Like all artists, filmmakers search for realism in the sense that they search for their own reality, and they are generally tormented by the chasm between their aspirations and what they have actually produced, between life as they feel it and what they have managed to reproduce of it.

Jean Renoir does not film situations but rather -- I ask you to remember the circus attraction of the Hall of Mirrors -- characters who are trying to find their way out of the Hall, bumping into the mirrors of reality. Renoir does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and he does not invite us to adopt these ideas or to sort them out no matter how quaint or illusory they may be, but simply to respect them.

In contrast to all the films that we defend in Les Cahiers du Cinema, Assassins et Voleurs is innocent of any esthetic ambitions. It possesses not the slightest indication of professional conscience: a boat scene supposed to be taking place in the open sea has obviously been shot on the sand; a hotel elevator does not ascend any more than the boat floats; the same setting is made to do for several locations; the long dialogue between Poiret and Serrault, which is divided into ten or twelve segments, was clearly filmed in a single afternoon with two cameras, and so sloppily, to boot, that if we strain a bit we can hear the buses passing by the studio-hangar and the stagehands on the next set chatting cheerfully over their lunch.