General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

La Chienne

La Chienne (French for "The Bitch") is a 1931 French drama film directed by Jean Renoir, adapted from the novel of the same title by Georges de la Fouchardière and the play drawn from it by André Mouëzy-Eon. It stars Michel Simon as Maurice Legrand, a downtrodden Parisian clerk and amateur painter who falls for the prostitute Lulu (Janie Marèse) and is exploited by her and her pimp Dédé (Georges Flamant). It was Renoir's second sound film and is widely regarded as the first fully personal film of his mature career.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Jean Renoir, scenario with André Girard, dialogues by Renoir; based on the novel by Georges de la Fouchardière and the play by André Mouëzy-Eon³
Principal cast	Michel Simon (Maurice Legrand), Janie Marèse (Lulu), Georges Flamant (Dédé), Magdeleine Bérubet (Adèle)²
Production	Les Établissements Braunberger-Richebé; produced by Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebé; cinematography by Theodor Sparkuhl⁴
Release	Public premiere 19 November 1931 at the Colisée, Paris, after an avant-première in Nancy⁵
Running time	100 minutes as originally released; surviving versions run about 91 to 96 minutes²^•⁶
Remake	Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945), from the same literary source⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Legrand is a cashier at a Parisian hosiery firm, bullied at work and humiliated at home by his shrewish wife Adèle, a war widow. His one escape is painting on Sundays. One night he intervenes when he sees a young woman, Lulu, being beaten by her boyfriend Dédé, installs her in an apartment, and falls in love with her. Lulu and Dédé, who remain lovers, exploit him: he steals from his employer for her and loses his job, while Dédé sells Legrand's paintings under the invented identity of "Clara Wood", an American woman artist. When Adèle's first husband Godard, presumed dead, reappears, Legrand gladly leaves her, only to discover Lulu's contempt and her continuing relationship with Dédé. He kills Lulu with a paper knife and lets Dédé take the blame; Dédé is convicted and sent to the guillotine for a murder he did not commit, while Legrand disappears into the world of Paris tramps.²^•¹^•⁸

A Guignol puppet show prologue announces that the film is neither a drama nor a comedy, but "the eternal story of the man, the woman, and the other man".⁷

Production

Renoir's first sound film, On purge bébé, had been made earlier in 1931 to prove to producers that he could deliver a successful film under budget, which helped persuade Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebé to finance La Chienne. Renoir had wanted to cast his wife Catherine Hessling, or Florelle, as Lulu, but the producers imposed Janie Marèse; her casting hastened the breakup of Renoir's marriage.¹^•⁹

Shooting took place in the summer of 1931 at the Billancourt studios, with location exteriors in Montmartre, on Avenue Matignon, and at Nogent-sur-Marne, using the Western Electric sound system.⁵ A dispute between Renoir and producer Roger Richebé led to the editing being entrusted to Denise Batcheff and Paul Fejos, but Renoir ultimately retained control of the final cut, credited to Marguerite Renoir and Jean Renoir.⁵

Death of Janie Marèse

On 14 August 1931, about three months before the film's Paris release, Janie Marèse was killed in a car crash on a road near Saint-Tropez. At the wheel was Georges Flamant, her co-star and lover, who survived; he had bought the car with his wages from the film. When La Chienne opened in Paris, critics pointed out the parallel between the actress's fictional and real deaths; Le Figaro wrote that the film was "bringing to the screen her laughter from beyond the grave".¹

Style and themes

The film combines a period naturalism, almost ethnographic in its attention to Montmartre street life, with an ironic distance visible in the deliberately theatrical playing of the actors.² It was in several respects experimental for 1931: Renoir used direct sound, real locations, long shots dense with background detail, and extended tracking shots with relatively deep focus, none of which were common at the time.⁷ The soundtrack is unusually layered for early sound cinema, with street noise, footsteps, rain, and conversations across courtyards; the contrast between Legrand's educated French and Dédé's slang maps the class divide that also determines the film's justice, in which Dédé is condemned and Legrand escapes.¹

The film also stages its turning points as overtly artificial set pieces, such as the parallel montage of street musicians and the murder, calling attention to their own construction against the free-flowing realism of the rest of the movie.⁷ Renoir refuses to condemn Lulu and Dédé, and presents Legrand's murder of Lulu, for which he feels no remorse, as an escape from bourgeois society; the critic Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, reads the film as an anti-petit-bourgeois fable and an expression of Renoir's anti-moralism.⁷

Reception and place in Renoir's career

A few conservative voices deplored the story's "immorality", but the film did well enough in provincial cities to be released in Paris in late November 1931, to positive reviews.¹ It is generally seen as the start of Renoir's great realist period: the first in the string of films, including The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Grand Illusion, La bête humaine, and The Rules of the Game, that established his standing in 1930s French cinema.¹^•¹⁰ Janus Films describes it as a precursor to The Rules of the Game, a stinging commentary on class and sexual divisions.¹¹

Comparison with Scarlet Street

Fritz Lang remade the story in Hollywood as Scarlet Street (1945), with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea, from nearly the same plot. The film scholar E. Ann Kaplan has compared the two adaptations to isolate the effect of context: Lang's postwar American film turns the material toward the protagonist's guilt and wounded interiority, while Renoir's film, made in Popular Front-era France, contains more elements subversive of bourgeois ideology.¹² Renoir and Lang later each adapted Zola's La bête humaine as well, Renoir in 1938 and Lang as Human Desire in 1954.⁷

Restoration

The film was restored from the original nitrate negative by Les Films du Jeudi and the Cinémathèque française, with support from the CNC and the Franco-American Cultural Fund; the negative was described as particularly fragile.¹³ A restored DCP runs 100 minutes.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1920s–1940s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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