The Rules of the Game (1939). Jean Renoir, director. Fullscreen (1.33:1), B&W, Dolby Digital 1.0 (mono, French with English subtitles). Commentary, documentaries, interviews. 2-disc. Criterion.

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To honor Criterion’s release on DVD of what is widely considered to be one of the finest movie of the sound era, SV, RSB, and JV give you three views of Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game.

Steve Vineberg In Jean Renoir’s 1937 Grand Illusion, set in German POW camps for officers during the First World War, the amiable, generous Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) reminds his fellow prisoners, when they make fun of his borrowed nobility, that the European aristocracy is bankrupt, so his family has been able to acquire its castles and estates over the last couple of generations. In The Rules of the Game, which Renoir made two years later, Dalio appears again, this time as Robert de la Chesnaye, who has bought himself a title along with a country chateau. (Below stairs, the servants gossip that his grandfather was named Rosenthal.) It’s now 1939, two decades after the Great War, and the aristocrats in Grand Illusion, the German von Rauffenstein and the French de Boeldieu, who said their regime would end with the war, turn out to have been correct: They’ve been replaced by an aristocracy of money and celebrity rather than birth. It’s a running gag in The Rules of the Game that the old mustachioed general, one of the guests at a weekend at Robert’s estate, La Colinière, keeps calling anyone he admires a member of a vanishing race, because the old-fashioned values are long gone. However, the current breed is doomed, too—the movie takes place in Renoir’s world, a world that’s on the brink of collapse at the dawn of the Second World War, though no one alludes to it directly.
      Grand Illusion was about the old rules of war, the chivalric rules that would never again be seen, because it was the dying aristocracy that maintained them. The Rules of the Game is about the rules by which their successors conduct their lives. The movie is full of games (pinochle, a hunt, an amateur theatrical) and toys (Robert’s collection of mechanical toys, his Victrola, his player piano). They’re linked up with other modern devices like the telescope through which his wife Christine sees him kiss his mistress, Geneviève; the radio; the airplane flown by the record-smashing André Jurieu, a Lindbergh-like aviator who adores Christine; and the car he drives off the road in his love-distracted state. Renoir juxtaposes all these items with the real human beings who play the games and play with the toys for their amusement—and play at the game of love and the social game that demands an iron-bound code of conduct. Geneviève calls love “an exchange of two whims and the contact of two skins,” and that’s how the people in her set try to act, as if love were nothing very important. But there’s an element of desperation in their behavior; they can’t help the way they feel underneath their moneyed cool. Robert is driven half-insane by the thought that Christine might be sleeping with André (she isn’t, but everyone assumes she is); Geneviève doesn’t want to give Robert up, though he feels they’ve come to the end of their affair. When the characters do give in to their emotions, the result is farce—a mad racing about, comical brawls and chases—though because we can see the feelings that motivate these follies, the farce is poignant, Mozartian.
      Robert’s guests repeatedly call the Vienna-born Christine a foreigner, and indeed she is, to the rules of their game. She’s the only person at the estate that weekend who has to learn that her husband has a mistress. Geneviève says of Christine, “A Parisian would understand. She doesn’t.” And in the course of the film Christine tries to learn the rules and play by them, but her heart isn’t in the attempt. She carries it off with élan—she goes to see her rival and pretends she’s always known about her, and, very modern, very much women of the world, they share their common complaint that Robert smokes in bed. But it’s an act for Christine. Though she claims that Jurieu is too sincere for her, that sincere men are dull, she herself is sincere, and that’s what makes her foreign in this society. As for Jurieu, though he’s the hero of the moment, linked with modernity, he’s the odd man out at de la Chesnaye’s weekend party, because he follows a démodé code of behavior. (And he’s the only character in the movie who ever speaks of rules; to acknowledge them is a grave social error.) He wants Christine, but in a relationship that’s open and above board; he wants to tell her husband about it. Unlike Christine, who is out of the game but can fake it, André is too stolid and clumsy to fake anything. He’s also a child; he acts like a lovestruck boy at the airport when Christine, to whom he’s dedicated his flight, isn’t there to celebrate his triumph. (His fits of romantic pique recall Treplev in Chekhov’s The Sea Gull.)
