Boudu Saved from Drowning

In this 1932 French social satire comedy of manners film, legendary director Jean Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and the anarchic charms of his lead actor Michel Simon to create an effervescent satire of the bourgeoisie. When tramp Boudu is rescued by well-to-do bookseller Edouard Lestingois after a suicidal plunge into the Seine, the Lestingois family decides to take him in, but Boudu's irrepressible nature soon shakes the household to its foundations. Renoir's adaptation of René Fauchois's play is a loving fable about a bourgeois attempt to reform an early hippie, capturing the spirit of an earlier France with its photographic record of Parisian life.