La Grande illusion (1937)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

It was whilst he was working on Toni (1934), his first serious brush with the problems of the ordinary working classes, that Jean Renoir conceived La Grande Illusion, the film that was destined to become one of the director's most important and best-known works. The wartime reminiscences of a former comrade-in-arms, together with his own experiences as an aviator during the First World War, provided Renoir with the starting point for a script, which he developed with screenwriter Charles Spaak as they worked together on Les Bas-fonds (1936).

Renoir came tantalisingly close to never making the film, as he expressed a far keener interest in Spaak's script for La Belle équipe (a film which appeared to have been born out of the public euphoria for the Popular Front but which ended up being chillingly prescient of the movement's demise).   Renoir even went as far as to ask Spaak to sell La Grande illusion to rival director Julien Duvivier.  Duvivier was unimpressed with Renoir's dull prisoner-of-war tale but warmed immediately to La Belle équipe.  Once he had made up his mind to direct La Grande illusion, Renoir then had enormous difficulty finding a backer.  Only after Jean Gabin (the star of Les Bas-fonds) had agreed to appear in the film was the director able to persuade producer Raymond Blondy to finance it.  It was largely a matter of luck that Renoir was able to make the film on which his future reputation would, to a large extent, rest and which many now regard as one of the unassailable monuments of cinema.

The apparent ease with which Renoir was willing to give up La Grande illusion to another director now appears scarcely believable.  Surely there is no other film in which Renoir appears to be so thoroughly involved, in which he reveals his political and humanist concerns with such warmth, sincerity and lucidity.  It is the film in which his personal stamp is most recognisable - his faith in the intrinsic decency of the common man, his contempt for class divisions, his abhorrence for war.  (Gabin even wears the very uniform which Renoir wore when he was serving as an aviator during WWI.)  All that needs to be known about Jean Renoir can be gleaned from this one film; everything else is mere repetition and elaboration, padding and window-dressing.

If Renoir's political views were unequivocally leftwing, his views on war were surprisingly ambivalent.  He publicly stated that he was a committed pacifist and yet he also acknowledged that he found Hitler thoroughly repugnant, hinting that war between France and Nazi Germany may prove to be the lesser of two evils.  This ambivalence is apparent throughout La Grande illusion.  Whilst the film is widely (and correctly) interpreted as an anti-war film, one that powerfully, and yet subtly, argues the futility of military conflict, it had another purpose, which was to encourage unity in the French people at a time of national crisis.  If war was imminent and unavoidable, it was best that France entered the fray as a nation united by common ideals, not divided by such trivial concerns as race and class.   It was a message that seemed to go down well.  When it was first released in France, in June 1937, La Grande illusion was an immense critical and commercial success.  This encouraged Renoir to repeat the message, somewhat more stridently, in his one great historical epic, La Marseillaise (1938), but on that occasion the call to arms came too late and met with little enthusiasm.  After the collapse of the Popular Front government, France was as divided as it had ever been; the threat posed by Fascism had grown, and the reality of an impending war with Germany had sapped the resolve of the French nation.  It was at this point that the reputation of La Grande illusion began to suffer, to the point that it came close to being erased from history.

Even before the war started, La Grande illusion found its detractors.  Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda, saw the film as highly dangerous, not only because it featured a sympathetic Jew, but it also portrayed German soldiers in a way that was (to his way of thinking) highly unflattering.   It was Goebbels who put pressure on Mussolini to prevent the film from winning an official prize at the 1937 Venice Biennale (something which prompted the festival jury to create their own special prize for the film) and it was Goebbels who dubbed the film Cinematographic Enemy Number One.   However, his superior, Hermann Goering (the head of the Luftwaffe) approved of the film and it was allowed to be distributed in Germany, minus a few scenes involving the troublesome Jew.  In Italy, the film was banned outright, as it was in Belgium (at the instigation of the socialist minister Paul-Henri Spaak - yes, the brother of the man who scripted the film), prompting a rare anti-Belgian tirade from Churchill.  On the other side of the Atlantic, the reaction was more positive.  President Roosevelt feted it as a film that "all democrats should see" and it was the first foreign language film ever to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Picture category, at the 1939 Academy Awards ceremony.

As hostilities commenced in 1939, the French government appeared to be more preoccupied with outlawing potentially demoralising films than in actually winning the war against Germany.  La Grande illusion was one of the casualties, banned in 1940 for its unwholesome depictions of fraternisation with the enemy.  The ban stayed in force when France came under Nazi control and, under Goebbels' edict, all known prints of the film were seized and shipped to Germany for destruction (fortunately, not all prints were burned - a complete print of the film was recovered in Munch in 1945).  After the Liberation, the critics hastily revised their opinion of the film and now dismissed it as anti-Semitic (previously it had been pro-Semitic) and an invitation to the kind of collaborationist activity which had infected the Vichy regime and made France complicit in Hitler's war crimes.  It was not until the mid-1950s that the film came to be regarded as one of the great masterpieces of French cinema, through favourable write-ups by such influential critics as François Truffaut.   The original negative of the film was thought to have been lost until it was rediscovered (unlabelled) in the Toulouse Cinémathèque in the early 1990s, having found its way there from the Berlin Reichsfilmarchiv vaults some time in the 1960s.  Prints struck from this negative in the 1990s were found to be of exceptional quality, adding further lustre to a film which, by this time, had come to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

One of the most perplexing things about La Grande illusion is its title.  It is believed this derived from the book The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, a British economist, writer and future Nobel Peace Prize winner.  First published in Britain in 1909, this book argues that war is futile because it is against the common economic interests of the countries involved.  What exactly is the illusion that Renoir is alluding to?  Could it be the misguided belief (which many people had in 1914) that the war would be short and comparatively painless?   Could it be the belief that war is an inevitable fact of life, the only way that nations can resolve their differences (short of creating something as monstrous as the Eurovision Song Contest)?  The most likely explanation is that it refers to that miracle of self-delusion that the Great War would be "The War to End All Wars".  By choosing the title he did (and dispensing with the less portentous original title Les Evasions du Capitaine Maréchal), Renoir may simply have been expressing his view that another major European war was unavoidable.  There will always be one more war...

