The Rules of the Game (1939), directed by Jean Renoir, is a bitter social comedy set over a weekend hunting party at a French chateau — where the idle rich, their servants, and an aviator hero who loves the hostess careen toward humiliation and death with oblivious grace.

Why It Matters

• Voted the greatest film ever made in the 1962 and 1972 Sight and Sound polls
• Renoir's deep focus photography and long takes allow multiple actions to unfold in the same frame simultaneously — an unprecedented formal innovation
• Renoir plays one of the supporting characters himself — a nervous, bumbling interloper who mirrors the film's attitude toward its own class

French audiences hated it on release and cut it by 15 minutes, calling it too painful. The complete version was reconstructed from fragments in the 1950s. It is now recognized as the most precise and devastating satire of European bourgeois society ever filmed — made six months before the society it depicted was destroyed by war.

Reference:

Wikipedia: The Rules of the Game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_the_Game