[Boudu sauvé des eaux] is a devastating indictment of crass, middle-class values and conformism, an exercise of which Buñuel would have been proud….

[Boudu] is viewed with immense sympathy by Renoir: he is nowhere near as dastardly as Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange he is merely striking out against convention and putting bourgeois vanities to flight….

Boudu sauvé des eaux is a hymn to Eros, filled with the exuberance that Renoir and Truffaut alone in the French cinema appear capable of creating. Like Catherine in Jules et Jim, Boudu is "une force de la nature', cataclysmic in his effect on the merely bookish, on those ignorant of the vibrancy of life itself.

Peter Cowie, "'Boudu'" (© copyright Peter Cowie 1965; reprinted with permission), in Films and Filming, Vol. 12, No. 2, November, 1965, p. 32.