The Rules of the Game is the longest film I’ve ever seen. Not in duration, but in the dimensions of the spaces it depicts. Shot after deep-focus shot shows us figures rushing, fussing, and scurrying thirty feet in the distance—figures who matter just as much as those in the foreground, and who may, at any moment, make an impact just as great. And those tracking shots—director Jean Renoir following his actors as they traverse lengthy hallways in a fabulous mansion, other men and women appearing and disappearing through doorways and around corners all along the way—they’re remarkable.
We get a sense of a place, or time, that could go on forever. And of the immensity of the place itself; and of the puniness, by contrast, of the people who occupy it. The Rules of the Game is a comedy, but a mean one: zeroing in on a collection of men and women too rich, too idle, and too complacent to realize how little meaning their lives have, and suggesting, not so subtly, that the problem doesn’t begin and end with them.
This post is part of Classic Movies’ Mary Pickford Blogathon, which is rolling right now.
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It’s important to know, before you slip a copy of this movie into your DVD player, or even read this post, that The Little American was directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Knowing this makes The Little American a more fulfilling viewing experience. It explains things.
DeMille’s sort of a controversial figure in film history. He’s remembered as a director who put the public’s appetites ahead of its need for art—giving them what they wanted in the form of splashy, often hugely expensive films that were thin on insight. He directed a silent film about Joan of Arc (no, not that one); he made two versions of The Ten Commandments and the humbly titled Greatest Show on Earth (considered by some to be the weakest-ever Best Picture winner, though it’s not even close). When he died in 1959, DeMille was planning a movie about space travel.
I wish he’d lived to make that one. It would have told us nothing about space, but an awful lot about what people hoped to find there.
DeMille had a gift for recognizing the public’s desires and delivering a product that met them. Yet The Little American seems not to be an example of this. It seems, instead, an attempt to change the public’s collective mind—a tool designed to steel Americans’ resolve for a bloody conflict their country had just joined.
