Boudu Sauvé Des Eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
NR, 87 min.
Directed by Jean Renoir, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hania, Sevverine Lerczynska.

One of Renoir’s very best films, Boudu skewers class distinctions with its hand outstretched with a joy buzzer. The great French comic actor Michel Simon is also at his best here as a bum saved from the Seine by a bourgeois do-gooder. The beauty of Renoir’s work is that he shows us all angles of human experience, while never privileging one over the other. The movie was remade in America with Nick Nolte, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, and Elizabeth Peña as Down and Out in Beverly Hills by Paul Mazursky in 1986.

This article appears in March 24 • 2000.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.