!
I
f FILMOGRAPHY •
267
We agree with Maurice Bardeche's judgment. FRAN<;OIS TRUFFAUT
Salute to France (1944) DIRECTOR: Jean Renoir, ill collaboration SCREENPLAY: Philip Dunne, Jean Renoir, Burgess Meredith DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Army Pictorial Service EDITING: under the supervision of Helen Van Dongen MUSIC: Kurt Weill PRODUCTION: Office of War Information DISTRIBUTOR: United Artists LENGTH: 540 meters (20 min.) FIRST SHOWING: December 1944 or January 1945 in Paris (without credits) ACTORS: Burgess Meredith (Tommy); Garson Kanin (Joe); Claude Dauphin (Jacques, the narrator and multiple roles: the soldier, the peasant, the intellectual, the guerrilla, etc.) Presented in France in complete anonymity a year after the end of the war, Salute to France was noL as far as I know, honored with the slightest notice from the Parisian press. How ever, in America it had had a handsome measure of success. which, though not egual to that of his great previous film This Land Is Mine, proves that Renoir, when he wants to express cer tain elemental truths. knows how to reach a large audience. The point was, in Renoir's words, "to explain France to the Americans who arc going to land there." On the bridge of a troop transport headed for the conti nent. a little group. including a French soldier, an English sol dier, and an American soldier, discuss the country they are about to discover or rediscover. Claude Dauphin, naturally, is the spokesman for the charms of the French way of life. But he wonders. along with his interlocutors, what kind of a country he shall return to after the terrible years of occupation. Renoir
I I
!
!
I
I