
The sense of the characters and the action and, above all, the symbolic side of the film was something I had thought about for a long time.

The Rules of the Game, the most expensive and ambitious French production of 1939, was the first film made under the auspices of that organization.Īs he wrote the script, Renoir referred to the film as “an exact description of the bourgeoisie of our time.” He was so confident in his vision that he later claimed to have started shooting with only one-third of the script complete: “In reality, I had this subject so much inside me, so profoundly within me, that I had written only the entrances and movements, to avoid mistakes about them. But then two big successes, Grand Illusion (1937) and La bête humaine (1938), encouraged him to act out a dream-to form his own production company, wherein he could work when and as he pleased. Still, for all his command, his films were seldom commercial hits. He became, in the midthirties, the film director of the left, his protagonists often working-class rather than bourgeois. Then, in the late thirties, intent on creating rhythm and balance within complex narrative structures, he began constructing his films around matched opposing pairs, a form that helped bring coherence and resonance to his intricate story lines.Īs he mastered this style, Renoir’s social commitments deepened. Renoir arranged his actors in deep space long takes in deep focus allowed them to move freely in this space and gave them time to seek and achieve convincing characterizations.
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Throughout the 1930s, Renoir had worked at the margins of the French movie industry, exploring aspects of contemporary French society while developing a style in opposition to the one that emanated from Hollywood and dominated the film world.

It is also, in the words of Dudley Andrew, “the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.” A total box-office failure in 1939, The Rules of the Game now ranks as one of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema. The result was The Rules of the Game, a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created. In this atmosphere, Jean Renoir, anticipating war and deeply troubled by the mood he felt around him, thought he might best interpret that state of mind by creating a story in the spirit of French comic theater, from Marivaux to Musset, a tradition in which the force that sets every character in motion is love and the characters have no other occupation to interfere with this pursuit.

By February 1939, it no longer seemed evident that the surrender of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich had “saved the peace.” A sense of doom was beginning to hang over Europe.
