The notion that Renoir's films are somehow formally lax has sprung in part from their structural looseness, a looseness, one should add, that now seems an inseparable part of their self-renewing freshness and modernity…. As early as in Boudu Saved from Drowning one is aware of the sustained development of a style in which the classical criteria of visual composition within a frame are abandoned in an attempt to open up the frame to depth of field and to peripheral fluidity—and a style in which the momentum of the films derives not from a pulse created in the editing but from the realization of those possibilities for expressive movement to be found in the imaginative transformation into movement of their subjects. Already in Boudu Saved from Drowning one sees a film that in great measure takes its movement from the kinetic thrust of its protagonist…. (pp. 198-...