‘Rules of the Game’ to screen on Aug. 16

A cinematic comedy of manners about the social butterflies of a bourgeois, wine-soaked country town – and it’s not set in Sonoma?!

No, it’s “The Rules of the Game,” the classic 1939 French film set at the cusp of World War II and it’s showing Wednesday, Aug. 16 at the Harvest Moon Café.

The film, directed by legendary filmmaker Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut dandy acquaintances.

Among other things, the film is famous for the oft-quoted line, “Everybody had their reasons.”

According to Criterion.com, the film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. That 110-minute version, which has stunned viewers for decades, will be shown as part of the Harvest Moon Café’s Wednesday Night Movies summer series in which guests are invited, according to the café’s website, to “dine and enjoy the backdrop of classic movies in our patio.”

None other than director Orson Welles, himself, said of Renoir: “(His) breath of range, this amplitude of spirit must necessarily, at some point, confound every critic.”

Harvest Moon is located at 487 First St. W. Call 933-8160.