In his stinging appraisal of the erotic charades of the French leisure class before World War II, Jean Renoir satirizes the manners and mores of a society near collapse. Banned on its initial release as "too demoralizing" and made available again in its original form only in 1956, The Rules of the Game has come to be regarded as one of the great masterworks of the cinema. Alternating between farce and melodrama, realism and tragedy, the film centers on a lavish country-house party given by a marquis and his wife. The complicated intrigues of the upper-class guests are mirrored by the activities of the servants, a brilliant narrative device that has served as the template for generations of films that examine class structure.