In his stinging appraisal of the erotic charades of the French leisure class before World War II, Renoir satirizes the manners and mores of a society near collapse.  Alternating between farce and melodrama, realism and tragedy, the film centers on a lavish country-house party given by a marquis and his wife, where the complicated intrigues of the upper-class guests are mirrored by the activities of the servants.  Banned on its initial release as "too demoralizing,"The Rules of the Game has come to be regarded as one of the great masterworks of the cinema.