Le Règle du jeu: "...a film in which all the intrepidity of the avant-garde survives, in which, from time to time, something like an echo of L'Age d'or can be discerned" (Jacques Brunius). Indeed, there is more to link The Rules of the Game to L'Age d'or (by way of La Vie est à nous) than the presence of Gaston Modot as the gamekeeper Schumacher. Once again the upper-class are at their most ridiculous during a typical soiree (here, a costume ball, the artifice made plain); like the comical Madame LaPlante, they mangent de tout though their play is as mechanical as one of the Marquis' musical toys. Behind the scenes, the disparate squirmishes of lovers reveals the anarchy of desperation, after the rules of the game have been broken by the pilot André in his singleminded pursuit of amour fou. But Renoir is even more cynical than Buñuel, if that were possible; "André is a hero in the air but hopeless on the ground, like all modern heroes," reports Octave, the film's real, doomed hero (played by Renoir himself). Renoir described this brilliant tragicomedy as "a sort of reconstructed documentary on the condition of a society at a given moment," that being 1939, on the eve of a disastrous phase of French history. And as for Christine (Nora Grégor), who loves foolishly but, alas, not madly; and her husband the Marquis (Marcel Dalio), whose boredom itself signals disaster: for these disillusioned models of decorum we envision a postwar Voyage to Italy.