      In the manner of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century high comedies Renoir is evoking (the movie is roughly based on an Alfred de Musset play called Les Caprices de Marianne), the servants at the estate are as class-conscious and rule-conscious as their masters, and they emulate those masters. Lisette, Christine’s maid, lives apart from her husband, the groundskeeper Schumacher, except when the de la Chesnayes come to La Colinière. This arrangement enables her to have her freedom; she dallies happily with other men. But Schumacher, who hasn’t picked up this lifestyle from the aristocrats, expects her to act like a true wife—to live with him, and certainly to be faithful to him. Even the chef at La Colinière has rules: he won’t gratify the wishes of one of the guests for vegetarian meals because, he protests, “I accept diets, but not fads.”
      The movie is built on a series of mirror images. Marceau, caught poaching animals on the estate, winds up poaching the wife of the groundskeeper who caught him. But Robert takes a liking to Marceau and wants to hire him to kill the rabbits he’s been stealing (rabbits destroy the grounds), and Marceau charms him into taking him on as a servant instead. These two characters, the aristocrat and the thief, are linked because Robert—in terms von Rauffenstein of Grand Illusion would comprehend—is a kind of social poacher, who bought his way in; it makes sense that he would be sympathetic to Marceau’s desire to wend his own way up the social ladder. Jurieu and Schumacher are also doubles for each other: they are the two clumsy, gauche men whose actions keep mucking up the game. Schumacher’s jealousy of Lisette gets in everyone’s way; it upsets the smooth running of the household—and suggests the way real emotion disturbs the surface of these beautifully apportioned lives. Ironically, when, at the film’s climax, he shoots the man he thinks is sleeping with his wife, it turns out to be Jurieu in disguise. That’s the point at which the farce segues into tragedy—a step that Ingmar Bergman comes short of taking in Smiles of a Summer Night, the latter-day movie that most resembles The Rules of the Game. When the gun goes off in Bergman’s movie, the bullet turns out to be a blank, and the hero winds up with a face full of black powder. Schumacher uses real bullets.

Royal S. Brown One would have thought that the idea would have occurred to me many years ago. But it was only after screening Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu for this article that I was struck by the obvious fact that much of the work of Robert Altman comes straight out of this film. La Règle du jeu is, as the director points out in a long interview for French television included on a second DVD, a film without a main character, an ensemble piece in which various characters, or groups of characters, emerge into the foreground at different moments and then give way to other characters and/or groups of characters. Once the guests arrive at the country chateau, Altman’s debts to the film are particularly striking as Renoir’s camera and microphone seem to pick up snippets of action and dialogue as if on the fly, only to accidentally intrude immediately thereafter on other snippets of action and dialogue. At certain moments the camera almost performs gymnastic feats in order to leave one character to focus in on another—around the corner, in the next room, wherever. At other moments Renoir deploys depth of field, a well-documented characteristic of his visual style, to reveal superimposed planes of action. Near the end, as the pilot Jurieu (Roland Toutain) and the Marquis de La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) converse in the foreground, significant action begins to take shape in the distant but sharply defined background between the maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) and Octave (Renoir himself in the strangely ambiguous role of a non-aristocratic outside-insider who shapes pieces of the action without ever becoming fully involved in it). Earlier on, as the Marquis’s wife Christine (Austrian-born actress Nora Grégor) attempts to explain her relationship with the pilot, who has just completed a solo transatlantic flight, Renoir and Dalio slip in behind the two and mug rather shamelessly.
