106. Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion) (1937)

Directed by Jean Renoir

Synopsis

Two Frenchmen get shot down over Germany during WWI, and they are sent to a prison camp for officers. They are transfered from that camp and end up after several escape attempts at a maximum security camp.

Review

This is a truly great film, it starts out very much like The Great Escape, and this film was certainly an inspiration for the WWII prisioners of war which inspired the making of that film. The similarities are too great in the digging of the tunnel, hiding the earth during exercise etc. for it to be mere coincidence. It goes on to explore issues of society, nationhood, race and the uselessness of war like never before.

The only film that can be compared to this before it is 1930's All Quiet On The Western Front. The messages are similar, however there is not a single battle in La Grande Illusion. The whole film is carried on the shoulders of the four main characters, a French and a German aristocrat, a mechanic and a nouveau riche Jew from Paris. The dicothomy is not a racial or national one here, the dicothomy is a social one, between the aristocrats and the rest. This is quite a tremendous statement for 1937 when Hitler was the big cheese and so was Mussolini, Franco and Salazar in Portugal. The next-to-last dialogue in the film when the two commoner characters can't tell where Switzerland is because there is nothing marking the borders because nature doesn't give a shit about nations encapsulates the whole meaning of the film in a short dialogue.

The two gems of the film are not the commoner characters, however, but the two aristocrats. The great director Erich Von Stroheim is particularly amazing as the German Von Rauffenstein and it's great to see him working as an actor in a non-silent film, bringing all his amazing presence to screen again. Actually Stroheim's cinema during the silent era with it natural performances is a great paralell to the natural performances of the whole cast here, and this is a particularly French trait in cinema, characters look fully rounded because they talk and act like real people, as if they had just walked into your living room. Stroheim left the US becuase he could not get funding for any new films, but in France he got the recognition and work he deserved, at least as an actor.

It took me a long time to understand why French cinema was and is so highly regarded, with the mass marketing of Hollywood we lose sight of a tremendous school of acting and screenwriting which is fresh, exciting and real. I am in love with French cinema, I think there has not been a bad or mediocre French film in the list up until now, and I hope this trend continues. Get this great film at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:


* Jean Renoir was an aviator for the French Army during World War I, actor Jean Gabin (as Maréchal) wears Renoir's uniform in the film.


* According to Renoir's memoirs, Erich von Stroheim, despite being born in Vienna, Austria (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire) did not speak much German, and struggled learning the language along with his lines in between filming scenes.


* Orson Welles once said, "If I had to save only one film in the world, it would be Grand Illusion."


* As the first movie depicting an escape from a prisoner of war camp, scenes in Grand Illusion have influenced other films in the genre, especially influencing the scenes of the digging of an escape tunnel in The Great Escape (1963). Because the tunnel scenes depicted in "The Great Escape" were based upon the actual events that took place in a German prisoner of war camp for captured Allied airmen (and based upon the book by British flier Paul Brickhill), it is possible that the tunnel scenes from "Grand Illusion" inspired the prisoners to plan and dig a tunnel using many of the same methods depicted in "Grand Illusion."


* Likewise, the scene of the French prisoners singing La Marseillaise—the French National Anthem—to enrage their German prison guards, inspired a similar show of patriotic resistance in the film Casablanca (1942).


* An early script version had Rosenthal and Maréchal agreeing to meet in a restaurant at the end of the war. In the movie's final scene everyone there would be celebrating the armistice...but instead of these men there would be two empty chairs at a table.


* The title of the film (in French La Grande illusion) comes from an essay called "The Great Illusion" by British economist Norman Angell, who argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of different nations. The title of Renoir's film is really more accurately translated to "The Great Illusion".

* The Wintersborn part of the movie was shot at Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg in Alsace.

One of the best scenes in the film, yes they start out speaking in English, the aristocrats keep changing from English to French to German depending on their mood, sorry for the lack of subtitles: