*** NOV-22-2011: ADDED REVIEW OF 2011 BLU-RAY & DVD ***
Criterion now has released 3 editions of this French classic: 2004 DVD edition (blue cover with photos) that has been put out of print, 2011 DVD edition (bright cover with vintage drawing) that has identical content save for a revised supplement, and a corresponding 2011 Blu-ray edition that is a high-def version of the 2011 DVD.
The 2011 Blu-ray and DVD appear to have used the same source that yielded the 2004 DVD. As those who have seen the 2004 DVD know, the original source is not in the best of shape, even though it is the best material Criterion was able to get. Google "nytimes hunting rules of the game" to see the report on Criterion's effort in tracking down the best material of the film. So does this Blu-ray look as good as the "Casablanca" blu-ray, the "Gone of the Wind" blu-ray, the "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" blu-ray? No, it doesn't. But as usual, Criterion maintains the integrity of the picture by retaining a lot of film grains on the transfer. Other studios may use digital noise reduction (DNR) to remove those film grains to not annoy modern viewers. But Criterion consistently retains film grains on its Blu-rays, thereby retaining a lot of picture details which may have been lost otherwise had DNR been used. Those who have seen a classic film in theaters would know that film grains are inherent to the pictures from those periods. These Criterion Blu-rays therefore give you as close to a theatrical experience as you can get. This Blu-ray also offers 2-3 times higher horizontal and vertical resolutions, 6 times higher video bit rate, and 6 times higher audio bit rate compared to its DVD counterpart, although these advantages benefit more to those with large screen HDTVs and good audio systems.
So what about the revised supplement on the 2011 editions? On the 2004 edition, the filmmakers' tributes to the film is on the disc. But on the 2011 editions, they are put on the booklet.
My review of the 2004 DVD is below.
** ORIGINAL REVIEW OF CRITERION 2004 DVD EDITION, JAN-24-2004 **
On the surface, THE RULES OF THE GAME is a frivolous satire of the French ruling class during the interwar years. But beneath it, this 1939 film is a rather sweeping appraisal on human nature and how the rigidity of our society continues to undermine our humanity. With a microcosmic cast of characters that comprises of masters and servants, the film weaves an intricate plot about their love, jealousies, deceit, infidelities, hypocrisies, misunderstandings, and, at times, reconciliations, and realignments of friends and foes. Through their travails, the film depicts a symbolic breakdown, and ultimately restoration, of the prevailing social order, resulting in the film being both a comedy and a tragedy. Director Jean Renoir also acts in the film, playing the pivotal role of an outsider (obviously a stand-in for the audience). His character's futile attempts to break into the "circle" and to bring about the well-beings of his friends suggest that it is often difficult to survive under the social order, let alone change it.
The Criterion DVD is an all-region two-disc set with a newly restored video transfer and plenty of rewarding extra material. This eagerly-awaited disc was originally to be released last Fall, when Criterion had already finished a video transfer that would have looked better than any existing copy of the film. But at the last minute, Criterion received word that an earlier-generation fine-grain master of the film had been located in France, and that additional improvement, though not dramatic, could be made to the picture quality. Being the perfectionist that it often is, Criterion decided to redo the video transfer based on the fine-grain master, thus delaying the DVD's release by several months. According to the New York Times article "Hunting 'The Rules of the Game'" on Jan-18-04, the redone transfer justified the additional time and cost by yielding more details in dark areas and richer shades of grey on the picture, resulting in a less harsh look and perhaps subliminally making the characters in the film seem more sympathetic.
The DVD's video quality is indeed the best I've ever seen. Its sharpness and clarity of details are a revelation to those who have seen, for instance, Criterion's laserdisc version years ago. A digital cleanup process has been used to eliminate much (but not all) of the dirt and blemishes. The original French audio track has also been improved, and it now sounds cleaner, with almost no hiss and pops, and more detailed. In a film that relies on its numerous visual and audio details to be effective, the technical improvements made for this DVD are absolutely worthwhile and welcomed.
Accompanying the film is a superb analytical audio commentary written by film historian and Renoir's friend Alexander Sesonske, and read fluidly by Peter Bogdanovich. Recorded in 1989 for the Criterion laserdisc, this commentary analyzes the intricate relationships of the characters, how their actions often counterpoint one another's, and what Renoir intends to accomplish with them. It points out that the story creates two groups of quintets, each comprising of a husband, wife, lover, mistress, and interceding friend, and that the actions in one group are often the opposites of the other. The commentary also mentions the political climate in which Renoir made the film, as well as the classical works (such as The Marriage of Figaro) that inspired Renoir.
