It's been awhile since I viewed Rules.. it seems the new DVD is a bitchin restoration of this 1939 flic. On my list. I find the reviewer's comments helpful all along, as in these opening/concluding excerpts:

Beyond the Multiplex

A restored version of one of the best movies ever made, "Rules of the Game." Plus: A transsexual romance and a "Memento" rip-off.

By Andrew O'Hehir


Nov. 2, 2006 | A lot has been written about Jean Renoir's 1939 film "Rules of the Game." Too much, maybe. For many years it has ranked near the top in critics' lists of the best films ever. In Sight & Sound magazine's most recent critics' poll, it's at No. 3, behind only "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo." Yet "Rules of the Game" doesn't have much of a popular constituency and never did; it was a horrendous bomb when it opened in Paris in the summer before the Nazi invasion of France, and it doesn't make the top 250 films ranked by IMDb users.

Many digressive topics beckon here, but I'm going to try to resist them: the strange human compulsion to make lists and compare things that, philosophically, ought to be incomparable; the gulf between critical and popular tastes (you're sick of that one, if you've ever read this column before); the fact that contemporary audiences literally have difficulty understanding most films made before the '60s; my own sense of confusion and betrayal every time I see "Vertigo."

[. . .]

Amid the tense international situation of 1939, you'd think a movie about the adventures of the idle rich and their earthier servants would be just the ticket. But not these idle rich people, or their adventures. "People go to the cinema in the hope of forgetting their everyday problems," Renoir writes in his 1974 autobiography, "and it was precisely their own worries that I plunged them into ... I depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in process of disintegration, so that they were defeated at the outset ... The audience recognized this. The truth is that they recognized themselves."

[Ed: hmmmm - anyone smell deja vu? maybe a timelier DVD release than I grokked, at first. Eh, maybe accident.]

Even this is perhaps too much interpretation, too much history. But it may be easier to appreciate "Rules of the Game" if you grasp something of its context, and if you understand that the film's tonal confusion, like its refusal to divide its large cast into heroes and villains, cheaters and victims, is deliberate. A certain fanciful subtraction may also be helpful: If you imagine a world where the films of Bergman, Truffaut, Altman, Mike Leigh and Woody Allen (among others) don't yet exist, you can begin to understand the prodigious influence of this movie. (Renoir himself would make many later films, in American exile and then back in France, including some good ones, but never got close to this level again.)

I saw Renoir in a tiny movie house in Berkeley, in the '70s. "The River" - his film about India and about liff Life.

(Screw Cannes, where ordinary folk never get to sit with one of the probably-immortals, while watching their work -- all free of a mass of gabbling poseurs just off their Gulfstreams.)