Film of the Decade

In 1939, two years after he made the moving and powerful antiwar drama, La Grande Illusion, the great French film-maker, Jean Renoir - son of the Impressionist painter, Auguste Renoir - completed his most personal film, the humanist masterpiece, La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), which featured the director himself among its superlative ensemble cast. Ostensibly a comedy of manners set among masters and servants at a weekend party in a country chateau, the film reveals a jagged edge as it exposes decadence, hypocrisy and corruption and it builds to a jolting denouement. An expensive box-office failure when first released, this clever, subtle allegory drew the odium of the French public, was cut by the Vichy government and banned by the Nazis, and it only received the acclaim it richly deserved when it was restored and re-released in the late 1950s. It remains a revelatory experience.