La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). 1939. France. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Camille François, Carl Koch, Jean Renoir. With Julien Carette, Henri Cartier-Bresson, M. Corteggiani. In French; English subtitles. DCP of 4K restoration courtesy Janus Films. 107 min.
Run by Martin Lewis from 1938 until his death in 1955, and then by his widow Ursula Lewis until 1973, the Thalia on the Upper West Side started as an art house theater specializing in new international films, and then switched its focus to revivals, becoming a repertory theater known for eclectic double features. Its signature programs were its long-running festivals and retrospectives, such as the successful London and Paris Film Parade and The Charles Boyer Revival Month, both in 1939. The latter was the city’s first retrospective devoted to an individual star. Its most popular event was the annual Summer Film Festival, which ran every June to October from 1942 to 1973. The writer Lillian Ross told the New York Times “[William] Shawn and I would always haunt the Thalia. Every time we’d have dinner and look at the list of movies, we’d always end up at the Thalia. We went there repeatedly to see Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. We must have seen it there about fifteen times.” Portraying a set of interlocking love triangles and upstairs-downstairs class conflicts during a weekend party at a French country estate just before the outbreak of war, The Rules of the Game is a magnificently directed tragicomic ensemble film that captures a complacent aristocratic society in its waning days.