Via GreenCine Daily, there's an encouraging piece in the Los Angeles Times about the upcoming L.A. screening of a remastered print for Jean Renoir's 1939 classic Rules of the Game. One of the greatest films ever made - and a harbinger of the talky ensemble comedies from Altman, etc. - the film has never really been projected the way it originally made its debut during WWII. Starting this weekend, though, the Criterion-ready remaster (which is also available on DVD) will screen at L.A.'s Nuart Theatre. More, from reporter Kevin Thomas:

Because the film's negative was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid, Gaborit and Maréchal labored three years to incorporate the trimmed footage, found untouched in a warehouse, with the best portions of the few copies of the soon-banned film that survived the war. They managed to reconstitute the film with less than a minute missing. Only now has it become possible to see "Rules of the Game" as it looked upon its July 7, 1939, Paris debut. That's because Criterion Films has undertaken a complete digital restoration of a fine-grain master print located in Paris after a painstaking search.