Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 113

weeks because of poor attendance. It later was shown at the Aubert-Palace in Paris. Renoir said of the attendance ‘I was utterly dumbfounded when it became apparent that the film, which I wanted to be a pleasant one, rubbed most people the wrong way.’ Renoir initially wanted to screen the film at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, but this idea was abandoned after the disastrous release in France.

Claude Gauteur surveyed reviews of The Rules of the Game published in Paris and said 12 were ‘unqualifiedly unfavorable,’ 13 were ‘favorable with reservations’ and 10 were ‘favorable.’ Many reviews criticized the film for being ‘unpatriotic, frivolous and incomprehensible.’ One mixed review came from Nino Frank of Pour Vous, who called it ‘a copious work, even too much so, very complex and profoundly intelligent from one end to the other.’ Le Figaro called it a ‘bizarre spectacle’ which was ‘one long succession of errors ..... a heavy-handed fantasy with wooly dialogue.’ In the 1943 edition of Histoire du Cinéma, Robert Brasillach wrote that ‘The Rules of the Game’ was among Renoir's most ‘jumbled’ and ‘confused’ films but applauded the biting satire, which he considered ‘Proustian.’ Brasillach also praised the technical variation employed by the director and said the film was an unrealized masterpiece. In the United States, a negative review from Variety said Renoir ‘attempts to