“I was 15 when I first saw this masterpiece. I know no more today about society than I learned then from Rules of the Game.” -Richard Avedon, Berkeley, 3/18/80.

Renoir described this brilliant tragicomedy, the original “Upstairs/Downstairs,” as “a sort of reconstructed documentary on the condition of a society at a given moment” - the moment being 1939, with a disastrous phase of French history in the offing. The Rules of the Game is a satirical study of a way of life that stifles all opportunity for love and friendship. A November house party at the chateau of Marquis Robert de La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) provides the ideal setting. All spirit and enterprise have departed from the gentry at the gathering. They are as petrified as the Chinese statues that line the vast rooms, as mechanical in their decorum as the musical boxes the baron loves so dearly. Andre, the intrepid pilot, is the acknowledged outsider. He does not behave like the hero society expects him to be; he disregards the rules of the game, and his dispute with the Marquis for the love of Christine becomes a clumsy fracas, a significant substitute for the duel of prouder times. The distressing finale of the film is also ironic because Octave (Jean Renoir) finds that his honorable sacrifice rebounds on him with a vengeance.