Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition.

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Including La Fille de l'eau (B&W, 72 mins., 1925), Nana (B&W, 130 mins., 1926), Sur un air de Charleston (B&W, 20 mins., 1927), La Petite marchande d'allumettes (B&W, 33 mins., 1928), La Marseillaise (B&W, 132 mins., 1938), Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (B&W, 97 mins., 1959), and Le Caporal epingle (B&W, 96 mins., 1962), as well as a documentary, Jean Renoir: An Auteur to Remember (color, 32 mins., 2007). Released by Lionsgate Home Entertainment, www.lionsgate.com.

When Jean Renoir died in 1979, Orson Welles called him "very probably the greatest of all directors," adding, "His friends were without number and we all loved him as Shakespeare was loved, 'this side idolatry.'" But in the years since then, it has often seemed that Renoir's greatness has been more honored in the breach than the observance. It should be nothing less than a scandal that many of his films are still not available on DVD in this country and that many of his writings have never been translated into English. The critical literature on Renoir available in English is also relatively sparse for a director of his magnitude.

No doubt this neglect is partly a symptom of the overall decline in cinephilia since the Seventies and the gross neglect of foreign films in the U.S. that Jonathan Rosenbaum so passionately decries in his 2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See. But Renoir is a "foreign" filmmaker only to those suffering from nationalistic myopia; he worked throughout the world and imaginatively embraced different cultures with unflagging elan. The undervaluing of Renoir also stems from the uncategorizable nature of his artistic personality, a virtue on display in this welcome new boxed set of seven of his films that have suffered from various degrees of obscurity in his adopted country.

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Lionsgate has assembled its collection from recent restorations released by the French company StudioCanal; the print quality is generally excellent, sometimes spectacularly so as in the cases of the elaborately produced 1926 silent feature Nana and the exhilarating 1938 historical epic La Marseillaise. Only the 1928 silent short La Petite marchande d'allumettes (The Little Match Girl) looks battered by age, but still hauntingly lovely in its creation of a fairytale world shadowed by death. This low-frills collection (inappositely packaged with a cumbersome container that includes a corny clapperboard) comes with a bargain price of $29.98 and goes some lengths to helping rectify the underrepresentation of Renoir in the American DVD market.

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The Criterion Collection has also made major contributions in recent years with its marvelous set of three Renoir color films, Stage & Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir (French Cancan, Le Carrosse d'or [The Golden Coach], and Elena et les hommes [Elena and Her Men]), as well as sterling DVD editions of La Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), La Grande Illusion, The River, Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning), Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths), and La Bete humaine (The Human Beast). The Criterion sets include some important documentaries, such as Jacques Rivette's three-part Jean Renoir parle de son art (Jean Renoir Speaks about His Art) and David Thompson's two-part Jean Renoir. But more than half of the forty films Renoir directed are still MIA on DVD here, including, to name a few, Tire au Flanc, La Chienne, Madame Bovary, Toni, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Vie est a nous, This Land Is Mine, The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Le Petit theatre de Jean Renoir. The most glaring omission is his classic short Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country), which can be obtained, however, in a DVD from the British Film Institute. It is worth purchasing an all-region player to see this beautiful print and the accompanying collection of outtakes, a revealing look at Renoir's working methods.

For me, the most eagerly awaited part of the Lionsgate collection was La Marseillaise, which I consider the finest historical film ever made and rank among Renoir's masterpieces along with French Cancan, The Rules of the Game, La Grande Illusion, Boudu, The River, and Partie de campagne. And yet La Marseillaise is underrated even by many otherwise sympathetic commentators on the director, who fail to appreciate, among other things, the extraordinary quality of its screenplay (by Renoir "with the collaboration of" Carl Koch and N. Martel-Dreyfus). Robert Towne once remarked, "The greatest filmmaker that I know of, the one who moves me the most, is Jean Renoir. If I were ever to do a course in screenwriting, I would deal a lot with Renoir.... Renoir got more of life into his art than anybody I've seen before or since." It is breathtaking how Renoir encompasses such vast elements of his sprawling political subject matter in La Marseillaise and tells the story without relying on a single protagonist. Befitting its theme, this is a rare film that practices true democracy in characterization and casting (and as such is a forerunner of Robert Altman's influential experiments with multicharacter films). Renoir concentrates our attention mostly on a group of ordinary citizens from Marseilles fighting for liberty, but also offers a recurrent focus on the aristocracy and the paradoxically sympathetic figure of the befuddled Louis XVI (played by the director's brother Pierre Renoir). Francois Truffaut observed that the Film plays like a series of newsreels from the time. Rivaled only by Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon for its ability to give us the feeling of being present in a distant epoch with rules far different from our own, La Marseillaise simultaneously unfolds with a sense of immediacy and intimacy unrivaled in the genre.

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The two late works in this collection show Renoir's visual style stripped down to its essence, like the late work of Ford and Dreyer, to concentrate more closely on people who embody the filmmaker's central concepts. The seriocomic 1962 World War II story Le Caporal epingle, unjustly eclipsed because of its echoes of Renoir's 1937 classic La Grande Illusion, replaces the earlier film's more complex meditation on social classes with a narrative of bluntly eloquent simplicity based around episodes of a French prisoner of war (subtly played by Jean-Pierre Cassel) making increasingly desperate attempts to escape from the Germans ("I love a man who won't be enslaved," a young German woman [Conny Froboess] tells the title character in one of Renoir's characteristically philosophical lines of dialog). Le Testament de Docteur Cordelier (1959) updates Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to coldly modern Paris and features a bravura dual performance by Jean-Louis Barrault. It is hampered less by its obvious B-movie production values than by the tiresomely repetitious and shallow thematic treatment of what Renoir's narration calls "the tragic exhilaration of [the doctor's] spiritual quest" (I was delighted, however, to finally get to see the prologue featuring Renoir himself as a TV host introducing the story).

