It’s been more than 50 years since Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” was shouted off the screen at its 1939 Paris premiere. “Rules” bombed miserably in first release and again in a re-cut version. But after World War II, the film began to win more and more converts.

“The awful thing about life,” says Octave, a character in “Rules” played by the director himself, “is everyone has their reasons.” By the late 1950s, “The Rules of the Game” regularly sparred with Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” for the top spot in critics’ best-ever polls, and Octave’s quote had become a credo of sorts, defining all of Renoir’s effortlessly honest, ingeniously character-rich films.

Drawing from Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s “A Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro,” “The Rules of the Game” tells the story of a philandering Marquis (Marcel Dalio), his loyal wife (Nora Gregor), and the various romantic temptations that come between them and draw them together. Instead of confining the action to a single day like Beaumarchais, Renoir offers a full weekend, during which the Marquis hosts various guests at his château for a hunting party. Among those present are the Marquis’s spurned mistress, several of his wife’s would-be lovers (including a smitten aviator), the Marquesas’s free-virtued maid, her violently jealous husband, and a poacher whose covetousness goes beyond rabbits and pheasant.

During the course of the weekend, both the guests and the help drink, eat, pair-off, separate, slaughter small game, and entertain each other with amateur theatricals. But as their misbehavior escalates, the difference between love, pain, comedy, and tragedy blur. By the time the credits roll, the coroner is on the way and everyone involved is, if not a little wiser, than surely a little sadder.

In his memoir, “My Life and My Films,” Renoir describes “Rules” as the by-product of binging on French baroque music and musing about “certain of my friends whose amorous intrigues seemed to be their only object in life.” When shooting began on location at a mansion in rural Sologne, France, the film evolved into something richer and darker than a tragicomic bed-hopping rondo.

With France on the eve of war and eventual occupation, Renoir’s casting of Dalio, an actor who made no attempt to hide his Jewish heritage in virulently anti-Semitic pre-war Europe, and Gregor, an exiled anti-Nazi Austrian princess, guaranteed the film would be as much a Rorschach blot for the audience as a slice of entertainment.”Rules” is a portrait of the well-educated, frivolously playful society that Renoir, the eldest son of the successful Impressionist painter Pierre August Renoir, knew well. With Germany rattling sabers just across the border, it was a society that in 1939 was, in the director’s words, “dancing on a volcano.”The impending world war is the unmentioned elephant in every one of the drawing rooms and boudoirs in “Rules.”

Having experimented with various surrealist (1925’s “La Fille de l’eau”), expressionistic (1931’s “La Chienne”), realistic (1935’s “Toni”), and heroic (1937’s “La Grande Illusion”) cinematic conceits, Renoir chose to stage “The Rules of the Game”in wide, deep-focus compositions. Deep backgrounds and languorous camera moves allowed his cast to move freely from slapstick to high drama to song and dance. And with little more than a third of the script completed when the cameras rolled, the actors enjoyed the luxury of finding their characters as much by their own instincts as by their director’s instructions.

Renoir’s masterfully loose approach pays off richly. Relative amateurs like Gregor miraculously hold their own alongside seasoned pros like Dalio, Toutin, and the relentlessly scene-stealing Julien Carette (who does for the Gallic shrug what Curly Howard did for the face-slap) in intricately blocked dialogue scenes that would have sunk less comfortable performers.

The standard issue wisdom on “The Rules of the Game” is that it exposes previously unseen layers and epiphanies with each viewing. To me the digitally restored new print showing at Film Forum showcases Renoir’s remarkable cast. It also highlights a dizzying mid-film montage of the hunting party itself. By his own admission, Renoir hated hunting, declaring it “an abominable exercise in cruelty.” Consequently, the hunting party sequence in “Rules” is an extraordinary exercise in filmmaking. You would have to go to Alfred Hitchcock to find a more disturbing and eloquent example of “pure cinema”— a sequence of shots so ingeniously photographed and symphonically combined that they achieve a level of expression and clarity that doesn’t exist outside of the film medium.

During the last few decades, “Rules” has been kept alive mostly through scratchy, contrastless prints. For younger film aesthetes forced to watch it in migraine-inducing 16mm public-domain-o-vision or, worse, VHS tape, Renoir’s film loses much of the pull it has exerted on filmmakers from Robert Altman (“‘The Rules of the Game’ taught me the rules of the game”) to Woody Allen. The Internet Movie Database, the voting voice of Generations X through Z film-geekdom, doesn’t even list “Rules” in its top 250 films (“The Shawshank Redemption” is no. 2). To hear many young film enthusiasts talk, watching “The Rules of the Game” ranks slightly below the films of D.W. Griffith on the “just eat it, it’s good for you” film history menu.

Film Forum’s new print of “Rules” is the fullest version known and has been pieced together from a negative source many generations closer to the one that made its debut in February 1939, only to be banned that October by the Vichy government, which considered it a demoralizing portrait of French society. It has been digitally buffed to a high gloss using the same technology that recently resurrected Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The result is striking. The fog of dupe prints, negative damage, and crackling soundtrack that used to be an inevitable downside to enjoying “Rules” has at long last lifted.

“List making,” Paul Schrader once wrote, “is the junk food of criticism.” Hopefully this immaculate new revival of Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” (and the DVD issue that this theatrical run heralds) will give this marvelously rich cinematic confection a much-needed boost back onto the required viewing lists of contemporary film-goers and filmmakers.

Through November 16 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).