Cast:
Jean Gabin (Lieutenant Maréchal), Marcel Dalio (Lieutenant Rosenthal), Pierre Fresnay (Captain de Boëldieu), Erich von Stroheim (Captain (later Major) von Rauffenstein), Dita Parlo (Elsa), Julien Carette (Cartier), Gaston Modot (Engineer), and Georges Péclet (Officer) Directed by Jean Renoir (#1234 - The River)
Review:
"[La Grande Illusion] is a story about human relationships and I am confident that such a question is so important today that if we don't solve it, we will just have to say 'goodbye' to our beautiful world.”
You know, the label of "auteur" apparently went out first to directors such as Jean Renoir. That is the theory that a director had such a control of their filmmaking in personal style that one could identify a film as made by them alone when it comes to talking about cinema. So yes, folks like Renoir or Hitchcock (depending on what critic is talking about, of course, since it was François Truffaut who called Renoir one of the "la politique des auteurs"). Renoir served in the French cavalry prior to the start of World War I. He took a gunshot to the leg and grew interested in cinema when recovering before eventually serving as a reconnaissance pilot. His father (Pierre-Auguste, a famed Impressionist painter who raised an actor son in Pierre, and a ceramic artist in Claude) suggested he should go into ceramics, but Renoir took inspiration from Erich von Stroheim and became a filmmaker in 1924. The film takes its title from the 1909 book The Great Illusion, as written by Norman Angell that said theorized that a European war wouldn't occur because of the economic cost of war being so great. The film was written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak; it is a French film that due to its interesting circumstances of character setup sees a mix of French, German, and English spoken all throughout the film.
As a film of brotherhood, it was quite popular in its day (despite trouble in finding a producer for years), owing to Renoir's goal of apparently doing a true picture of the men doing the fighting that had been done (in his eyes) by only All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a film for "everyone who believes in Democracy". Renoir finished the decade with La Marseillaise (1938), La Bête Humaine (1938), and The Rules of the Game (1939); the latter was eventually referred to as one of his best films. Fierce bonds between prisoners clearly must have irked Nazi Germany, since the country not only banned the film (with a label of it being "Cinematographic Enemy Number One") but also found time to destroy most (not all) of the prints of the film. Given that the film was made right in the middle of two World Wars, it probably says more about the nature of people than anything, as if it isn't enough to have "class ailments" to go with wars that treat all folks the same in terms of who goes first or not. There may be time for POWs to go in drag and sing "La Marseillaise", but there isn't time for sentiment in war or time to wonder just what the place will be for a "Boëldieu" in a post-war society or if one is snuffed out before that can happen. In that sense, for an anti-war film that shows the plight of one trying to eke out with some sort of humanity remaining that basically says "damn the classes, let's get the hell out of this war".
Gabin has been called one of France's key stars in cinema, and he appeared in a wide range of films of varying directors beyond a handful of collaborations with Renoir. He has an understated charm that seems effortless when it comes to making a pursuit of escape at all costs, and the repertoire with Dalio (playing a rich but generous prisoner, with his Jewish heritage being noted) makes them a worthy pair to follow in solid timing (most tragically, Dalio would later see members of his family perish in concentration camps at the hands of the Germans, who used his face as a "typical Jew" on posters). The film is neither dour nor mired in sentimentality, finding a balance with its seamless sense of cinematography and humane spirit to make a mostly effective pacifist feature. Even the moments spent with Parlo (near the climax, which apparently came to Renoir late in production) make for a fruitful time in saying what needs to be said in the true measure of war from the only key person not playing a soldier. Evidently, von Stroheim and Renoir had an eventful time when it came to making the film together, but the former later said, "I have never found a more sympathetic, understanding and artistic director and friend than Jean Renoir." With certain suggestions made by von Stroheim (such as certain parts of dialogue) mixed in with Renoir's collaborative directing, it makes for a quality performance that doesn't seem constricted with the ratio of screentime to presence. Him and Fresnay represent the last of a potential dying breed when it comes to "needed names in society", and they play it straight to the bone in high-measured honesty, which makes their last scene together all the more poignant. The final sequence (the one after a would-be romance is essentially put on pause) is one best left to looking for oneself to imagine where it could go from there, pragmatic or not. As a whole, you can't go wrong picking this film when looking upon messages about people or war as is the case here, and it is easy to see why this endures as one of Renoir's most distinct films.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
