Jean Renoir's first great sound classic, La Chienne is the story of an unhappily-married, middle-aged bank clerk, played by Michel Simon. His only passion in life is for painting, which he does in his spare time, until he becomes obsessed with a prostitute (Janie Mareze). She robs and deceives him, and their involvement ends in tragedy. (Fritz Lang filmed this same story in Scarlet Street, 1945.) In his “Dictionary of Films,” Georges Sadoul notes,
“Out of the melodrama Renoir created a very realistic social portrait of certain aspects of Montmartre life. Even in this, his first sound feature, Renoir used depth of field to characterize the personalities in their social milieu....”