Jean Renoir's downbeat drama about the dangerous liaisons of a henpecked bank clerk and a hooker is one of his earliest masterpieces. An early example of the poetic realism that would become a dominant strain in the French cinema of the 1930s, it comes from a period in the director's career when he was scouring the margins of French society. Despite the noirish feel of the plot, it has little in common with the romanticism one associates with the genre, its tale of greed and cruelty permeated by a cutting bleakness. Renoir's conclusion, which offers poetic rather than strictly legal justice, was so highly controversial that the film was banned in many locales until the mid-'70s, but seems as entirely fitting now as it did then. Michel Simon, is, as always, inspired as the harried clerk and Sunday painter, his hangdog demeanor and slumping shoulders an eloquent expression of his put-upon character. Renoir's deep focus photography, an advance from that of his earlier work, is sharp and revelatory, conveying a palpable sense of the sordid locations, and the use of natural rather than post-synched sound also adds much to the film's texture.