RENOIR FILM SERIES AT ART MUSEUM

While most venues for special film presentations have gone dark for the holidays, the County Museum of Art has continued straight through the season with its splendid Irene Dunne series, and now begins the new year with an offering of Jean Renoir films starting Friday in Bing Theatre at 1 p.m. and again at 8 with “Grand Illusion” and “A Day in the Country.” (The second replaces the previously announced “La Chienne.”)

Along with Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” (1939), “Grand Illusion” has become a staple of the lists of all-time great films. When a film is so firmly ensconced in the pantheon, it’s good to see it from time to time, both to see how it’s holding up and whether it remains a standard to which film makers may measure their own aspirations. After a half-century, “Grand Illusion” is as great as ever and so fresh that seeing it over, especially after a long while, is like seeing it for the first time. Happily, the museum’s print is first-rate.

Most people who love films are familiar with “Grand Illusion.” With his usual deceptive simplicity, Renoir introduces us to a group of French officers who have been taken prisoner by the Germans during World War I. They include an aristocratic career officer (the dashing Pierre Fresnay), and two lieutenants: Jean Gabin, the eternal Everyman of the French cinema, and Marcel Dalio, a witty Jew unashamed of his nouveau riche background. Like his subsequent “Rules of the Game,” Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” is at once an elegant farewell to Europe’s ancient aristocracy and a profound warning against another World War that he surely sensed was inevitable. Both have a tremendous sensitivity to class, which in a lesser man might lapse into either elitism or, at the other extreme, sentimentality.

But with his peerless compassion for his fellow man, Renoir poignantly juxtaposes the sure solidarity of the French with the friendship their often-wounded German commandant (Erich von Stroheim, the very definition of noblesse oblige) extends to Fresnay. The sensitivity, delicacy even, with which Stroheim treats Fresnay as an equal--yet never forgetting he’s an enemy--is exquisite yet virile; it’s as if Stroheim, now denied the opportunity to be the great director he was, became an even greater presence on the screen as an actor. Never is there a word heard on the folly of war, for Renoir knew it was enough to fill the screen with truly decent people to get his message across.

“A Day in the Country” (1936) is one of the screen’s great vignettes, a free adaptation of a De Maupassant short story about a family outing in which Renoir manages, with a sort of sublime ease, to contemplate in a mere 40 minutes society’s essential conflict with nature. Renoir focuses on a fateful moment when a pair of local lads decide to court a youngish mother and her daughter while their menfolk doze during in the heat of the day.

“Boudu Saved From Drowning” (1932), which screens Saturday with “Toni” (1934) at 1 p.m. and again at 8, is a gentle satire of the bourgeoisie, a film of timeless mirth starring Michel Simon that served as the inspiration for Paul Mazursky’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

As filthy, bearded, shaggy-haired Boudu, Simon is the ultimate tramp, a man who, having lost his dog, decides to end it all by jumping into the Seine only to wreak havoc on the household of the kindly bookseller (Charles Grandval) who saves his life. For all his warm embrace of Boudu et al., Renoir remains a subtle ironist and resists the sentimental finish to which Mazursky succumbed.

Often heralded as a forerunner of Italian Neo-Realism, something Renoir himself disclaimed, “Toni” (1934) is a tale of a grand passion set in the rural Midi and told by Renoir with such earthy humor and spontaneity that the result is romantic tragedy instead of hot-blooded melodrama. Charles Blavette has the title role as a day laborer 2003332896gorgeous Marie (Jenny Hella) and in love with the even sexier and more tempestuous Josefa (Celia Montalvan).

For full schedule and further information: (213) 857-6201.