Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game

Abstract

There were all those problems, wars, the Depression, the Stock Market. In my films, I tried, for an hour or two, to make people forget them; thus Busby Berkeley on the purpose of his art. It was, for most of the people concerned with producing them, the motivating philosophy of American films. Particularly in the days of the big Hollywood studios, fantasy was all. These studios were avowedly and proudly the industry, and it was difficult for those running them to believe that people would find much entertainment (or the studios much financial profit) in films depicting the dreary reality of Depression-ridden America. In fact, the general Hollywood consensus was that it was to escape precisely that reality that people went to movies in the first place. The brightness and glamour of American films and their stars were consciously meant to counterpoint the drab material tone of American life in these years; with a few notable exceptions they were an expression of hope rather than a reflection of reality. It is not surprising that the one film genre spawned by the Depression was one which rejected consistency and consequences, the screwball comedy, so called because it was based on caprice and the possibility of sudden, inexplicable changes in fate and fortune. What is probably the most famous Depression comedy, My Man Godfrey, denied the reality of the Depression; for Godfrey, the bum who becomes a butler but is in fact all the time a wealthy man, the Depression is a sham, and in the end he shows it to be a sham for everyone else in the film by bailing his employers out of impending bankruptcy and by turning the shanty town where he had lived into a posh night club employing its formerly outof-work inhabitants. Nor is it surprising that Hollywood's most im-