Prevert wrote this screenplay for Renoir the same year he wrote Jenny for Marcel Carne and it's interesting to speculate what might have happened in French cinema had Prevert forged a partnership with Renoir instead of Carne. There's a lot here about workers 'rights' a subject that still, 70 years down the line, still preoccupies Robert Guidiguian, but given that Prevert IS Prevert there's also a lot of poetic touches and subtle dialogue. Indeed it is tempting to think that the Batala he wrote for Jules Berry was a rough draft for the real Devil that Berry would play a few years later in Les Visiteurs du Soir. Arguably one of the earliest uses of 'flashback' it is also full of holes - the flashback is related by a laundress who has fled with Amedee Lange to a small inn on the border; realizing that the proprietor and customers have recognized Lange as a man wanted for murder, she offers to tell his (Lange's) story and then let them decide whether or not to turn him in. However roughly half of what she relates is stuff of which she herself had no direct knowledge, conversations to which she was not privy, etc. If we make allowances for this we are left with a fairly engrossing story verging on a morality play of good (Lange) versus evil (Batala) and workers banding together and unlike La Belle Equipe remaining bonded via the glue of Lange's humanity. In many small ways it feels earlier than nineteen thirty six but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Now available in a boxed set of 3 Renoir titles of which La Grande Illusion stands out.
Review of The Crime of Monsieur Lange
