Michel Simon could make an ungainly outsider funny and then make us regret the ease of our laughter. We value him most when he keeps the emphasis small: in La Chienne, an ordinary man's troubles become painfully recognisable.
Fi1m perspective
In La Chienne (1931), Michel Simon makes Maurice Legrand's timidity funny without making him conveniently ridiculous. His soft face and solid build might invite a broad caricature; the playing has remarkably little theatrical emphasis. He lets us recognise the man before we have decided how much sympathy to spare him. We laughed, then felt uncomfortable, because Simon made Legrand too familiar for his difficulties to remain an easy joke.
He had already appeared as Jean Lemaître in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but the arrival of sound helped bring him to prominence. His husky voice was as distinctive as his face, and his characters were often tramps, sailors and awkward outsiders. His early-1930s breakthrough came with Jean Renoir, who understood how little this actor needed to underline. In La Chienne, the cruelty becomes harder to dismiss because Simon makes the man enduring it so recognisable.
Renoir used him again as the anarchic tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), a part written with Simon in mind. Jean Vigo's L’Atalante (1934) gave him Père Jules, an eccentric bargeman whose physical comedy admits sudden tenderness. These parts made room for a broader comic performance than Legrand, without losing the feeling beneath it. The danger in describing Simon by his appearance is that it makes him sound like someone who merely had to turn up.
His apparent spontaneity depended on preparation, and he often needed few takes. We would not mistake the lack of theatrical emphasis in La Chienne for a lack of technique: keeping a comic character this recognisable takes judgement. The film's crime story is less gripping than its people, and Simon gives us a reason to stay with it. There is no need to like Legrand for that to work.
His work continued through the 1930s and 1940s, including Zabel in Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938). He later returned to prominence as Pépé in Claude Berri's The Two of Us (1967). Start with La Chienne, though, and do not expect to feel entirely comfortable about finding it funny.
Biography
Michel Simon (9 April 1895 – 30 May 1975) was a Swiss actor of German origin, active primarily in France. He began his career in the theatre in the early 1920s with the Pitoëff company in Paris and made his film debut in 1925. He appeared as Jean Lemaître in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
Simon became known for roles in several notable French films of the 1930s, including La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) as Priape Boudu, L'Atalante (1934) as Père Jules, and Port of Shadows (1938) as Zabel. He later appeared in Panic (1947), Poison (1951), It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958), The Train (1964) as Papa Boul, and The Two of Us (1967) as Pépé.
In 1967 he received the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival for his performance in The Two of Us. His son, François Simon, also became an actor.
