1937 ‘La Grande Illusion’ Directed by Jean Renoir
A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.
Jean Gabin Pierre Fresnay Erich von Stroheim Marcel Dalio Dita Parlo Julien Carette Gaston Modot Georges Péclet Werner Florian Jean Dasté Sylvain Itkine Jacques Becker Habib Benglia Pierre Blondy Albert Brouett Roger Forster Georges Fronval Karl Heil Carl Koch Little Peters Claude Sainval Michel Salina Claude Vernier
A Grande Ilusão, Die große Illusion, La grande illusione, Вeликая иллюзия, Marea iluzie, La gran ilusión, Veľká ilúzia, Η μεγάλη χίμαιρα, Velika iluzija, De groote illusie, A nagy ábránd, Towarzysze broni, Velika opsena, Den store illusjon, Den store illusion, Velká iluze, De grote illusie, Великата илюзия, Suuri illusioni, Den stora illusionen, La grande illusion, Η Μεγάλη Ψευδαίσθηση, 위대한 환상, The Grand Illusion, Les Aventures du lieutenant Maréchal, L’évasion de Pinsard
The African-French soldier shows them his pictures, and they turn him away. They just ignore him, and in that simple moment, Renoir's film transcends from a simple morality tale, rises above its themes and critiques of politics. It almost silently reveals its awareness of the depth of humanity's flaws as even the heroes in this melodramatic war story can't be the paragons of acceptance or fellowship that Renoir clearly believes humans can be. He spells it out a bit later, showing the parallels between the French and German aristocrats, the antisemitism and classism of the German officer, the antisemitism of the French officers, and so on and so forth. Bonds form between the prisoners, bonds that ultimately prove a salvation of sorts for them, but in a single moment he says that we have a long, long way to go.
December count: 80/100
Film #20 of Project 30
”Boldieu, I don't know who will win this war, but whatever the outcome, it will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.” - Capt. von Rauffenstein
Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion is a compassionate and incredibly affective portrait of men who spend the best years of their lives in war, men who are not just trying to survive but they also try to keep their moral and ethical values and principles despite all the outside pressures, it’s a war movie but there’s not any battle scenes in it, it happens in a POW camp but it’s not a typical prison movie, in fact it is unlike any other war movie, instead of being…
The Ultimate Criterion Challenge: (Re)Watching Every Film by Spine Number
Barbarity and annihilation are the two key features that are never lost in the anti-war genre, as it completely highlights the futility of the war itself; that both sides obliterate each other to death until one side gives up and all that’s left is the aftermath of a tragedy. These films expose and often criticize humanity’s biggest and deadliest conflicts, either by showing it upfront, like Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, or satirizing it up, like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. While execution and delivery differs, the core message of these films stays the same: to depict the inhumanity of war.
Director Jean Renoir attacked the genre in an intricately…
Frontiers are an invention of men.
-Lieutenant Rosenthal
While some films have incredibly interesting stories in regards to it's pre-prodcution and production, Jean Renoir's first huge financial and critical success, La Grande Illusion, took on a life of it's own after it's release and it's lasted over 75 years. It's no exaggeration, film historians to this day disagree on some of the film's most famous underlying themes with some seeing the film as pro-socialist and anti-semitic while others see it as anti-war and pro-democratic.
Whether it's the fact that the film's public perception changed drastically by some a mere two years after it's realease when World War II broke out forcing cuts to be made in the film so the…
orson welles said this is 1 of 2 movies he would take with him "on the ark" but the guy also never saw ratatouille?
With its overarching message wholeheartedly worn on its sleeve, La Grande Illusion is a classic war film from Jean Renoir which exemplifies the belief that justification for war is invariably dubious, and that its rationale can be manipulated to achieve absolutely anything. Renoir additionally unearths the background, which concerns the lives of French prisoners during the first world war, as an investigation into the essence of social class and human connections.
The senselessness of war is well demonstrated, and there's a remarkable scene where a German widow reflects on photographs of her deceased family as she commemorates the ”victorious” battles in which they perished. Kindness, tolerance and understanding are at the heart of the narrative, and the displays of these principle traits perpetually raising beyond the perceived boundaries of nationality and social order, throughout trials and tribulations, are impressively demonstrated.
76/100
Thought I loved this but turns out I just strongly admire it. In a way, it's too humanistic for its own good—I've been sitting here for a while trying to convince myself that Renoir intended the title as an indictment of his own utopian vision, but that interpretation is too bonkers even for me. While class trumping nationalism makes for a provocative thesis, I feel like I know too much about war and dehumanization to believe that it's ever been so civilized in practice; even when Von Stroheim's sneering at non-aristocratic names like Maréchal and (egad) Rosenthal, he sounds far more respectful than [extremely contemporary political reference elided; you're welcome]. Renoir's genius is that he makes you want to…
Any film Goebbels cited as ‘Cinematic Public Enemy Number One’ is something to be proud of. Perhaps my hopes were a little too high going in though, the horrific elements of war seeming all too peripheral in this highly revered classic. For 1937, Grand Illusion stepped into uncharted territory like no film had before, its romantic focus on the universal compassion among men remaining influential some 80 years later. It’s impossible to knock the details in Renoir’s depiction of this era, himself having served in the First World War. The very fact this is a war film without any depiction of battle is the source of its genius, and yet part of me feels that to be generally untrue. Although…
Grand Illusion is a pacifist war movie, without any physical battles. It is a story of how men will be men, people are just people, we can find commonality in all of us. It is a humanist masterwork.
Class is the overarching theme of Grand Illusion. Officers are nice to each other, as politeness and civility is part of privilege. Upper class characters are seen as more trustworthy. The trappings of class produce expectations that cannot be avoided. World War One was the end of aristocracy, yet Grand Illusion depicts the delusion of friendship between captor and captive. Aristocrats care for each other above nationality. They have a respect for duty, and the film shows a baseline of racism and…
“Grand Illusion” is a master class in cinematic simplicity. When a film exists not just onscreen, but in the human soul, it endures without complication or end.
Conflict is just a spectre on the horizon in Jean Renoir’s work, even though it unfolds largely inside a German-run prisoner of war camp.
Much is made of the ‘illusions’ of philosophy, literature, theatre, and painting that help the detained soldiers of the film pass their time. But one not need dig too far into subtext to unearth the truth that these apparitions are the true form of the heart; not the war that surrounds them.
Renoir accomplishes such an astounding amount with what seems like so little in “Illusion.” The plot is…
