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The Lionsgate/Studio Canal Jean Renoir: 3-Disc Collector's Edition seems, at first glance, to be a rather haphazardly assembled collection of seven films. Its first disc and the first half of the second disc contain four silents: Renoir's first film, 1924's La Fille de L'Eau; 1926's Zola adaptation Nana, which Francois Truffaut noted is "the first of his films which Renoir considers worthy of discussion;" 1927's bizarre futuristic fantasy Sur Un Air De Charleston; and 1928's elaborately nightmarish Little Match Girl (La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes). Then it jumps to 1938's French Revolution drama La Marseillaise. The third disc contains two of Renoir's final films, 1959's Jekyll-and-Hyde inspired Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier and 1962's The Elusive Corporal, which takes Renoir back to the war-and-escape turf of 1937's La Grande Illusion.

Haphazard it may seem, and haphazard it may indeed be. But for the Renoir devotee, the box fills in some major gaps in the Renoir DVD filmography. The first four silents show the young Renoir working in a fascinating variety of modes, from the broad social tapestry of would-be-actress-turned-prostitute-tale Nana to the ur-sci-fi stylings of Charleston (featuring a confounding blackface performance by Johnny Huggins, playing a flying-saucer-piloting scientist — a potential precursor to The Brother From Another Planet?) to the full-out fantastic in Match Girl. The films also highlight the charms and talents of their star Catherine Hessling, who was Renoir's wife at the time. Le Marseillaise forms a kind of bridge from Grande Illusion to The Rules of the Game. Cordelier finds the elderly Renoir returning to the fantastic content we see him essaying in some of the early works in the collection, but with a completely different visual style — one influenced by television production.

Yes, the appeal to Renoirphiles is substantial — one wouldn't want to recommend this as a starter set to those who haven't yet seen Illusion or Rules. But one doesn't want to identify its value as strictly academic either. Le Marseillaise is, in particular, a revelatory picture. It's a humanistic but hardly uncritical look at Versailles and the seedbeds of the French Revolution that anticipates both neo-realism and that bit of dialogue from Rules stating that everyone has their reasons. The set is peppered with pleasures that should be accessible to anyone, and the films are all well presented, transferred from terrific restorations in many cases. There are no printed extras, but there's a good documentary, hosted by Martin Scorsese, that features observations on all the films in the collection from a variety of observers, including Renoir and Hessling's son Alain. It's at the tail end of the third disc, which is odd placement; it would probably have been better placed at the beginning of the collection.