If we listen to film historians, Tire au flanc is nothing but a second-rate vaudeville, sloppy and uninteresting. If we judge from the enthusiastic reaction of the audience at the Cinémathèque, it is instead one of the funniest films ever made in France, as well as one of the best silent films by the director. Without a doubt, among Renoir’s films Tire au flanc has the strongest Chaplin influence. It is likely that Vigo watched it carefully before shooting Zéro de conduite; Renoir’s film is to military life what Vigo’s film is to boarding school life. The construction is the same, with short sketches of only eight or ten shots; arrival at the barracks, the injection, exercises with gas masks in the Fontainebleau forest, every one of these scenes results as a hilarious sketch. (…) There are few films where it is so easy to see a director thirsting for movement fighting against a device inclined to stillness, few films where the director’s victory over the contingencies is so clear. The infantile simpering of Michel Simon is an announcement and promise of the most admirable faces in French cinema, those of Bruel, Caussat, Boudu and Père Jules.

François Truffaut, in André Bazin, Jean Renoir, Paris, G. Lebovici, 1971