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Lionsgate's companion documentary to this collection, Jean Renoir: An Auteur to Remember, contains illuminating introductions of the seven films by Martin Scorsese, whose dedicated work in presenting films on television and DVD has made him one of our foremost film historians as well as directors. Renoir scholar Janet Bergstrom, a professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and the director's son, Alain Renoir, a professor emeritus in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, offer some keen insights, Bergstrom linking each film succinctly to Jean Renoir's artistic development and Alain helpfully explicating his father's intentions for the surreal 1927 short Sur un air de Charleston (aka Charleston or Charleston Parade). But there is no inner coherence to this overview haphazardly assembled by Gidion Phillips, and the American Film Institute's Ken Wlaschin, in discussing La Marseillaise, is allowed to mangle the phrase "Liberty, equality, fraternity," apparently without being asked for a retake.

Perhaps the spotty appreciation that an artist of Renoir's stature has long received in the U.S. (including his maltreatment while working in Hollywood in the 1940s before the postwar blacklist made him unemployable here) can be blamed largely on the problem that bedeviled Renoir commercially throughout his career and in fact was one of his special glories: the impossibility of categorizing his work, whether esthetically or politically. The eccentricity of this set offers an admirable example, even if it stymies the maker of the accompanying documentary. The label most commonly attached to Renoir ("humanist") is a limiting factor for anyone who wants to experience his full range of achievement beyond his accepted 1930s classics of "social realism." Despite his much-heralded generosity of spirit, which enables him to empathize with a staggeringly wide range of characters (only Tolstoy and Shakespeare had comparable ability), anyone who knows Renoir's work well is aware of the frequently acerbic nature of his social commentary, sometimes even shading into vitriol toward the flaws of the "human beast," the trait that virtually caused him to be run out of France in the wake of The Rules of the Game. This quality caused dismay right from the beginning of his career.

As he writes in his 1974 autobiography, Ma vie et mes films (My Life and My Films), "Nana was a mad undertaking.... [For the premiere] I had hired the big hall of the Moulin Rouge, together with its excellent orchestra. The place was packed, the audience being divided into two opposed parties--devotees of the classic cinema on the one hand, who, without knowing why, looked upon me as a wicked revolutionary, and on the other hand, upholders of the avant-garde cinema, who, also without knowing why, considered me a daring innovator. The film ran to an accompaniment of whistles and catcalls punctuated with bursts of hearty applause. People took sides and exchanged abuse.... That first night was the epitome of my whole career. It has been my destiny always to be caught between the extremes of rebellion and orthodoxy, with never a safe middle way: but at least audiences of that kind have the merit that they are not indifferent."

Some of the consternation caused by Renoir's first forays into film may have been caused in part by public aversion to his leading lady, the bizarre Catherine Hessling. He admits in his autobiography, "I must insist on the fact that I set foot in the world of the cinema only in order to make my wife a star, intending, once this was done, to return to my pottery studio. I did not foresee that once I had been caught in the machinery I should never be able to escape." Hessling was an actress of limited talent and physical appeal, coupled with a wild lack of restraint befitting the age of the Flapper, and Renoir tried various ways of framing her odd qualities both narratively and stylistically. He cast her as a glaringly bad actress-turned-courtesan in Nana; indulged her strange melange of riffs on Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, and Mae Murray in the 1925 film La Fille de l'eau (also known by its British title, Whirlpool of Fate), a diverting blend of Griffith-like sentimentality, social satire, and sheer prankishness that points forward to the Nouvelle Vague; he gave her free rein as a comically frenzied Parisian dancer wooing a bemused black scientist (Johnny Huggins) in the apocalyptic farce Sur un air de Charleston; and he presented her (most successfully, because most delicately) as a stylized waif in The Little Match Girl It is no coincidence that Renoir's directorial career did not flourish until he jettisoned Hessling, but the coming of sound, which could have greatly benefited the rather ponderous Nana, was the final ingredient that enabled him to develop his mature style.

Renoir was never one to rest on his laurels or worry about risking his reputation by venturing into untested waters. His love of artifice and eagerness to experiment with technique is a constant throughout his career, as this collection amply demonstrates by foregrounding his early sallies into the avant-garde and his later ventures into TV-style multiple-camera shooting in Docteur Cordelier and The Elusive Corporal. This penchant, which also confounds those who see him as merely a social realist, is a function of a more general character trait that helps account for Renoir's greatness: his boldness in allowing himself to evolve as an artist and a citizen of the world. Some critics ignore or disparage whole areas of his work because it doesn't fit their overly narrow paradigms. Renoir's protege Truffaut has also suffered from this critical myopia, which has a hard time reconciling both men's fondness for film noir and pessimistic storylines with their equally characteristic warmth and human sympathy. That the two sides can coexist within the same rich artistic personality is a truth not universally acknowledged.

As Welles wrote in his eulogy of Renoir, "[T]hough he always had his ardent partisans, a long-winded and murky dispute has ranged through the years over the question of which films are 'true' Renoir and which are, if not 'false,' at least what many French aesthetes speak of as 'deceptions.' From his earliest beginnings, and many times throughout his long career, he had been charged with abandoning social realism, or with turning away from 'nature' to a candid theatricality which outrages those who would tie his work to the impressionism of his father, or who would rate the films according to their ideological content.... This breadth of range, this amplitude of spirit must necessarily, at some point, confound every critic. Doctrinaire leftists are ill at ease with the ardent and life-long pacifist who was a pilot in the First World War and the author of two of the great anti-Fascist films. They have repeatedly denounced what they view as his political amorality.... There are no easy labels for such a man."