[Rules of the Game] is original precisely for the connection it makes between a traditional theatrical structure and a new content, and for the way it articulates their relation. For Rules of the Game is the one film in a thousand where the study of a given milieu is inseparable from a particular dramatic scheme: in it, artistic reflection is on a par with historical analysis.

Renoir's project was clear: to perform the "autopsy" of the bourgeoisie in crisis, to record the proof positive of a class overwhelmed by the events in Europe…. Renoir's film was intended, in his own words, as "an exact description of the bourgeois of the time." Directly, then, Rules of the Game is given as a totality; each of its characters becomes part of a whole and thereby acquires his significance. Thus, the secondary figures in the film form a survey of the...