The audience booed Renoir in 1939. What would they do today?

Watched the "commentary" version and some other supplementary material on the Great Jean Renoir "Rules of the Game" (1939) and though the commentary was adequate, not extraordinary, the more you learn about the film the more you appreciate it: the wonderful composition of shots, the use of long shots with slow moving camera, the depth of focus (many of the interior shots), the brilliant editing of the hunt sequence (only place in move with many short takes - creating a totally different pace and mood). Also commentary discusses the social classes, making clear that Octave and Andre are the two outsiders, and spends a lot of time discussing the balancing of relations among the characters - like an elaborate dance - some of this lost me and didn't interest me much. Most interesting of all was Renoir's own brief intro, in which he said that the film was a horrible failure on premier, with the audience booing - they hated the film for its point of view, which was a savage attack on the French so-called nobility, a society I find rotten to the core, Renoir said - so that should put an end to any thought that he was sympathetic to this social milieu (though he is sympathetic to the characters within this milieu, because he is humane) - today, I fear, an audience would boo because he criticizes the members of the nobility, not because he devastates them.

Rules of the Game: One of the best movies, if not the best movie, ever made

It's been many years since I've seen Jean Renoir's 1939 "The Rules of the Game," and it still holds up as no doubt one of the best movies if not the best movie of all time. This is surprising in a lot of ways, most notably in that you have to hate most of the main characters: French aristocrats who live in idleness and luxury, playing games with one another, cheating on their spouses, behaving recklessly with the feelings and emotions of others, living off the labor of others while contributing little or nothing to the betterment of their world, oblivious of the war that is about to erupt all around them - and yet, and yet - each character is so fully developed in such a short time and space: De Chesney, the pompous count - collector of musical toys (the image of him next to his grandest acquisition is one of the great portrait moments in cinema) who is also a Jew, we learn, and therefore just not quite as secure socially as he seems to be; Octave (a bit overplayed by Renoir) a ruined man at the end, a participant in a crime, friendless, an artistic failure, cut off from those he has tried to love; the countess, desperate for love and alone in a country she does not understand; Lisbeth, the maid with social aspirations; and many others. No film has ever explored class relations with more acuity and wit (The Leopard comes close - but it's really Lampaduso's novel that deserves the credit there) - and none has a higher level of both cinematic and literary excellence: some of the scenes are so extraordinary that they can match Citizen Kane any day: the animals killed in the hunt, twitching to death, showing the cruelty of those who would kill - animals or one another - for sport; the conversation between the count and his mistress, as she leans against a Buddha statue; the gamekeeper, Schumacher, crying his eyes out in the night - just three examples among many, and the dialogue, among all characters - not just the aristocrats but the servants as well - is so smart and insightful and revealing: "iets (regimes) I can accept, but not lunacy (the chef)"; "Me? I don't have an old mother!". It takes a little while to get into this film - as is true of so many great works of art - but by the end you have experienced an entire world.