New Trailer for 4K Restoration of Jean Renoir’s ‘The Rules of the Game’

New Trailer for 4K Restoration of Jean Renoir’s ‘The Rules of the Game’

by Alex Billington
December 22, 2022
Source: YouTube

“Let the game begin.” Janus Films has revealed a brand new trailer for the 4K restoration and re-release of the Jean Renoir 1939 classic The Rules of the Game, considered one of the best films ever made despite opening to very negative reviews. The film depicts members of upper-class French society and their servants just before the beginning of World War II, showing their moral callousness on the eve of destruction. At la Colinière, the deceptively idyllic country estate of a wealthy Parisian aristocrat, a selection of society’s finest gather for a rural sojourn and shooting party, and reveal themselves to be absurdly, almost primitively, cruel and vapid. Starring Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain, Gaston Modot, and Pierre Magnier. The film received terribly negative reviews and even provoked near riots in Paris upon its initial release. As a result, Renoir cut 23 minutes from the film at the time. The original negative was subsequently destroyed during World War II, and only in 1959 was the film fully reconstructed from surviving prints and embraced by audiences and critics alike. This 4K digital re-release will hit theaters in the US in December, and it’s also available on Criterion Blu-ray. Have a look.

Here’s the new 4K restoration trailer for Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, direct from YouTube:

Considered one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here in a gorgeous new 4K restoration. The Rules of the Game is written and directed by acclaimed French filmmaker Jean Renoir, his 20th feature film at the time made just before Swamp Water. Co-written by Koch. The film premiered in Paris in 1939. It later screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1947, only arriving in the US for the first time in 1950. Janus Films will re-release Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in select US theaters – starting at New York’s Film Forum on December 23rd, 2022 and at Los Angeles’ Los Feliz Theater on December 29th, 2022, with more cinemas in early 2023. For more info on the re-release, visit their official site. Who’s in?

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