Grand Illusion

Unfailingly, this movie by Jean Renoir (son of painter Auguste) earns near-top billing in every cinephile’s list of the greatest films of all time. Called “cinema enemy number one” by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels yet named by cinema maven Orson Welles as the first work he would rescue, if forced, for posterity, Grand Illusion can be all things to all people. That’s the beauty, not the folly, of this deeply anti-war movie – and the films of Jean Renoir in general. Renoir always makes you understand that everyone has reasons for behaving as they do. Everyone. Yet Renoir’s films transcend mere sociology: They’re astute and observational but hardly analytic and antiseptic. Renoir is the great humanist of the cinema, the one who shows the vast array of perspectives and the validity of individual points of view. As a result, we see in Renoir’s films how the variables of class, sex, nationality, religion, and disposition all contribute to the vagaries of who we are and how we see things. Set in a WWI POW camp, La Grande Illusion reveals the differences and similarities among the prisoners of various nationalities and their German captors. The director Erich von Stroheim plays the camp commander as a stiff Prussian aristocrat in a neck brace, an image that has become iconographic over the years. The seeds of many other movies can also be seen in Grand Illusion – The Great Escape and Stalag 17 obviously – but also such things as Casablanca and Black Mama, White Mama And in the virile good looks of Jean Gabin, we can see shades of Steve McQueen, “the Cooler King of The Great Escape. Although the film dates itself in some ways, by the latter half the film hits its real stride. This new print was struck from the original negative, which was secured for safekeeping behind enemy lines until well after the end of the war. Grand Illusion has never looked this lustrous. (In French, with new English subtitles.)