Before The Deluge-With Jean Renoir’s The Rules Of The Game In Mind

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Rules of the Game, starring Nora Gregor, Marcel Dalio, Jean Renoir, Roland Toutain, directed by Jean Renoir, 1939         

Here is one film, Jean Renoir’s classic The Rules of the Game, that a look at the release date tells a lot.1939 as Europe, as the world eventually, was on the eve of war, tells even the naïve that a film about the decadent morals and devil-may-care attitude about what was coming among the upper crust would not sit pretty with a government that itself was decadent and ill-prepared to fight a second war in a generation. That notwithstanding this is a great film of manners and a bit of a sent up of life among the upper set and their foibles in the late Third Republic. The nice trick is that these foibles are placed on display by Renoir for the servants and for us to see-and comment on.         

The storyline is pretty convention as such comedic efforts go. It is the cinematography and scene-settings that are the remarkable parts of the film. Here a famous French aviator on the order of Charles Lindberg in his country, Andre, is head over heels in love with Christine the wife of rich landowner, Robert, with a country estate well outside of Paris (of course having a place in town as well). Robert has his own liaisons and life but one must keep up appearances. The long and short of the situation is that Octave a mutual friend of Andre and Robert’s wrangles an invitation for Andre to go to the country estate for a time. There all hell breaks loose as all the various romantic machinations are played out between Andre and Christine, Robert and his lover, Christine’s maid and her husband, the gamekeeper of the estate, and a budding thing the maid had with a poacher.     

Nothing good can come of this and nothing does, at least for Andre who winds up dead, very dead after a famous scene where the gamekeeper who had spied in the greenhouse someone whom he thought was his wife with Andre and after a couple of identity miscues shot him dead. After all this high speed romance and intrigue the highest level of energy the landowner Robert could come up with is that the whole thing was an accident. This is one time that the simplicity of the plot-line does not convey the intricacies of the goings-on. So see this world classic film that back in the late 1960s and early 1970s was playing almost continuously at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge as a whole generation rediscovered what great film-making was all about. Rediscovered those foreign film gems that the French in particular were producing before film noir hit the world.