No offense, suckerwasp, but don't you ever get tired of going onto every conceivable message board and scouraging it with either insufferably inane proclamations or annoyingly stupid, easy to answer questions? I mean, is it so difficult to look up film critiques or watch the special features on the DVD you probably saw the film on or, god forbid, put some thought into what you are saying? Do anything but make a fool of yourself? I ask this because it seems like I can hardly go anywhere on this site without running into your pollution and, just as if I were to see you throw a soda can into the sea, or in this case a whole truck's worth, I must express my fondest wish that you stop, or at least cut down.
Anyway:
Do you mean the ending to this movie? The ending that makes the entire film, and without which the film would be effectively pointless, a sloppy Preston Sturges movie without the winking cynicism? If nothing else, ending with Boudu on the boat would be utterly depressing.
On the Criterion DVD Jean Douchet and Eric Rohmer describe the clash depicted in the film as one not necessarily between social classes (which is what the remakes and rip-offs tend to ham-handedly deliver) but as one between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Order and chaos, that is. Douchet says: "Chaos must visit the orderly world and turn everything upside down. The orderly world is enriched by this temporary chaos, but chaos must then return to its own world." In the Greek drama, Balance is all. You noticed the satyr and other Greek artifice at the beginning, right? In the end of Boudu Saved from Drowning Balance is restored - can you imagine the continued existence of the straight world if Boudu maintained a presence? You're a child, so you probably can... How about the opposite: Boudu becoming a piece of said straight world, freedom ground into dust, converted to fertilizer? Either way, the situation is unworkable as an ending. The Hollywood ending would also be ruinous because it is too neat, unaligned with the chaos that came before: this is a film about that chaos, and about how it is needed. To wrangle that chaos is to suggest that a safe, normal world exists (which it doesn't) and is the only one worthy, and that Boudu's version of the free life, however unattractive it may be in some ways, is stillborn. When Boudu tips over the boat he once again turns the world on its ear, popping normality like a bubble. As it exists, the film shakes things up, leaves them shaken up, and doesn't cop out.
That's an interpretation I can support.
Also the Return of Boudu is really lovely: after the slightly cramped bourgeois interiors of the house, Boudu releases himself (through no fault of his own - like a Sturges character he bumbles into a happy ending, but in this film he bumbles again into an even happier one) into the wondrously shot expanse of the natural world (natural enough for a park, anyway). The wanderings are a relief, a breath of fresh air if one can excuse the cliché. Boudu casts off his bourgeois trappings and becomes himself again, instead of the pampered pet that he seems almost to have become at the wedding. The robbing of the scarecrow is particularly wonderful: it sorts of reminds me of Buster Keaton (and of Nosferatu). Afterward, when Boudu is walking along the river, the band, who have been playing all this time, finally stop and the soundtrack fills up with the music of nature (echoing a scene at the beginning of the film where the flute player in the window stops and traffic noise rises up to replace him). Birds chirp, waters gurgle, and, in the distance, we can hear a dog barking. You remember Boudu's lost dog at the beginning of the film? There's a tie back.
The family wonders where he's gone, but they won't look for him. And then the bums sing a song of freedom.
Anyway:
Try "research" some time: it's fun, and educational! And it doesn't make you look lazy and stupid.
'Tis a coward I am - but I will hold your coat.
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