Flashback, July 1939: Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” Becomes Cause Celebre in Prewar France)

A title of a 1966 film about France’s capital under siege by Resistance forces in WWII asked, Is Paris Burning? The same question might just as easily have applied to the major row that broke out over actor-writer-director Jean Renoir’s Le Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), which premiered 70 years ago this week. In fact, at its opening, a disgruntled moviegoer set fire to his newspaper in an attempt to burn the theater down!

You really have to hand it to the French: They really go for filmmakers who are, shall we say, critically underappreciated in the U.S., like Jerry Lewis.

(The story goes that Orson Welles, upon being told that the French regarded him as one of the three greatest directors, inquired who were the other two. “D.W. Griffith and Jerry Lewis,” he was told. The orotund director sighed as he admitted that it was always the third name that killed you.)

But when it came to one of their own—Jean Renoir, an authentic genius with a streak of films in the Thirties that were either remade shamelessly by Hollywood (Boudu Saved From Drowning, later adapted into Paul Mazurski’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills) or which placed among the greatest films of all time (the antiwar Grand Illusion)—the French threw a fit. Once audiences left theaters in droves and the critics pummeled it, the French ministry got into the act, banning his masterpiece twice (first under the prewar government, then under the collaborationist Vichy regime).

During WWII, when Renoir (pictured here on the left) fled to the U.S. to avoid the Nazis, many in France derided him for having “gone Hollywood”—as if the man had any chance, given that all other markets for his life’s work had been effectively shut down by a virtually continent-wide dictatorship. A 1943 movie made in the U.S., about the French Resistance, was received scathingly by his countrymen, who were still under Hitler’s thumb.

In the end, Renoir would not make a movie again in his native country for 15 years after The Rules of the Game.

What upset the French so much about the film? Anyone watching the movie today would be hard pressed, judging strictly by what they see onscreen, to figure it out. It helps to have some context.

Start with this: Only two years after rightwing forces in France had vented their frustration with the first Jewish premier, Leon Blum, with the soon-to-be-regretted motto, “Better Hitler Than Blum!”, many in the audience at the premiere expressed their annoyance with the casting of the Jewish actor Marcel Dalio. Zenophobes were only slightly more charitable to Austrian-born actress Nora Gregor.

Overarching everything, though, was Renoir’s portrait of a decadent society—an upper-crust bent on maintaining appearances, even when larger issues (the necessity of stopping Hitler) overshadowed should have overshadowed petty concerns and an authentic hero (an aviator) became sacrificed in the movie as a result of a tragic mistake.

Within a week after the film’s disastrous premiere, Renoir set to work trimming minutes from its running time, in an attempt to improve its commercial fortunes. Not only did the ploy not work, but his luck was about to worsen: the movie was cut yet again and the original negative was destroyed during the war. It would be more than a quarter century before a painstaking reconstruction allowed audiences to see what all the original fuss was about.

If you’re speculating about the filmmaker’s surname, you have surmised correctly: he was indeed a son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His experiments with deep-focus cinematography demonstrate that he had his own strong visual sense.

But what I loved so much about The Rules of the Game when I first saw it more than 20 years ago was the following:

* It felt like a novel. The ensemble cast benefited from a script that gave each character individuality. All kinds of complex characterization were taking place in the upstairs-downstairs setting of a “shooting party” at a country estate.

* It constantly surprised the viewer. It morphed from rueful satire to breakneck bedroom farce to tragedy.

* It did not jump on a soapbox with a sign announcing its message. Renoir was perfectly willing to discuss his leftist sympathies, but felt that ideology had to be subordinated to character development. He did not look down on any of his characters, but assessed them with a pitying but all-encompassing eye—perhaps exemplified best by the line given to Octave, the character played by the director himself: “The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons.”

The Rules of the Game inspired films by, among others, Woody Allen (Manhattan) and Robert Altman (Gosford Park). Though these latter movies were fine in their own right, they were either chillier (Gosford Park) or slighter entertainments (Manhattan) than the original.

There are all kinds of reasons why this masterpiece is usually ranked next to only Citizen Kane in polls of critics. But I don’t want to spoil any of the pleasure that awaited me when I saw it. Find out for yourself what the hullabaloo's been about for 70 years.