A world inside four walls

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Jean Renoir’s 1932 film Chotard et cie. (Chotard and Co.) is the least esteemed of his 1930s films. Renoir directed sixteen films over this incredibly fruitful decade, most of them great and more than one considered among the greatest films ever made. Not only can the French director’s ‘30s output be placed alongside any other director’s most impressive streak, but it bests many auteurs’ entire oeuvres. Despite this overall level of excellence, few critics have even taken the time to dismiss Chotard et cie. as minor. André Bazin offers little more than a plot summary in his (unfinished) book on Renoir, while Raymond Durgnat dedicates barely a page and a half of his Jean Renoir to the film. Even Renoir himself fails to mention it in his fragmentary memoir, My Life and My Films.

The film’s relative insignificance has been attributed to an uncharacteristic theatricality. It’s difficult to find, I’ve only watched a low-quality, un-subtitled version on Youtube, but this is enough to confirm the frequent default to theatricality in its mise-en-scène and performances. It’s also enough to say with some confidence that Chotard et cie. slots comfortably into the category of ‘minor Renoir’. The director does, however, manage to achieve something quite incredible despite all of the film’s artifice: he constructs the film’s primary set, comprised of a street/storefront, the store’s interior, and a backroom apartment as one continuous environment. The result is a setting with its own clearly defined special logic. Through this technique, Renoir attempts to reconcile the material’s theatricality with his own developing aesthetic by establishing a kind of ‘artificial reality’. Chotard et cie. may have been confined to the studio, but Renoir is able to present the viewer with what is, in essence, M. Chotard’s entire world.

Friends Like These

This piece was originally written for publication  on The Life Sentence, a terrific website devoted to crime fiction that has sadly closed. The piece discusses Peter Yates’ ’70s crime classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and in particular, looks at the film’s portrayal of the relationship between crime and commerce among its low-level hoods.

I have to thank The Life Sentence’s Lisa Levy for her invaluable editorial contributions to the piece.

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Crime is hard work. At least, this is the case for the blue-collar Boston hoods in the 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle. They take meetings not in lavishly decorated offices but shitty diners, bowling alleys, and otherwise deserted bars. Transactions aren’t made with briefcases or wads of cash as thick as a motel bible, but with a few bills that could disappear in the palm of your hand. One character even informs on his buddies to a local detective for twenty bucks a tip. And sure, certain activities are best performed with the aid of darkness, but these criminals would much rather do business during regular working hours.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle has just received the Blu-ray treatment from The Criterion Collection. It’s an ideal opportunity to discover this quintessential — and too often overlooked — piece of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking. Coyle was praised by contemporary critics, yet wasn’t canonized the way films from young up-and-comers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin have been. It’s the work of a pair of old pros: director Peter Yates and star Robert Mitchum, who was robbed of an Oscar nomination for his performance as the titular character. That it was overshadowed by the emergence of that decade’s “New Hollywood” movement is more than a little ironic, given that The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the perfect antidote to The Godfather’s gold-hued romanticism.