Le Crime De Monsieur Lange (1936)

The crude owner (Jules Berry) of a publishing company owes a great deal of creditors. When the opportunity presents itself, he fakes his own death to avoid them. However, when his struggling publishing company is taken over by his employees after his "death", it becomes an enormous success, mostly due to the Arizona Jim stories written by Monsieur Lange (Rene Lefevre). His greed gets the better of him and he decides to return and claim the profits. Directed by Jean Renoir, this is one of his lesser known but no less excellent films. Obviously the film has a leftist leaning to it with the magazine's employees banding together as a collective to make the magazine a success and share in the profits. But in spite of the film's deadly outcome, there's a great deal of grace and wit in it. It's a film that could never have been made in Hollywood at the time, not only because of its leftist leanings but the film's protagonist would have to be punished for his "crime" according to the production code in power in 1936. With Florelle, Nadia Sibirskaia, Maurice Baquet, Sylvia Bataille and Marcel Levesque.