Hobo heaven: "Boudu Saved From Drowning"

Competing with The Shop Around the Corner and the upcoming The Big Sleep for the title of most welcome seasonal revival is a restored print of Jean Renoir's 1932 comedy Boudu Saved From Drowning. The set-up is as simple as that of any early sound picture. A well-to-do Parisian bookseller, Lestingois (Charles Granval), dives into the Seine to rescue Boudu (Michel Simon), a hobo driven to attempt self-sacrifice after the loss of his beloved canine companion. Lestingois brings him back to his apartment, dries him off, and - in a show of the best liberal intentions - invites him to make himself at home, without realising that a free spirit with little grasp of social mores isn't the ideal houseguest when you're trying to hide your affair with one of the friskier domestics from your dear darling wife. (The plot was updated by the farceur Paul Mazursky for 1986's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which had the foresight to cast Nick Nolte as the dishevelled interloper.)

Though the restoration is first rate - these are as sharp as I can remember seeing these particular images - the film itself might now seem a little antiquated to newcomers, all too evidently based on a stage play (by René Fauchois) designed to épater le bourgeois without unduly alienating that audience that went to the theatre or picture palace of the time. (The humanist Renoir - steering his camera towards genteel recreation in parks - likes his characters too much to go too savagely for their throats; the cinema would have to wait a few decades for Buñuel's late 1960s output to truly tear into the middle-classes.) Boudu's reputation thus more or less rests entirely on Simon's towering performance as one of the movies' very greatest tramps: scratchy and bearded and crotchety, giving the impression of someone who's genuinely turned up on set half-cut, while never once suggesting a major star of stage and screen - as he was at this moment - slumming it. He's having a ball, treating his new home in much the same way Belmondo (surely the actor's rightful heir) did the South of France in Pierrot le Fou - as his own personal playground, which is perhaps why the film remains such good, solid, mildly naughty fun.

Boudu Saved From Drowning opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.