      La Règle du jeu also foreshadows Altman in its extremely diffuse narrative, in which the viewer can find no one major turning point or even a single dramatic situation upon which to focus (in his most recent film, The Company, Altman seems to have realized a lifelong ambition to create an all but plotless film). Instead, the film revolves more around themes within which the diverse character groupings and interactions provide sets of variations. Love triangles abound, from the upper crust all the way down to the servants (no intermingling of classes here, however). But at the same time the “rules of the game” that seemingly dominate every breath taken in the rarified atmosphere of the French aristocracy provide their own variations, almost in a quasi-counterpoint, that allow, for instance, the Marquis to take a poacher (Julien Carette) on his property into his employ, Christine to take her husband’s lover, Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély), into her confidence, the Marquis to take his wife’s would-be lover into his confidence, or Schumacher, the Marquis’s game warden (Gaston Modot), to turn the poacher, who is in love with his wife, Lisette, into a fellow-suffering blood brother. But to fall in love, as does the pilot, is a definite no-no, and, as Renoir puts it, he is sacrificed on the altar of the gods in order that this class might continue to exist.
      Much of all this has its origins, in Renoir, in the quasi-Italian comedies originating in eighteenth-century France in such playwrights as Marivaux and Beaumarchais, and finding a cynical peak in the plays of nineteenth-century French poet Alfred de Musset, whose Les Caprices de Marianne offers a direct source for La Règle du jeu. One also senses more than a bit of Chaplinesque slapstick in some of the poacher’s lovestruck antics. But in this eve-of-World-War-II drama Renoir goes beyond his past-century predecessors by examining his characters and their milieu in an extremely harsh light that makes Altman’s cutting edges sometimes pale in comparison. Although the extensive program booklet and several comments that come up in the supplementary material refer to the upper bourgeoisie, the direct target of Renoir’s sometimes scathing social commentary here is the French aristocracy, enough of whose members escaped the guillotine of the French Revolution to survive as a class right on into the present. You may recall that, in the 1960s, the descendants of the Marquis de Sade were able to force a change in the abbreviated title of Peter Weiss’ play from Marat-Sade to Marat-X, not because of their forebear’s humanity and largesse but simply because of the clout of the family name. La Règle du jeu’s celebrated hunting scene, in which animals flushed out of the woods run or fly headlong into the guns of waiting hunters, who slaughter them gruesomely at point-blank range, stands as one of the cinema’s most crushingly brutal metaphors of class privilege. One is reminded of the Peter O’Toole character in the 1972 The Ruling Class who, once he has stopped playing Jesus Christ and recovers his full mindset as a British aristocrat, takes out a rifle and starts shooting, noting, “I recall that it’s a sign of normalcy in our circle to slaughter anything that moves.”
      It is particularly gratifying that, as of 1959, cinephiles have been able to enjoy a 106-minute version of La Règle du jeu not imagined by Renoir when he opened a 95-minute cut to hostile audiences in 1939 Paris and then, devastated by the reactions, reduced it down to a mere eighty-one minutes. The work of the two devotees, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, who, with the director’s blessings, restored and then expanded the film after discovering over 200 boxes of footage, is documented both in an interview they did at the time and in a revealing side-by-side comparison of the original versus the expanded final sequence. As one example, the extra lines spoken in the expanded version by Monsieur le Marquis following the film’s climactic tragedy/non-tragedy gives the full, crushing weight to Renoir’s cynical depiction of how the rules of the game must prevail at all cost. That, as one of the aristocrats smugly notes, is class…not necessarily in both senses of the word. Of the many DVD extras, I was particularly enchanted by the 1993 interview done with the director’s son Alain (a former professor of comparative literature in California), whose good spirits and sense of humor are thoroughly infectious. The print, while definitely better than what one usually sees in the theaters, definitely has flaws and a 1930’s look to it, while the transfer ranges in quality from almost three-dimensional in some of the exteriors to a slight graininess in others. La Règle du jeu, however, is a must-see, and you can spend many engrossing hours with both the film and the dazzling array of supplementary material offered by Criterion.

Jonathan Valin When Jean Renoir made The Rules of the Game he was the most celebrated filmmaker in France. His two previous movies—La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938)—were not just successes but international successes. Indeed, The Rules of the Game was the first production of Renoir’s own company, Nouvelle edition française. Alas, it was also the last.