A 30-minute excerpt of the 1967 TV documentary "Jean Renoir, le patron", originally included in the laserdisc version, is also included in this DVD. It is essentially an interview of Renoir, who talks about his shooting style, and the themes and characters of the film. There is also a rather poignant moment of Renoir reuniting with actor Marcel Dalio at the steps of the "La Colinière," where they reminisce about their experience.
The DVD includes a great one-hour documentary on Renoir and RULES OF THE GAME, made by BBC in 1993. It recalls Renoir's childhood, upbringing, how his love of the movies developed, and his film career up to and including RULES OF THE GAME. It shows fascinating clips of his early films such as LA FILLE DE L'EAU, CHARLESTON, NANA, LA CHIENNE, BONDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, and others. It also includes comments from his family members, friends, collaborators, and other filmmakers such as Bertrand Tavernier, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Peter Bogdanovich.
Perhaps the best supplement in the whole DVD set is a "Version Comparison" that provides side-by-side comparison of the final scenes in two versions of the film: the shorter 81-minute cut which Renoir reluctantly made in response to criticisms, and the longer 106-minute version that was reconstructed in 1959 (the version used for this DVD's presentation). Film historian Christopher Faulkner's commentary provides further elucidation on the differences between the two. Thus, we can plainly see for ourselves that the shorter version drastically eliminates many of the subtleties and alters the meaning of the film's final moments completely.
Also valuable is a 10-minute interview footage of the two people who reconstructed the 1959 version, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand. They recall their multi-year efforts in finding film elements from all over the world, and eventually discovering several minutes of footage that was not in Renoir's original version (one of such footage is the long conversation between Octave and André at the knoll in the countryside).
Other extras include an 8-minute "video essay" (a featurette) on the film's production history, 3 interview segments, and several written tributes by today's filmmakers, which include a few pretty thoughtful mini-essays on the film as well as succinct comments such as that from Robert Altman: "THE RULES OF THE GAME taught me the rules of the game."
Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME takes place on the eve of World War II at an aristocratic house party in an opulent chateau just outside of Paris where the overlapping `affaires d'amour' of all social classes are observed with a keen and compassionate eye. Renoir looks to the eighteenth-century world of Commedia dell'Arte and Mozartian opera, and seamlessly integrates farce with tragedy, using a classical form to offer his audience a profound and multifaceted parable on the disturbing realities that underlie the veneer of contemporary French society.
It is the middle-class aviator, André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who embodies the film's central conflict between the private passions and a sense of obligation to a larger social body. Right at the outset of the film, he violates the unwritten "rules" of social propriety by declaring to a radio reporter his disappointment that the woman he had been courting, Christine de la Chesnaye (Nora Grégor), is not present at his reception after completing a record-breaking flight across the Atlantic. His skill with the advanced technology of aircraft is not matched by an ability to deal with people, particularly in matters of love. Indeed, André's careless and unmediated show of desire for a highborn lady not only transgresses the received law of proper social conduct but of traditional class distinctions as well.
Other characters also entertain desires that come into conflict with the social order. The Marquis, Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), is having a fling with Geneviève de Marrast (Mila Parély) behind Christine's back, and Geneviève is sincerely attached to him and wants for them to go away together yet he maintains the proper outward appearance, and out of politeness and consideration for his wife's feelings, keeps up the charade that their affair is a secret in spite of the fact that "everybody knows." Christine observes her husband's liaison with strange amusement, commenting that they look "very interesting" together for her adultery is a form of entertaining spectacle. But even Robert loses his cool at one point when he discovers Christine and André together in the gunroom and punches the aviator in the face.
Strangely enough, it is only the classless Pandarus-figure, Octave, who can get through to the serenely unattainable Christine because he seems to have no particular desires of his own; he only concerns himself with regulating the desires of others. Octave confesses that, like Marcello Mastrioanni in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA, he is "a failure" who merely pleases his friends so that he may live off their wealth like "a parasite." Apparently, Christine loves him for his understanding that everything in life, every social relationship, is really a lie of some sort, and that all desire and romantic fantasy is, at bottom, a blind form of narcissistic self-deception. It seems that the two of them have come to understand the law that underpins desire "La Règle de Jeu" all too well.
