Tire-Au-Flanc
(The title means Good-for-nothing, or Ne'er-do-well.) “Like so many of Renoir's films, Tire-Au-Flanc is a master-and-servant story in which a basic friendliness contributes to a thoroughly democratic confusion. When Jean-François d'Ombelles (Pomiès) is obliged to report for military service, his valet Joseph (Michel Simon) is signed up also, to provide him with some shelter from the worst servitudes of military existence. D'Ombelles is gentle, dreamy, absent-minded, a poet.... He scrapes from one peril to another. While he languishes in the guardroom, his fiancée Solange (Jeanne Helbling) falls for the dashing Lieutenant Daumel (Jean Storm). But art and poetry triumph.... In skipping through its farcical rhythms, the film constantly stubs its toe on poetry, or on realism, and for a few moments we lurch to a dizzier rhythm. The comic becomes a predicament of grotesque and derisory effort which grips the heart with a pang like beauty.” Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir