Metrograph

Two slices of life from Europe entre deux guerres, and two compact masterpieces. Renoir’s featurette fragment, based on a Guy de Maupassant short story and only edited 10 years after its shoot came to a premature end, evokes the disappeared world of Belle Époque France—the world of Renoir’s father, the painter Pierre-Auguste—by describing an afternoon’s outing for two young shirt-chasers, a middle-aged Paris shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper’s susceptible-to-flattery wife and daughter. People on Sunday, made by a supergroup brain trust of future cinematic luminaries including Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer, follows a quintet of Berliners through a weekend of walks along the Wannsee, domestic squabbles, and frisky flirtation. Modest in ambition, yet they contain the world in miniature.

A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1946, 41 mins)

People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930, 74 mins)

Distributor: Janus Films