Jean Renoir (1894 - 1979)
Related: classic film - French cinema - director
La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) - Jean Renoir [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
La Règle du Jeu (1939) was initially judged to be too gloomy and was greeted with derision by a Parisian crowd on its premiere. The French government duly banned it, but after the war it has come to be seen as one of the greatest films of all-time. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_the_Game [Sept 2004]
Biography
Jean Renoir (September 15, 1894 – February 12, 1979), born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France, was a film director, actor and author. He was the son of the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
As a film director and actor he made over forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, Renoir My Father (1962). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean Renoir [Jul 2006]
La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) - Jean Renoir
The Rules of the Game (original French title: La règle du jeu) is a 1939 film directed by Jean Renoir about upper-class French society just before the start of World War II.The film was initially judged to be too gloomy and was greeted with derision by a Parisian crowd on its premiere. The French government duly banned it, but after the war it has come to be seen as one of the greatest films of all-time. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_the_Game [Sept 2004]
Renoir's look at bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II. An assorted cast of characters - the rich and their poor servants - meet up at a French chateau for various reasons and the result is murder --http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0031885/ [Sept 2004]
La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) - Jean Renoir [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Consistently cited by critics worldwide as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's bittersweet drama of life, love, class, and the social code of manners and behavior ("the rules of the game") is a savage critique undertaken with sensitivity and compassion. Renoir's catch-phrase through the film, "Everyone has their reasons," develops a multilayered meaning by the conclusion. A young aviator (Roland Toutain) commits a serious social faux pas by alluding to an affair on national radio. To avert a scandal, the cultured Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), husband to the aviator's mistress, Christine (Nora Gregor), and a philanderer in his own right, invites all to a weekend hunting party in his country mansion. The complicated maze of marriages and mistresses (social register and servant class alike) is plotted like a bedroom farce, but the tone soon takes a darker cast. Renoir, who also takes the pivotal role as Andre's jovial pal and de la Chesnaye confidant Octave, deftly blends high comedy with cutting satire as he parallels the upstairs-downstairs affairs. The film builds to a comic pitch with the hilarious performance of Julien Carette as a rabbit poacher turned groundskeeper, but soon turns tragic in a devastating conclusion. The film was roundly condemned and banned in France upon its 1939 release, but years later (out of the shadow of WWII) the film was rediscovered for the masterpiece that it is. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com
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