Sightlines · reception
How The Rules of the Game was received
1939 · Jean Renoir · The Rules of the Game on Sightlines
The arc
Booed at its 1939 Paris premiere, hacked down by distributors and then banned by the wartime French government, it was reconstructed in 1959 and promptly climbed to the very top of the canon — a fixture of Sight & Sound's top ten ever since.
What’s debated
The eternal 'is it actually the greatest film ever?' test case: first-timers often shrug at what looks like a frothy country-house comedy, while devotees insist it only reveals itself on rewatch.
Its footprint
'The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons' is one of the most quoted lines in cinema, and the country-estate-upstairs-downstairs template it perfected echoes everywhere — Robert Altman openly modeled Gosford Park on it.
Where it stands
A permanent top-five-of-all-time citizen — the ultimate 'you can't call yourself a cinephile until you've seen it' film.
Did you know? The original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1942, and the film only survives because a near-complete version was painstakingly reconstructed from found materials in 1959 — with Renoir's blessing.