As Pauline Kael has pointed out, Renoir may have conceived Robert de la Chesnaye as a composite of two different characters in GRAND ILLUSION: Marcel Dalio's rich young mercantile Jew, Rosenthal, and the generous, self-sacrificing French nobleman, De Boeldieu, played by Pierre Fresnay. Here, the director appears to equate the waning aristocracy of Old World Europe with the imminent fate of the European Jewish community in the wake of rising nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia. When a chef makes an anti-Semitic slight against the Robert, revealing the bigotry of the French working classes, it evokes the controversy surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. By the same token, the General's final comment that Robert is one of a "dying breed" not only heralds the decay of aristocratic privilege but, from the vantage point of hindsight, also seems a chilling spectre of Nazi racialist ideology and the Final Solution.
Christine's Austrian origin alludes to the looming war with Germany and seems a prediction of France's collaboration under the Vichy régime. Likewise, the reference to Schumacher's home of Alsace-Lorraine, the highly contested land ceded to the Germans at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and then returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, highlights an old geopolitical conflict between the two countries. The indiscriminate destruction of life in the rabbit and pheasant hunt sequence forecasts the waste and destruction of the war to come.
Renoir's approach to mise-en-scène is especially groundbreaking. He employs seamless cutting as well as long continuous takes and tracking shots which follow the characters as they move from one space to the next in a manner that anticipates the graceful circling, panning, sensuously kinetic camera of Welles, Ophüls, Godard, Resnais, Bertolucci and others. He uses deep-focus compositions, avoiding close-ups by putting many actors in the frame at the same time to suggest multiple viewpoints. The balustrades of La Colinière and the languorous tracking shots down the long corridors undoubtedly inspired those in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD while the checkered floor suggests a harlequinade and a chess board upon which the characters maneuver themselves in relation to each other like the similarly checkered shuffleboard floor in Antonioni's LA NOTTE or the geometrically precise arrangement of the garden in MARIENBAD. (Interestingly enough, Coco Chanel designed the costumes for both THE RULES OF THE GAME and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD).
Octave's gorilla suit at the party implies a regression of human behavior to a more primitive state, setting up a conflict between barbarism and civilized life, between the savage realities of human desire and the law of the social contract that contains them as theatrical spectacle. The Shakespearean convention of "the play within the play" appears just as it does in THE GOLDEN COACH in various forms throughout the film, the most ominous being the `danse macabre,' echoed in the séance and ritual journey to the realm of the dead in LA DOLCE VITA, suggesting that Renoir's superficial `affaires d'amour' are really a dance of death heralding the apocalyptic destruction of the old Europe.
Buy The Rules of the Game (The Criterion Collection) (1939) Now
No history of cinema would be complete without "The Rules of the Game" (1939). Director Jean Renoir's brilliant, perceptive study of a dying French aristocracy remains among the finest examples of visual poetry captured on film as evidenced in the savage "rabbit hunt" and the haunting final shot. Along with "Grand Illusion" (1937), "The Rules of the Game" represents the high-water mark of Renoir's career. It's as close to perfection as a film can get.
Read Best Reviews of The Rules of the Game (The Criterion Collection) (1939) Here
I had no idea what to expect before watching this film. I purposefully kept myself ignorant of it because I wanted to experience it as fresh as possible. All I knew was that, for years, it has consistently placed second on the Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films of all time (Citizen Kane always comes in first). Now, knowing that a film is considered one of the greatest of all time sometimes means that you are in for a snore. There are some so-called "classics" that just bore me to tears (The Conformist or L'Aventura spring to mind).
Yes, this is one of the greatest movies ever made. Yes, it is a satire on aristocratic society at the time. Yes, it was badly received and banned by the Nazis. Blah, blah, blah who cares? The amazing thing is what a joy this movie is to watch. It is genuinely funny. I often hear it cited as the main influence on Robert Altman, and now I can understand why. Instead of criticizing Paul Thomas Anderson for copying Altman, we should appreciate Altman imitating Renoir. Here we see the big cast without any real central character, the anarchic humor, and the brisk energy that moves everything along.
Like everything in the Criterion Collection, this print LOOKS VERY GOOD. This is all the more important since the original negative had been destroyed in World War II and for years only second-rate prints were available. There is a second disc that documents all the travails that this film went through, and how it was edited to several different versions. The version we have now was restored in the fifties outside (but with the blessing of) Renoir. This print is 98 minutes long. The original was 91 minutes, and we are still missing an unimportant scene from that original version. I would have liked to have had a new documentary with more commentary from contemporary filmmakers (especially Altman who admits that he learned "the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game"). However, there is a voice-over commentary track by Peter Bogdonavich, who is as good a film scholar as they come.
Want The Rules of the Game (The Criterion Collection) (1939) Discount?
