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Mubi's double bill Renoir, Beginnings and Endings is showing September 15 - October 15, 2020 in the United States.Above: NanaJean Renoir, one of the greatest French filmmakers, if not the greatest, was a passionate raconteur. Not only did he write his expansionist memoir, My Life and My Films (1974), and rendered some of his life in prose in his late novels, but, according to his biographer, Pascal Merigeau, he also had a prodigious talent for molding fact into myth.Renoir’s dramatic story begins with his second feature, Nana (1927). Renoir adapted the tale about a striving actress from Émile Zola’s novel, to launch the career of his wife, Catherine Hessling. Hessling dreamed of Hollywood, as eventually did Renoir. Some ten years later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived till his death, in 1979. The film’s Nana plays hussies but dreams of a tragic role. When a theater director humiliates her,...

1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?

Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.

Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...