Film: La Grande Illusion
Director: Jean Renoir
Country: France
Released: June 1937
Runtime: 114 minutes
Genre: Prison Escape
Studio: RAC
Influenced: Orson Welles, Robert Bresson, Frank Darabont, Alan Parker, Jim Jarmusch
Jean Renoir, son of famous artist Pierre Auguste-Renoir, had his father's legacy to thank for the privilege of pursuing a career in cinema. It's fitting then that his films should be so concerned with class; his early realist works La Chienne (1931) and Bondu Sauvé des Eaux (1932) featured working-class actor Michel Simon – who also had a star turn in Vigo's L'Atalante – while Toni (1935) used non-professional actors to depict the lives of immigrant Italian workers. La Grande Illusion (1937) was Renoir's next movie, and his breakthrough hit, and although the film's vision this time was more expansive it still remained focused on the issue of class, in this case the barriers between prisoners and their captors during WW1.
Erich von Stroheim is the star of the show, his focus by this stage of his career more on acting than directing, playing the prison camp's Nazi commandant with such aplomb that you instantly suspend disbelief (it was the sort of role he got typecast for). His character von Rauffenstein develops a rapport with French officer and fellow aristocrat de Boëldieu, who together represent a doomed class of men condemned to pay lip service to honour and national pride while watching WW1 wipe away everything they once held dear. On the other side of the class divide are working-class French soldiers Maréchal (played by Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio).
What Renoir achieves so magnificently in this film is to show the humanity of all the characters. The different acting styles of the main protagonists – Maréchal and Rosenthal take a more natural approach while Rauffenstein and de Boëldieu are more controlled and actorly in their performances – are used by Renoir to emphasise their superficial differences of class status, but it's the nuanced interactions between them and the way they manage to find common ground that makes the film such a pleasure to watch.
On one level, La Grande Illusion is film about the decay of European society in the pre-WW11 period – while also of course being the inspiration for so many prison escape films to follow – but at its heart it's an anti-war film with a humanistic message that, at the same time, carries a stark warning. In a darkly prophetic moment, it's the Jewish character Rosenthal who rubbishes the "great illusion" (to which the film's title refers) that WWI would be the war to end all wars.
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