La Grande illusion certainly has an effective antiwar subtext, but this is perhaps muted by Renoir's even bigger concern, his preoccupation with class boundaries in society. The film's central irony is that class is a more powerful segregator of human beings than race or nationality.  It is easier for soldiers from a working class milieu to understand one another, whether they speak the same language or not, than for soldiers from different social strata who have the same mother tongue.  Examples of cross-nationality fraternity abound in the film - from a simple scene in which a German guard gives his French prisoner his mouth organ, to the exquisitely moving final segment in which the main character Maréchal forms a strong emotional bond with a lonely German widow.  By contrast, the aristocratic Capitaine de Boeldieu finds it impossible to establish any kind of rapport with his officers from more humble backgrounds, but has no difficulty hitting it off with his German counterpart Capitaine von Rauffenstein (to the point that their relationship resembles a parody of a love story). 

As he would do in his later La Règle du jeu (1939), an even more virulent assault on the French class system, Renoir reviles class distinction but appears to accept it as an inevitable consequence of the social order we have inherited.  The class system persists, but that does not mean it is a static phenomenon.  As Von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu are forced to concede, the one good thing about the Great War was that it allowed an honourable way out for the vestigial aristocracies of France and Germany.  They had become irrelevant; the world no longer had any need of them.  They must yield their place to the new aristocrats, the capitalist kings represented here by the nouveau riche Rosenthal.

Boeldieu is arguably the film's most interesting and ambiguous character.  Whilst he epitomises the class system which Renoir obviously rails against, he does not allow his class superiority to override his sense of duty.  Even though he seems to be looking down into a filthy pigsty whenever he addresses his comrades, Boeldieu is willing to surrender his life to give them a chance of escape.  In doing so, he knows that he must betray his own class, to the chagrin of Von Rauffenstein who has come to regard him as a brother.   Von Rauffenstein must in turn abandon his class ties and perform his duty, which is to shoot Boeldieu as he tries to escape.  The dispassionate way in which both Boeldieu and Von Rauffenstein disregard their common bond in the execution of their duty emphasises their lack of humanity and confers on both of them a kind of Fascist subservience to authority.  This makes a striking contrast with the human warmth and kinship that we see among the lower orders, the riffraff who simply want to get the war over as quickly as possible so that they can return to a normal life.  

With its cold realism and authentic portrayal of life in prisoner-of-war camps, La Grande illusion has far more in common with Renoir's early neo-realist endeavours than the more romantic films he made after WWII (which were heavily coloured by his experience in Hollywood, for better or for worse).  Significantly, the film lacks the stylistic experimentation of Renoir's previous films and is less visually striking than most of his films of the 1930s.  The film's reputation owes more to the nuanced screenwriting and the contributions from a superlative cast.  Jean Gabin is as perfect in the role of the proletarian officer Maréchal as Pierre Fresnay is as his blue-blooded superior Boeldieu - the former exudes a down-to-earth charm that makes him instantly likeable, the latter an icy aloofness that makes it hard for an audience to sympathise with him.  Their portrayals feed on our own class prejudices and make us aware that judging a man by his class alone is among the most foolish of conceits.

Erich von Stroheim is equally superb as Von Rauffenstein, and brings a subtle poignancy to a character that, on paper, has little to commend it.   (Renoir was so delighted when Von Stroheim - one of the legendary filmmakers of the silent era - agreed to appear in the film that he made substantial last-minute changes to the script to make his character one of the most important in the film.)  Von Stroheim's imposing physique gives him an unmistakable aura of Nazi superiority, but by the subtlest of means the actor reveals his character's troubled inner world, which is disfigured by a hopeless sense of failure and disillusionment.  Similarly, Dalio and Carette bring depth and complexity to their characters (the former giving what is probably the most convincing portrayal of a Jew in cinema up until this point), whilst Dita Parlo comes close to stealing the film in its heartrending final segment.  As duty intervenes once more to separate a man and a woman who are so obviously right for one another, as two soldiers trudge through a barren snowy landscape towards an uncertain future, we are again reminded of the human cost of war, a war that must be fought because it is easier to swallow the politicians' lies and die as heroes than to live in peace with our fellow man - that is surely the greatest illusion...

Film Synopsis

1916.  During World War I, two French aviators, Lieutenant Maréchal and Capitaine de Boeldieu, are shot down by German artillery whilst on a reconnaissance mission.  They are taken to a prisoner of war camp where they strike up a friendship with Lieutenant Rosenthal, a wealthy Jew who shares lavish food parcels sent by his family with his fellow prisoners.  The three men help to dig a tunnel by which they hope to escape from their prison, but they are transferred to another camp before they can finish the task.  After several further unsuccessful escape attempts, the three men are re-united at a remote German fortress which now serves as a high security prison.  The prison is overseen by a German aristocrat, Capitaine von Rauffenstein, who has been invalided out of the war.  Von Rauffenstein fraternises with de Boeldieu, since they share a common social background.  Although the fortress has a reputation for being escape-proof, Maréchal and Rosenthal are determined to escape...