Film

Boudu Saved from Drowning

Jean Renoir's anarchic comedy about a suicidal tramp who repays his rescuers by wrecking their tidy, aspirational household — refusing gratitude, hygiene, and manners alike. Michel Simon plays Boudu as pure appetite, a force of nature the bourgeoisie cannot civilise. Loose, location-shot, and gleefully rude, it's less a story than a controlled explosion — funny if you enjoy watching decorum lose.

TMDb rating3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy anarchic comedy about an unrepentant houseguest who exposes a comfortable household's pretensions, and you like satire played with a grin rather than a sneer.

Skip it if you need tight plotting or a sympathetic hero, since this is loose, episodic and more interested in shrugging at its characters than in pulling you along.

What it asks of you: It runs a brisk eighty-four minutes, asking you to ride a loose, shambling mood and enjoy the squirm of its middle-class targets rather than wait for them to be redeemed.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Parasite2019

Bong Joon-ho's class satire trades Renoir's tramp for a whole family of infiltrators, but the engine is identical: an outsider gets inside a comfortable house and everything underneath starts to show.

But The tonal swerve into thriller territory is abrupt, and the metaphor's final stretch can feel heavy-handed.

Parasite poster

My Man Godfrey1936

The screwball cousin to Boudu: a Depression-era hobo is taken in by a scatterbrained rich family and quietly runs rings around them. Same premise, gentler teeth, dazzling dialogue.

But It resolves its class tensions far more neatly and sentimentally than Renoir ever would.

My Man Godfrey poster

The Rules of the Game1939

Renoir's own follow-up broadens the target from one household to an entire social class, weaving a country-house weekend into a devastating comedy about people who cannot stop performing politeness.

But It's structurally busier, juggling many more characters, and its satire lands with more melancholy than laughs.

The Rules of the Game poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Boudu Saved from Drowning

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Guest2014

Same premise — a stranger let in out of kindness who then takes over the household — rebuilt as horror-thriller instead of satire, testing how differently the same intrusion can feel.

A charming stranger is welcomed into a grieving family's home and slowly, politely dismantles it from the inside — Boudu's disruption played as taut, stylish menace instead of comedy.

But It's a genre thriller with real violence and dread, nothing like Renoir's shambling farce in tone.

The Guest poster
More like this (8)

Kind Hearts and Coronets1949

A dry, immaculate English satire on class and inheritance, with a murderer working his way up the family tree. Same contempt for propriety, delivered with knives instead of elbows.

But Its comedy is arch and verbal rather than physical — a very different kind of anarchy than Boudu's.

Kind Hearts and Coronets poster

The Servant1963

A manservant slowly, quietly takes over his employer's life and home — the power inversion Boudu plays for laughs, replayed here as cold, seductive menace.

But It's a slow-burn psychological drama, not a comedy; go in expecting dread, not laughter.

The Servant poster

Trading Places1983

The class-swap engine turned into a glossy, quotable '80s comedy — a con man and a commodities broker trade lives and expose how thin the rules of respectability really are.

But It's broader and more plot-driven than Boudu, with a much tidier, crowd-pleasing sense of justice.

Trading Places poster

Withnail & I1987

Two unemployable wrecks descend on the countryside and offend everyone in sight. It's got Boudu's appetite for chaos and contempt for polite society, just soaked in whisky and rain.

But It's shaggier and sadder underneath the jokes — less satire of a class than a portrait of its own ruin.

Withnail & I poster

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie1972

Buñuel's surreal dinner-party farce, where every attempt at a nice, orderly meal is interrupted by something absurd. The bourgeoisie get mocked with even less mercy than Renoir shows them.

But It abandons realism altogether for dream logic, which some find delightful and others find frustrating.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie poster

The Ruling Class1972

A deranged aristocrat inherits a title and an asylum's worth of delusions, and the film delights in watching the upper class try to manage him. Wilder and stranger than most satires of its kind.

But It's a much longer, more theatrical, occasionally exhausting film that swings hard between comedy and horror.

The Ruling Class poster

Grey Gardens1976

Boudu is a fictional wrecking ball thrown at bourgeois order; this is the real thing, two actual women living out that same refusal to behave, filmed as it happens rather than staged.

A real mother and daughter, once wealthy, living in ruined genteel squalor, filmed as they bicker, perform, and refuse every social norm going. Unscripted chaos every bit as gleeful as Boudu's.

But It's a documentary with no plot to speak of — some find its subjects exhilarating, others find them exhausting to watch.

Grey Gardens poster

La Grande Bouffe1973

Where Boudu's appetite offends a household with crumbs and spit, this film takes the same idea — the body as an insult to bourgeois restraint — and pushes it to a nauseating, fatal extreme.

Four bourgeois men lock themselves away to eat themselves to death, in a satire so extreme and grotesque it makes Boudu's table manners look almost polite. Appetite as full-blown rebellion.

But It is genuinely gross, unsentimental, and built to disgust as much as amuse — not for the squeamish.

La Grande Bouffe poster

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L'Atalante, Down by Law