This book includes four screenplays by four of France's leading film directors, illustrating the development of French film-making from the silent era to the birth of the new wave movement in the late 1950s. Of the two comedies and two tragedies, Rene Clair's The Italian Straw Hat (1928) and Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950) are domestic, and explore the dynamics of sex, while Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953) are studies of human courage and endeavour. This book also includes additional commentary by Jean Renoir, Erich von Stroheim and Karel Reisz.