This deliciously subversive 1932 social comedy kicked off Jean Renoir’s greatest period.
A Parisian bookseller, Edouard Lestingois, sees a disreputable tramp throw himself into the Seine.
Saving him, he nobly takes him into his own household. But Boudu (played by great French cinema eccentric Michel Simon) proves singularly ungrateful...
In some quarters, Boudu was taken as a virulent attack on bourgeois values; but that’s to miss the genial exuberance of Renoir’s comedy.
Put it this way: it’s aged a lot better than ’86 remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills.
