The Crime of Monsieur Lange

The Crime of Monsieur Lange
Directed by	Jean Renoir
Produced by	André Halley des Fontaines Jean Renoir
Written by	Jean Castanyer Jacques Prévert Jean Renoir
Starring	René Lefèvre Florelle Jules Berry Marcel Lévesque Odette Talazac Henri Guisol Maurice Baquet
Release date(s)	1936
Running time	80 min
Language	French

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (original French title: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange) is a 1936 film directed by Jean Renoir about a publishing cooperative. An idyllic picture of a socialist France, the film is part social commentary and part romance.

Plot

Imbued with the spirit of the left-wing political movement, Popular Front, which would have a major political victory that year, the film chronicles the story of M. Lange (René Lefèvre), a mild-mannered clerk at a publishing company who dreams of writing Western stories. He gets his chance when Batala (Jules Berry), the salacious head of the company, fakes his own death and the abandoned workers decide to form a cooperative. They have great success with Lange's stories about the cowboy, Arizona Jim — whose stories parallel the real-life experiences of the cooperative. At the same time, Lange and his neighbor, Valentine (Florelle), fall in love.

When Batala returns from the "dead", intending to reclaim the publishing company, Lange shoots and kills him (the "crime" of the title). Lange and Valentine flee to escape the country, stopping at an inn near the Belgian border. Here, Valentine tells Lange's story to a group of the inn's patrons, who had recognized Lange as the "murderer on the run" and threatened to turn him in to the police. After the story is through, the men sympathize with Lange and decide to allow him to escape across the border to freedom.

Cast

• René Lefèvre — Amédée Lange
• Florelle — Valentine Cardès
• Jules Berry — Paul Batala
• Marcel Lévesque — The concierge
• Odette Talazac — The concierge's wife
• Sylvia Bataille — Edith
• Nadia Sibirskaïa — Estelle
• Henri Guisol — The son Meunier
• Maurice Baquet — Charles, the concierges' son
• Jacques B. Brunius (as J.B. Brunius) — Mr. Baigneur
• Sylvain Itkine — Inspector Juliani, Batala's cousin
• Marcel Duhamel — Louis, the foreman
• René Génin (as Génin) - A client at the Auberge Inn
• Max Morise - Man with the pipe
• Jean Dasté — The model maker

See also

• Cinema of France
• List of French language films

External links

• The Crime of Monsieur Lange at the Internet Movie Database