The joy of Jean Renoir's toilet humor in ON PURGE BEBE (1931, dir by Jean Renoir, France, 52mns)
[On Purge Bebe is available to stream via the Criterion Channel. ]
It’s always a joy to discover an early work by a director and find all the elements of their mature style are nascent and blooming.
Better yet, it’s an unexpected delight when the moviemaker somehow applies their sensibility to something that shouldn’t work for them but does.
Like when French master moviemaker Jean Renoir makes 1931’s On Purge Bebe (Baby’s Laxative in English).
You might scratch your head to wonder what it’s like to watch 52 minutes of toilet humor Jean Renoir style.
And you would be forgiven if you couldn’t quite wrap your head around how the moviemaker behind Grand Illusion, one of the most profound movies on human nature, class, nations, could also be the moviemaker behind a 52 minute broad comedy about how a bourgeois Mom and Dad fight over who’s going to give their bratty eight year old son a laxative because he hasn’t had a bowel movement all morning.
But when you get right down to it. . .both stories are part of a continuum of societal human behavior.
And we haven’t even gotten to the big reveal that miracle worker character actor Michel Simon (L’Atalante, Un Chienne, Boudu Saved From Drowning) shows up as a fussy potential investor for Dad’s miracle unbreakable chamber pot that will make millions when sold to the military.
On Purge Bebe, based on a one act comedic play by beloved late 1800’s-early 1900’s French playwright Georges Feydeau, is exquisite in its craft. As simple (and silly) as the premise is, the movie really is a takedown of French upper middle class hypocrisy. The arguments over who is going to give their son a laxative is really a pre-text to show a married couple’s frustrations with each other. And as broad as the actors are, their performances are brilliant and specific: you feel like these people could live down the street. Father is a kind of ambitious businessman who will gossip about others. . .until he needs them to give him money. Mother dotes on her son and takes out all her frustrations on her boring domestic routine on Father. Son, Toto (called Baby by his parents, another nod to how he’s both spoiled and infantalized) is actually a pretty sharp troublemaker who knows how to play his parents off each other. And potential investor Choilloux (Simon) is that weird mixture of politeness, repression, arrogance, and ignorance that can sometimes characterize people with money who like to feel wanted and needed.
Yes. All these people are in the middle of a conversation about laxatives.
Jean Renoir made this as his first sound film in a brisk three weeks from script to premiere. I’ve heard filmmaker Howard Hawks also tell such stories about movies like his 1930’s screwball classic Twentieth Century. Oh those were the days! 3 weeks. What the hell?! The quickness of production does the movie good as you can feel everyone having fun but also putting their shoulder in as professionals.
This is the work that made Renoir commercially viable. He made it knowingly TO BE commercially viable. Before this, he had had some successes but he was also known as a risk taker and experimenter (which he was to the end of his life). Investors/studios were circumspect about giving Renoir budgets/resources lest he make something uncommercial. On Purge Bebe was such a hit with the French public that it launched Renoir’s career and opened investors’ pocketbooks. Renoir would take his newfound cache and adopt the John Ford approach of “One for them, one for me” turning out a number of commercial hits AND experimental features in near equal measure for the rest of the decade.
What’s great about On Purge Bebe is to see a talented moviemaker take broad comedic material and still find a way to inject humanism and satire while making sure the laughs come fast and furious. Renoir, flying by the seat of his pants, could only trust his instincts in executing the material.
And if you’re a Renoir fan, you know his instincts over time seemed to be to emphasize the human, the empathy, the non-judgement, the joie de vie of existence and human interaction.
So yes. . .if you watch On Purge Bebe you are going to watch 52 minutes of folks talking about bowel movements. And yet. . .you’re going to (forgive the pun) come out the other end with renewed love for the power of cinema.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club