Aside from the occasional anonymous and fragrant bouquet of vituperation, one of the unexpected gifts for film critics is the opportunity to watch, as if for the first time, some reissued, often re-edited and remastered, classic of the past. Along with some decided mediocrities like "The Glenn Miller Story," those "new" releases of the last several years include such important titles as "Citizen Kane," "Touch of Evil" (the director's cut), "Vertigo," and "Rear Window"; now another film joins that distinguished list, Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" (1939), widely acclaimed as a masterpiece of the cinema, directed by one of the significant directors of his nation and era.

Initially heavily edited, apparently for its perceived satirical attack on French society, and more or less reconstructed after World War II, the picture deals with the behavior of a gang of aristocrats on a country house weekend. In the sort of setting favored in vintage British detective fiction, the upper-class folk drink, dine, shoot a quantity rabbits and pheasants, and perform in those dreary amateur theatrics that apparently constitute a favorite entertainment of the rich and privileged. More important, they indulge in a series of flirtations that involve many changes of partner, a sort of antiseptically sexual musical chairs that at times borders on farce; and of course, since it's a European film of a certain vintage, they talk and talk and talk.

Although the film deals with a large cast of characters, most of the action revolves around the hosts of the weekend, the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio) and his wife, Christine (Nora Gregor). Among other guests, the couple invite their recently discarded lovers, an aviator named Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who still loves Christine, and Robert's somewhat less committed mistress, Genevieve (Mila Parely). Several other men pursue the women, while a number of other dalliances interrupt the various connections, which turns the romantic games into a complicated and sometimes silly round of sexual entanglements.

Throughout the film the director employs numerous scenes of the couplings and uncouplings of the aristocrats, while below stairs, the servants mimic some of the activities of the upper class. Christine's maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) helps link the servants and the masters by attracting the attentions of men from both groups; her character, in fact, not only unites the two major groups but also inadvertently precipitates a final catastrophe that underlines something of the futility and emptiness of the picture's society.

The title refers to the sexual games that engage the characters as well as the tacit assumptions of their privileged social class, which provide both reason and excuse for all the behavior, silly and serious, that defines that class. The whole crowd, for example, slaughters rabbits and birds according to their so-called sporting rules - a dozen or more beaters drive the animals toward the hunters, who bang away at them in the approved aristocratic manner. When the movie's complicated interactions end in disaster, the Marquis calmly explains away any problems by asserting the presence of other sorts of rules, the means by which his society protects and maintains its position and power.

The director touches on a number of subjects and themes beneath the frequent silliness of his characters' conversations and behaviors, some of them highly relevant for his time, others perhaps more subtle and understated than necessary. On the brink of the German attack and occupation, for example, he reveals the servants' casual anti-Semitism (the Marquis is a Jew), and underlines the fact that Christine is Austrian and the most negative character is Alsatian. At the same time, his handling of such matters as the amateur theatrics seems both clumsy and contrived, a kind of vague symbolism without signification.

Finally, despite the virtually universal praise that surrounds the film, in our time it seems dull and talky, full of empty repetition, and populated by mostly insipid and superficial characters. The director blatantly underlines most of the intellectual and emotional content in some crude and obvious explication, so that the characters ultimately must tell us all what the movie is about. Today, unfortunately, "The Rules of the Game" seems much less an achievement than the masterpiece it may have been back in 1939.

"La Règle du Jeu" ("The Rules of the Game"), directed by Jean Renoir, is now playing at Little Theatres.