"What happens with great actors, and consequently with Michel Simon, is that they unmask you, bring dreams that you've had, but haven't expressed, to light” (Jean Renoir). In La chienne, Michel Simon is an unhappily married middle-aged bank clerk whose only passion in life is painting, which he does in his spare time, until he becomes obsessed with a prostitute (Janie Marèze). She plays him for the tragic sucker he is. Unlike Fritz Lang's remake, Scarlet Street, as Bertrand Augst points out, Renoir's protagonist has no remorse. The film is infused with a sadomasochistic sexuality that is both heightened and tempered by Renoir's camera, which (Renoir said) followed "the slightest detour of (Simon's) thoughts"—through windows, through time, truly through depth of field. In Renoir's first major sound film, shot on location, sync (rather than mixed) sound is brilliantly used: "Not only is the caustic criticism of French society most explicitly depicted in the mise-en-scène, but the soundtrack dramatizes very effectively the underlying social conflicts which characterize this society" (Augst).