If the social and historical commentary of The Rules of the Game retains its force today, it is because it embodies a moral message, a vision of man, love, and happiness. Essentially The Rules of the Game is a dazzling variation on the theme of true and false nobility, which is not a matter of blood but of the heart. I find the same message, which was already apparent in Grand Illusion, refined and polished with age in French CanCan, where we learn also that all vulgarity comes from the soul. A ragpicker who knows what she is talking about assures us that Danglard, the proprietor of the “Caf’-Conc’” (cabaret) is “a prince.” Furthermore, is not the French cancan itself a denial of the hierarchy of genres, an example of vulgarity transfigured by art? The lesson of Impressionism which Renoir so beautifully paraphrased here is not only plastic. Toulouse-Lautrec in immortalizing La Goulue or Auguste Renoir offering the figure of his maid for the admiration of posterity proved that there is as much nobility and grace in such humble models as in the Venus de Milo.
The other great lesson which Jean Renoir may owe to his father is an infallible appreciation of the quality of the image, the worship of vision and all else which comes to us through the senses. The entire work of Jean Renoir is an ethic of sensuality; not the affirmation of an anarchic rule of the senses or of an unrestrained hedonism, but the assurance that all beauty, all wisdom, and even all intelligence live only through the testimony of the senses. To understand the world is above all to know how to look at it and to make it abandon itself to your love under the caress of your eye.