Funny how tastes change. Grand Illusion was almost certainly the Renoir consensus pick for many years — it was a box office smash in France, won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, became the first film not in the English language to receive a Best Picture nomination after winning all the top critics’ prizes that existed back in 1938, and was eventually deemed one of the five greatest films ever made during the 1958 Brussels Expo. Orson Welles called it one of two films he’d take with him on Noah’s Ark (he didn’t specify the second); John Ford wanted to remake it and had to be talked out of it by Daryl Zanuck; and Pauline Kael called it perfect. When The Rules of the Game was reclaimed from its disastrous premiere and its more chaotic moods became easier to grasp, Grand Illusion gradually settled into second place — no harm in that, and probably more of a testament to The Rules ascending than a Grand descent.
Still, has there ever been a war film — or any film at all — quite like Grand Illusion since? Most of them, to start with, depict war in all its scale. Maybe the film’s pacifist approach was at least part of what specifically angered Joseph Goebbels, who called it “Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1” and had it banned. (Realistically, one of its heroes being Jewish was the main sticking point — Renoir had good reason to flee France when it was invaded.) It was ultimately closer to a prison escape film: then-assistant director Jacques Becker would take a few cues from Renoir’s way of doing things when he made one of the definitive examples with Le Trou over 20 years later, and The Great Escape‘s lasting influence goes without saying. Renoir’s own WWI experiences, however, were part of why he was more interested in the personal than the procedural, and that bore out its influence too: Casablanca swiped its use of La Marseillaise.
Three of the four main characters in Grand Illusion come from money. Erich von Stroheim is the German aristocrat Von Rauffenstein — the fact that he remains passionately alive despite his wounded state eerily echoes his own directorial filmography. The rest are Frenchmen POWs: Pierre Fresnay’s fellow aristocrat Captain de Boëldieu, Marcel Dalio’s nouveau riche Jew Rosenthal, and Jean Gabin, forever the embodiment of French working-class internalization, as Maréchal.
Renoir’s camera, always smoothly flowing like his beloved rivers, begins with Maréchal looking down nostalgically at a record playing a pre-war song and planning to see a girlfriend, only to be told that seeing her will have to wait when he’s sent on a mission: the whole film in miniature. Boëldieu and Maréchal are shot down from their planes and captured by Von Rauffenstein, and the class-based tensions of a world in disarray start to build up when he’s only willing to invite them if they are officers. They meet Rosenthal in the first POW camp that the German army sends them to, Hallbach, and promptly try to dig their way out of it. For all the difficulties of solitary confinement, a lack of oxygen in the tunnel, and having to pretend one knows what the word “cadastre” means, there’s also some of the truest encapsulations of liberté, égalité, fraternité up until Kieślowski explicitly tackled and deconstructed it. The aforementioned La Marseillaise rendition to resist the Germans upon the occasion of a French military victory is as stirring as Casablanca’s, but only Renoir undercut its patriotism by showing that it was a short-lived victory when Germany reclaimed the village. The song gets Maréchal thrown in solitary confinement, but the German guard is the one who shows him a greater kindness than his friends planning to leave without him. Rosenthal’s wealth and desperately ingratiating generosity with it, meanwhile, means that the prisoners he’s friends with frequently get better food packages than the commanders who oppress them. Finally, there’s a man in female drag for a pantomime show, whose beauty results in openly lustful looks — a cheeky little hint at the undercurrents of the intensified bonds that our leads form under duress, transgressing the usual boundaries. (For a similarly homosocial French film from the same year that also stars Gabin, see Jean Grémillon’s Lady Killer.)
Credit: Rialto Pictures/Criterion Collection
Our main trio winds up transferred to the Wintersborn when they’re on the verge of pulling the tunnel trick off. It’s a seemingly inescapable and lifeless castle of a prison camp, where Von Rauffenstein has been shunted to play head guard after a combat injury leaves him broken and bound together like an automaton, stiffly tending to a solitary geranium. Where the bonds between the two aristocrats were initially seemingly effortless due to common connections and experiences at the top of the old world, the rigid codes that launched the war to begin with are what will be their downfall.
The increasing mystery of Boëldieu’s internal turmoil never breaks his impeccable surface: he keeps Maréchal and Rosenthal forever at a respectful distance despite clear affection, and when the former confronts him about it, he claims he treats his wife and mother the same way. His supposed bond with Von Rauffenstein ultimately culminates in taking a bullet to the gut from his fellow aristocrat so that his fellow Frenchmen can escape into what will hopefully be a more equitable world, telling his devastated killer on his deathbed that he’d rather go out in war, leaving the German tin man to rust in place with his broken heart.
Maréchal and Rosenthal form a sort of gruff companionship on the run (they sleep together for warmth), but Rosenthal injuring himself and the starvation of life on the run leads to Maréchal hurling an anti-Semitic remark at him out of anger. When they understatedly get back together, it’s via the same song Boëldieu used to distract Von Rauffenstein: “Il était un petit navire,” a traditional French song where human kindness overcomes cruelty. It’s our bridge to the farmhouse owned by Elsa, a German mother who has lost her husband and brothers during the course of four of Germany’s so-called “greatest victories.” (She’s played by Dita Parlo, in the last of her iconic roles before her deportation in WWII functionally ended her career.) They form a makeshift family as Maréchal and Elsa fall in love. It’s a utopia of transcended bonds that likely serves as its own titular reference when the two men decide they must return to the war and manage to cross the border into Switzerland, whose arbitrary border serves as their final salvation from German shooters as they trudge through the snow. Once again, love has to wait, and yet the hope remains: the grand illusion continues.
