La Chienne

Maurice Legrand is a mild mannered cashier trapped in a tense marriage to Adèle, a domineering presence who makes his life feel narrow and wrong. A chance encounter changes his rhythm when he meets Lucienne, called Lulu, a young woman who both needs affection and wants protection. Lulu tolerates Maurice not out of love, but because he serves a purpose in her world and in the orbit of her pimp Dédé. Maurice mistakes Lulu's quiet warmth for real romance and steps into a social circle where money, desire and danger mingle. Maurice soon finds himself drawn into a web of obligations and risk, where appearances hide more than they reveal. Renoir offers this social panorama with unsentimental clarity. The film balances compassion with a cool, clinical eye, never glamorizing the flaws it exposes.

Directed by Jean Renoir, La Chienne premiered in 1931 and adapts Georges de La Fouchardière's novel into a tightly observed crime drama that probes ordinary lives beneath a polished surface. It marks Renoir's early use of sound to intensify character psychology and social critique.

La Chienne helped anchor a strand of French cinema that blends social realism with psychological nuance. Michel Simon's unguarded performance as Legrand became a touchstone for portraying decent men adrift in a world of exploitation. The film's blunt portrait of respectability, desire, and power influenced later directors and is often cited as a key step in Renoir's development as a filmmaker.

Critics of the era praised Renoir's patient, humane gaze and his refusal to moralize. The film treats love and longing as fragile illusions while money and social status corrode relationships, exposing the hypocrisy that prosperity and propriety mask.

Box office data from the 1930s is not easily accessible, but La Chienne is remembered as a prestige release that helped cement Renoir's reputation and showcased a new wave of French cinema.