Le Bled (1929)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

Although Jean Renoir had few commercial successes in the 1920s, his reputation was such that commissions frequently came his way, from parties who admired both his competence as a filmmaker and his penchant for innovation.   Le Bled was the second commission that Renoir was offered by the Societé des Grands Films Historiques (the first being Le Tournoi dans le cité, made immediately beforehand).  Intended to commemorate the centenary of France's colonisation of Algeria, it was funded by the French government and was scripted with next to no input from Renoir.

All too easily written off as a piece of imperialist propaganda, Le Bled is among Renoir's least known and least well-regarded films, but whilst the formulaic melodramatic plot cannot help inviting a certain amount of derision, the film does occasionally impress with a few dazzling flourishes of ingenuity.  Renoir's last silent film, it shows a break with the experimental potpourri that preceded it and anticipates the flurry of groundbreaking masterworks that were to follow.  With the impressive Algerian landscape serving as an active player in the drama, something that has the power to shape and define human character, Le Bled prefigures not only Renoir's early flirtation with neo-realism but also his grander American films, most notably The Southerner (1945).

There is precious little sign of the anarchistic, non-conformist tendency that pervades much of Renoir's early work, so the film delivers what it was intended to - namely to celebrate French colonialism and portray it in the most positive light.  The lengthy but beautifully constructed montage sequence that opens the film and gives it a documentary authority contrasts the traditional romantic image of Algeria with the present commercial reality, a thriving agricultural land of opportunity in which the native Arabs and French settlers live together in perfect harmony.  If Renoir had any misgivings about the film's obvious political leanings, he kept these to himself - his film elicits a genuine respect for those who earn their livelihood by toiling on the land, prospering honestly through a tough but rewarding communion with nature.

In a sequence worthy of Eisenstein, a battalion of French troops (an allusion to the landing in the Bay of Sidi Ferruch in 1830) materialises behind two of the characters in the main drama before dissolving seamlessly into a long line of tractors wending their way across a bucolic paradise.  As a visual interpretation of the 'swords to ploughshares' concept it is both stunningly effective and hauntingly lyrical, meeting the brief that Renoir was given without recourse to the kind of blatant pro-imperialist jingoism which a less balanced filmmaker may have indulged in.  The conversion of the lead male character Pierre, from work-shy man-about-town to committed land worker, is more difficult to swallow and highlights the film's main deficiency, a woeful lack of plausible character development.

The film's half-hearted moralising becomes a little wearying in the dawdling middle section but all is redeemed in the action-packed final act, which includes the most exciting sequence in Renoir's entire oeuvre - a feverishly alive gazelle hunt that somehow manages to morph into an exploit straight out of The Perils of Pauline.  Presaging a similar sequence in Renoir's greatest film, La Règle du jeu (1939), the hunt is astonishingly effective in capturing the excitement and thrill of the real thing, with vertiginous P.O.V. tracking shots (filmed by a camera secured to the back of camel) sweeping across the landscape in a way that makes the spectator feel as if he or she is an enthusiastic participant in the chase.

There may be a subtle anti-colonialist message lying just beneath the surface, but the frenzied montage of greyhounds and human hunters running inoffensive gazelles to ground is the perfect lead-in to the sequence that follows, in which the hero Pierre, now in full-on Douglas Fairbanks mode, rescues his helpless sweetheart from the dastardly Manuel.  And as if that wasn't enough excitement, the villain ends up being mauled to death by a barrage of deadly falcons, in a way that spookily presages the most famous scene in Hitchcock's The Birds.  By the standards of its time, it is a shockingly violent denouement, particularly as it looks as if a camel ends up having its eyes pecked out for real.

The film's blend of populist melodrama and western-style action earned it a fair amount of criticism when it was released in 1929 and it proved to be only a moderate success.  Whilst it is hard to justify giving Le Bled a place alongside Renoir's better films it has more going for it than you might think.  Some mischievous humour lightens an otherwise routine and predictable melodrama, and the spectacular conclusion, a full-throttle action finale that is guaranteed to set the heart racing, alone makes the film worth watching.  If Renoir's brief was to deliver a respectful hymn to French colonisation in the form of a popular entertainment he certainly succeeded, but the real importance of Le Bled lies in how strongly it prefigures the director's subsequent work, particularly his move towards a more naturalistic style of filmmaking, with characters fully integrated with their environment.

Film Synopsis

Pierre Hoffer, a loafer from metropolitan France, is on his way to Algeria to beg some money off his uncle Christian, a prosperous farmer.  During the steamboat crossing, he meets the beautiful Claudie Duvernet, who is also bound for Algeria, to attend the reading of a will of a relative who has recently died.  On learning that Claudie is the sole legatee of a substantial fortune, her cousins Manuel and Diane conspire against her.  Meanwhile, Pierre receives a cool reception from his uncle, who agrees to help him only if he spends the next six months working on his farm.  On hearing that Claudie has gone off to inspect the farm she has inherited in the south of the country, Pierre follows her on the pretext of undertaking some business for his uncle.  He arrives just in time to thwart Manuel's desperate attempt to abduct the young woman and force her into marrying him...