`The Rules of the Game', written and directed by Jean Renoir is considered by most to be one of the top ten movies of all time, commonly spoken of in the same class as Fellini's `La Dolce Vita', Kurasawa's `The Seven Samurai', Wells `Citizen Kane', Eisenstein's `Battleship Potemkin' and Kubrick's `2001' I completely agree with this assessment, but with a comments on why this movie is so much different than these others.
There are many things you can appreciate about this movie with nothing more than the English translation of the dialogue. I confess that I had to be prompted to appreciate this, but a careful viewer should be able to see how skillful Renoir and his cameramen are in making long focus shots where both foreground and background action can be seen in clear focus. The camera work may not be quite as dramatic as Eisenstein or Wells, but it is effective nonetheless. And, like these other directors, the camera shots are not done just to be clever. They are always used to capture something important, as when we see action down a hall in the middle background that puts the lie to the dialogue in the foreground.
Another cinematic trick is how Renoir ties together several scenes by some perfectly logical devices. The most dramatic is in the first few scenes where many of the principle characters are introduced at widely separate locations by the device of having all the characters either contributing to or listening to the same radio broadcast upon the arrival of aviator, Andre Jurieu at a Paris airport upon repeating the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh.
While the cinematic devices and stage directions contribute much, the meat of the film is in the relations between the eight principal characters, forming three interlocking romantic triangles among the bourgeoisie and a parallel triangle in the servant class, linked by the `classless' character, Octave (played by Renoir himself). These various interlocking romances drive most of the action throughout the movie, and are, collectively, evidence of a rottenness in the fabric of French society. Part of the greatness of this movie is that the malady Renoir depicts probably cannot be summarized in a few words, which is why we need a two hour movie to fully play it out.
Unfortunately for the modern American viewer who does not know French and whose knowledge of French 20th century history may be a bit weak, there is much in this movie which will be missed. The first is as simple as some word usages common to European languages but foreign to modern English. French and German both have two different modes of addressing people. One is polite and respectful for business colleagues, superiors, distant relatives, and just about everything except close relatives such as spouse, children, and close friends. The use of one form of address or the other is a dead giveaway to some aspects of the relation between people in drama. The second is present in English, but probably not very familiar to the average speaker. This is the difference between `good-bye' and `farewell'. The first simply means you are leaving for the moment, and expect to see the listener again soon. The latter means you are parting company for good, as when you are breaking a relationship and leaving for a distant land. I experienced how dramatic this difference was when I was leaving a company in Germany after a summer employment and used the German form of `farewell' and found my listeners were really touched by the distinction.
An even more important background element is the fact that this movie was filmed just a few months before the outbreak of World War II, and everyone knew it was coming. Thus, anything said to reflect on the soundness of the French culture or `backbone' could be taken as a serious criticism of the French state. Another subtlety is the fact that the lead actress, Nora Gregor, is from Strasbourg, a German city that just happens to be in France as a result of World War I.
The film is subtitled a `dramatic fantasy' which takes some of the bite out of the social satire, but not much. On a visceral level, I can't find a single major character with whom I am sympathetic. They are all tangled up in what seem like such shallow relationships, where the principle male character's interest in mechanical toys seems more important to him than his relation with his wife.
This DVD includes the single most useful extra, an English commentary track written by film scholar, Alexander Sesonske and read by the noted director and film commentator, Peter Bogdanovich. This commentary illuminates almost all of the things that may be hidden by the language and the historical context.
Most of the other extras support our understanding of the film, our appreciation of how it went from commercial flop in 1939 to its appreciation as a great film today, and our appreciation of what Renoir had to do to get the film made.
While I do not know if older versions of the film are available, it is worth warning that this particular 106 minute version of the film is actually 12 minutes longer than Renoir's original release and almost 20 minutes longer than the version cut down after the original critical and commercial failure of the 92 minute version. While I cannot be absolutely sure the long version is better than the original, the film is so important that every scrap of information we have about the film is valuable.
One contribution of some extras is testimonials by major directors such as Francois Truffaut and Bernardo Bertolluci on how this film influenced their careers. If I were to find anything at all objectionable about this package it is the fact that the booklet is printed with white text on a dark gray and is very difficult to read.
This is a very important movie indeed!
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Milos Forman has always had a knack for assembling great ensemble casts. This is particularly true in his most critically acclaimed releases (Taking Off, Amadeus and this film). It would be difficult indeed to come up with actors and actresses who were better suited to fill the roles in OFOTCN. This is true in terms of both the stars, Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, and the secondary characters. Who could have been a better Harding than William Redfield? A better Billy Bibbit than Brad Dourif? A better Cheswick than Sydney Lassick? And most especially, a better Chief Bromden than Will Sampson? 
