Jean Renoir's This Land is Mine; Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe

With This Land is Mine I wanted to show the Americans a less conventional view of occupied France.
Jean Renoir

Sight and Sound's most recent poll of 854 critics, programmers, academics and distributors lists Renoir's La Regle du Jeu as the fourth best film of all time (after Vertigo, Citizen Kane, and Tokyo Story) but it seems to me that few people under fifty have any awareness of this great French director, son of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  When I was in college La Regle du Jeu (1937) and La Grande Illusion (1939) were considered great and important films, the first for its exploration of class, the second for its pacifism, but when I watched This Land is Mine, made in America in 1943, I thought that Renoir might be too much of a humanist, with too much understanding of human motivations and reasons, for this more cynical and anti-intellectual age. This Land is Mine takes place in occupied France and Charles Laughton (who looks rather like Renoir) is a fussy and cowardly schoolteacher who gradually comes to realize that the Nazis can't just be ignored or collaborated with in the hope that they would eventually go away; they represent a threat to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and  of the Citizen, which he reads to his students just before he is arrested.  Some people resist, others collaborate or go about their daily business, sometimes benefitting by the occupation.  The disturbance of the Nazis riding into an empty town square, at the beginning of the film, means different changes in each individual life and Renoir observes and chronicles these changes with sympathy and understanding.

Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe (Random House,2014) is a serviceable spy novel, taking place in 1939.  The main character is trying to help Republican Spain in their losing struggle against Franco and there are intense and beautifully written scenes about smuggling money into Germany and stealing weapons in Russia.  John Le Carre has shifted his attention, now that the Cold War has ended, to terrorism, but fanatical terrorists are not as interesting literary material as literate and intellectual spies and it makes sense that Furst would be writing about Europe just before WWII.  I discovered Furst while roaming through the stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza, something I have not done in a while.  At that point in the 90's Furst was not well known and I found his early works, such as Red Gold and Dark Star, fascinating in their elegant complexity; Franco's spies in Midnight in Europe tend to be obvious femmes fatales and spying plays a small role in the narrative, full as it is of detail about life in pre-war Paris.