The Criterion Collection exceeds even its own high standards with a wealth of bonus features for Jean Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. On its own, disc 1 would be enough to satisfy film scholars and cinephiles, with an archival introduction to the film by Renoir himself (he was clearly pleased by the film's eventual acceptance and recognition), and for the feature-length audio commentary, director Peter Bogdanovich does an admirably lucid job of reading from Alexander Sesonske's hard-to-find book Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, a model of scholarly clarity and astute observation that is also excerpted in the accompanying 24-page booklet. A comparison of the different endings of the film--the earlier truncated version and 1959 restoration--reveals how a harsher indictment of the haute bourgeoisie ran counter to the more balanced and compelling perspective that Renoir had intended, and this is further supported by an illustrated study of Renoir's own copy shooting script, complete with deletions, margin notes, and revised dialogue.
