Robert B. Ray. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Harvard UP, 1995.
---. How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries of Cultural Studies. Indiana UP, 2001.
Rules of the Game. Dir. by Jean Renoir. 1939.
Yellow Submarine. Dir. by George Dunning. With the Beatles. 1968.
The Matrix. Dir. by The Wachowski Brothers. 1999.
For a long time I used to go to the movies early. Sometimes, on my way to the Music Box Theater in Chicago on a Sunday to see one of their 11:30 matinees, I wouldn't yet feel quite awake. And I wouldn't fight the feeling; I just wanted to drift into that morning's movie and be swept along.
This week it was Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (or La Règle du jeu, if you want to be official about it). The Music Box is a wonderfully restored, old ornate movie theater, with a marquee visible for blocks. I was surprised to see a line stretching out the door, mostly of children, under that marquee, but I then remembered that the other show that morning would be Yellow Submarine. I briefly thought about seeing that instead, just to see the kids' reactions, but I stuck to my old black and white film instead.
Rules of the Game is one of the few classics that I hadn't seen to death already, so I wasn't sure what I'd take from it this time. I first saw it in a film class through the lens of "class critique," and also as a dark foreshadowing of the coming war. Later I came across comments that emphasized Renoir's humanistic vision, focusing of course on the line he speaks himself in his role as Octave: "Everyone has their reasons." Even later I'd read more about André Bazin's ideas about deep focus photography and Renoir's wonderful use of space.
Yet it was another scene, just a shot really, that struck me more as I sat there in the Music Box. The bulk of the film takes place in the grand ornate chateau of the Marquis de La Chesnaye, played by Marcel Dalio (a wonderful actor who most people only know--you must remember this--as the croupier from Casablanca). La Chesnaye has been shown throughout the film tinkering with music boxes and other amusing little mechanical devices. At the end of the skits and songs the characters present for an evening's amusement (including the delightful yet foreboding Danse Macabre by guests dressed as skeletons), La Chesnaye presents his final "act." The curtains are opened a last time to reveal the latest acquisition to his collection, a huge calliope-like music machine known as a limonaire, a device which often provided entertainment at village fairs. When La Chesnaye turns it on, Renoir slowly tracks across its front, with brief pauses to reveal, each in turn, little carved clowns and decorative characters who dutifully hop into motion and play their required parts on bells and cymbals with the rest of the music.
Then came the shot that grabbed me. At the end of that shot, we see La Chesnaye, looking both back to machine and out to the audience, his face a kaleidoscope of expressions. This variety of looks flows across Marcel Dalio's face with a remarkable fluidity, making it hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. He seems to show almost simultaneously his entrancement by the music, his hope that his audience shares his joy, his pride in his acquisition, and his awareness of how silly it might seem that all this has such an effect upon him, that it can even hold such importance.
My point must seem obvious, and maybe like La Chesnaye I'm a bit embarrassed that I get some joy out of it: the glow and smile on Dalio's face is like ours at the movies when we discover ourselves unexpectedly charmed by an image. And yet, the glow is the director Renoir's as well. The line he speaks as Octave (that "Everyone has their reasons") has always held a certain privileged position as a glimpse of the auteur's intention, but surely this scene reveals Renoir just as much. His film itself works like such a well-timed machine, with entrances, conflicts and exits all dovetailing and complementing each other with amazing precision. It's as if Renoir had prefigured Orson Welles' statement, that here was "the greatest train set [or music box] a boy could have."1
Of course, this is not to cancel out other approaches to the film. One could take a much darker view of La Chesnaye's limonaire as an emblem of the mechanistic "rules," the ones that can grind you up, as they do the aviator Jureau. Or it could be seen as evidence of a bloated aristocracy that takes such an object designed for public amusement and squirrels it away for private privilege.
But there's little way to preserve the image of Dalio's delight in these readings. And even Bazin himself noted the unusally expressive nature of Dalio's close-up in this scene, in a passage in his book on Renoir I read years later as I started writing this article. But even furthermore, don't all of these approaches distract us from a simple fact: how did La Chesnaye get that magnificent device onto the stage where previously there had been performers? Who silently put it into place? Is that the real miracle, the real slight of hand that delights?
Next page: Robert Ray's Revival of Photogénie
