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Le bled

Live Musical Accompaniment
Directed by Jean Renoir.
With Alexandre Arquilliére, Enrique Rivero, Jackie Monnier.
France, 1929, DCP, black & white.
French intertitles with English subtitles.
DCP source: Gaumont Pathe Film Archives

Renoir’s last silent film was his second for the Société des Films Historiques (after The Tournament), meant this time to commemorate the centennial of the colonization of Algeria. The scenario is complacently colonialist: an innocent young Frenchman arrives in Algeria and must prove himself to his prosperous pied-noir uncle and to the woman he falls in love with. “Since the simplicity of the scenario gave him a good deal of latitude, Renoir took the opportunity to make an adventure film in the style of the American pictures he had enjoyed so much in his youth. Le bled, following the healthy tradition of Douglas Fairbanks…starts out as comedy, comes to a climax of high adventure, and turns toward the sentimental at the end.”—Jacques Rivette.

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