film to light, fresh air, and the teeming multifariousness of Parisian street life; the denizens of the city become unwitting extras in the movie as Boudu first shambles, then prances, among them. The deep-focus camerawork is exhilarating, but even the gregarious roughness of the production feels right, indeed essential. 'I believe that perfection is even dangerous,' Renoir remarked of his own movie. 'If a film is perfect, the public has nothing to add.... The audience should always be trying to finish a picture, ... fill in the holes which we didn't fill.' Collaborating on Boudu is a glorious experience. --Richard T. Jameson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - "One should only come to the aid of one's equals!"
I'm not a fan of comedic cinema (nothing against it as a genre or art form; I just don't have much of a funny bone). But Renoir's "Boudo Saved from Drowning" (or "...from the water" in French) had me laughing at the richness of Michel Simon's portrayal of the crazily unconventonal tramp who disrupts a respectable bourgeois household.
Boudo is a comical Caliban, a wild "Neanderthal" as one of the film's characters calls him, who serves as a countervailing force to everything that the ... Read More
Rating: - My Favorite Renoir
So you're a self-proclaimed film buff & you've sat through the Renoir masterpieces "The Rules of the Game" and "The Grand Illusion" and performed the obligatory genuflecting before two of the greatest contributions to film ever. Two gold stars for you. Now what? Though Renoir never quite approaches the level of excellence of those two greats in his other work, there are still plenty of gems on his resume. Boudo Saved From Drowning is an earlier Renoir effort my suggestion for the third Renoir ... Read More
Rating:  - Important film history
This is a marveouls slice of film history, giving a very accurate representation of life in 1932 Paris, and also an artistic vision, as well as subthemes of Freudianism, as it began to permate the arts of the 1930s and 1940s.
Boudu is reminiscent of Chaplain's little trap, but more realistic and fully realized, irritating, ignorant, aggrivating and entirely self centered. He is the animal nature of man, and our Bourgeous gentleman who takes him in is the supposedly cultured man who is also ... Read More
Rating: - Civilization and Its Discontents
In BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, Renoir's satire is never cruel. He shows affection for all of his silly characters, and no one escapes a ribbing.
Boudu is pure id (imagine Walt Whitman on a three-day bender), but he has no real malice toward anyone. Lestingois, the good citizen who takes him in, is driven by a sincere but utterly self-serving sense of compassion. He thinks he can bring this wild animal into his house and groom and curry him until he personifies the bookseller's own generosity. ... Read More
Rating: - Hilarious.
I'm not into a lot of analysis and social commentary like many of the reviewers of this film seem to be. And I have nothing against the bourgeoisie--average middle class people make the world go round (and I bet that most people who review films on Amazon are very middle-class, enjoying the comforts of 21st century America--which are considerably more than the comforts of 1930's France.) I can see that if there was a real Boudu, I would not want him in my house for very long, if at all (the man spits in ... Read More
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