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Jean Renoir did not reach Hollywood until 1941; his journey there could be said to have begun in 1939 with the release of La Regle du jeu. Although it is hard to imagine today, La Regle du jeu, a film we consider a masterpiece, was a disaster with the critics and the public when it was released in July 1939 on the eve of France's capitulation to Germany. Unlike any of Renoir's previous 1930s films, La Regle du jeu portrayed French society as class-bound, frivolous and unchangeable. This image of French society, as well as the film's complex narrative structure and the absence of conventionally sympathetic and unsympathetic characters, confused critics and provoked hostility in the public. Renoir never recovered from his bitter disappointment at the French reaction to this film he had put so much of himself into and staked so much of his future on. 'The film was greeted with a kind of hatred', he wrote later in his autobiography. 'Despite some favourable reviews, the public saw it as a personal insult ... [T]he fact remains that the failure of La Regle du jeu when it was released depressed me so much that I decided either to give up the cinema or to leave France."
We know that Renoir did not give up the cinema. Instead, he went to Italy to make a film of La Tosca, but after preparing the script, he was able to direct only a few shots before Italy's impending entry into the war forced him to return to France. Then Paris fell, and Renoir turned toward America, helped by Robert Flaherty, who negotiated a contract for him with Twentieth Century-Fox. By 10 January 1941, Renoir had arrived in Hollywood, 46-years-old and unable to speak English. As an 'auteur' who was used to writing, directing, producing, occasionally acting and, as he put it, doing a little of everything, and as someone who had built up relationships with excellent writers, technicians and actors who understood how he worked, Renoir now found himself in an environment in which his producer controlled almost all the decisions that had previously been his. How confident Renoir had been before the release of La Regle du jeu when he stated: 'The first generation of the...