      The film opened in Paris on July 8, 1939. To say that the debut was a disaster is an understatement. The audience was infuriated—Renoir himself saw one patron trying to set fire to the theater. Critics were outraged. Even the government was incensed, banning the film a month after its release as bad for the morale of a country on the verge of war. (The Rules of the Game premiered less than two months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland precipitated World War II, and a scant eleven months before France signed an armistice at Compiègne, effectively surrendering to Nazi Germany—which also banned the film, by the way.)
      In one of the several excellent documentaries included in this two-disc Criterion set, Renoir admits that the debut was the worst moment of his artistic life. He immediately trimmed the film from ninety-five minutes to just a little more than eighty in an attempt to excise the offending materials. Though what he trimmed is interesting (for which, see below), he must have known that no one part of The Rules of the Game had offended French audiences. It was the whole idea—the image of a frivolous, immoral society “dancing above a volcano”—and the semi-farcical, semi-serious way this idea was treated that made Frenchmen, facing the imminent prospect of going to war to preserve that society and its values, so angry.
      Certainly there are many precedents in French literature for this kind of mordant laugh at the expense of the haute bourgeoisie, even in troubled times. Renoir himself mentions the plays of Marivaux and de Musset as models. But the sharpness of the film’s satire—and French audiences weren’t wrong to see this film as harsh—combined with the perils of that moment in history made for comedy that peeled back the skin of farce and revealed the skull beneath.
      Though the film’s laughter is cutting, it is consistently balanced by Renoir’s clear-eyed but genuine compassion for his characters, expressed in a famous line of dialogue that itself blends mordancy and mercy: “The awful thing about life is that everyone has his reasons.” In the version that Criterion has given us on this DVD—the 106-minute version that Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand salvaged from existing prints and excised footage, and first presented at the 1959 Venice Film Festival—Renoir gives us those reasons, funny and awful though they may be. The version of Rules that I was weaned on—the 80-or-so-minute cut that was shown widely in this country at film schools and film societies back in the sixties and seventies—is, as Christopher Faulkner says in his excellent commentary, a different story.
      Tellingly, the 80-or-so minute film is the version that Renoir himself re-edited after Rules bombed so terribly at its debut. In retrospect, the nature of those edits rather makes you wonder whether he was trying to salvage a success or taking a parting shot at French audiences, for not only did he omit a good deal of intrigue (and explicatory motivation), he also left out almost all of the scenes in which the characters show what is in their hearts.
      To take one of many instances, in the Gaborit/Durand version Octave (Jean Renoir himself), who secretly loves the heroine Christine but knows that he is unsuited for her by looks and temperament and class, momentarily entertains the wildly romantic notion of running off with her himself—joining her in the greenhouse in the garden, professing his love, and taking her away from her droll but faithless husband, the Marquis de La Chesnaye. Octave is quickly brought back to reality by a spare few words and pointed looks from Christine’s chambermaid, Lisette. Sobered, he sacrifices his own dream of happiness and, at the last moment, dutifully and correctly obeys the rules of this game (and of French farce), pointing his friend—the handsome, ardent, and much more suitable hero, André Jurieu—toward the garden greenhouse, literally handing him the coat he was going to wear outdoors (although Octave might as well have been handing him his heart). Ironically, of course, Octave has sent André to his death and dodged the fatal bullet himself, but he doesn’t know this when he makes his beau geste.
      In the abridged Renoir version, we see none of Octave’s touching struggle with himself. Instead, André simply comes up to him and Octave hands him the coat and points him to the garden, rather as if, in retrospect, he has coolly hurried him toward his doom.
      Of course, we do not know exactly what the Paris audience saw in 1939. But assuming the Gaborit/Durand reconstruction is closer to what Renoir originally intended (and it is a safe assumption), then Renoir must have felt that what primarily upset his countrymen wasn’t the savagery of his satire of the French haute bourgeoisie, but the compassion that humanized it, that added tragic dimensions to these figures of farce. If, indeed, “the awful thing about life is that everyone has his reasons,” it was these very reasons—this breadth of understanding, which makes it so difficult to judge even the worst people at their worst—that Renoir excised. At a moment in history when compassion itself was at stake, this was perhaps the most damning thing an artist could say about the world as it then stood—that it no longer had use for the truths, or the lies, of the heart.