Rules of the Game (1939)

Directed by Jean Renoir. Starring Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, and Jean Renoir.

This comedy of manners from French humanist Jean Renoir is one of the first truly great examples of an ensemble piece in cinema. There are no central protagonists in this story, and certainly no heroes or villains. Instead, Renoir uses his large cast to examine class issues and social mores in European society at the time, assembling the gentry and their servants at a country home over a weekend and observing their interactions and individual stories. Renoir doesn't portray the monied characters as being fundamentally different than their servants, as members of both classes engage in domestic squabbles, rivalries, and flirtations, and he punctuates this idea by casting himself in the role of Octave, a kind of free-agent who associates with members of both sectors, maintaining a distance on both that allows him to marvel at their similarities. It seems like his biggest theme here is, for better or worse, we're all more similar than we pretend to be. Robert Altman re-worked Renoir's structure into his film GOSFORD PARK, but while his allegiance to the lower classes provided an interesting perspective on the film, his work doesnt hold a candle to Renoir's masterpiece.