![The Rules of the Game: Booed In 1939 And Cut To Pi](https://cdn.slatesource.com/3/9/a/39ab493d-cbcf-4591-94c7-6a6d69910ee8.webp)

# The Rules of the Game: Booed In 1939 And Cut To Pi

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/the-rules-of-the-game-booed-in-1939-and-cut-to-pi)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/3/9/a/39ab493d-cbcf-4591-94c7-6a6d69910ee8.webp)

## The Rules of the Game (1939)

Renoir's ensemble comedy about a weekend party was jeered off French screens weeks before the war.

Runtime

110 minutes

Director

Jean Renoir

Country

France

Cinematography

Jean Bachelet

## Everyone Has Their Reasons

A rich Parisian couple invite friends and staff to a country estate for a shooting weekend, and Renoir lets upstairs and downstairs run the same plot at the same time: two households, two sets of affairs, one set of rules that nobody can follow and everybody enforces. The camera moves constantly through rooms in deep focus so several conversations stay legible at once, a technique that looks effortless and took the industry twenty years to absorb. At the centre is the hunt, in which beaters drive rabbits and pheasants toward guests who shoot everything that moves, cut with a precision that makes the social comedy retrospectively unbearable. Renoir plays Octave himself, the friend everyone tolerates, which puts the film's most compromised character in the director's own body.

journey·6 Acts

# Watching The Rules of the Game

Momentum

/

Act

The Landing

Celebrated

"An aviator lands after crossing the Atlantic and asks a live radio audience where the woman he did it for is."

Audiences rioted at the premiere and the distributor cut it from 113 minutes to 81. The original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Boulogne.

A near complete restoration was assembled in 1959 from surviving elements with Renoir's cooperation, and the film went from commercial disaster to a permanent fixture near the top of every critics poll.

> The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.

[The Rules of the Game on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031885/?utm_source=slatesource)