The
first time I saw this film I was in my early twenties and I couldn't
see what all the fuss was about; I knew it was universally acclaimed
as one of the two masterpieces that Jean Renoir directed in the 30's,
and while I could see the attraction in the second of these two,
Rules of the
Game(1939),
La Grande Illusion
left me cold. While I still think Renoir's La
Bete Humaine(1938)
is a better film, and his Crime
De Monsieur Lange
(1936) is just as good, I can now see that La
Grande Illusion is
also worth watching.
The
film starts when two French soldiers, the commoner Marechal (Jean
Gabin) and the aristocrat Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), go up in a plane
and get shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans. The first half
plays out much like The
Great Escape, except
that this is World War One not Two, and all the soldiers in the
German prison camp are French. But they likewise dig a tunnel out
from under their barracks and there is even a sequence of the men
dropping earth from inside their trousers and mixing it into the
topsoil with their feet, which was presumably the inspiration for an
identical sequence in
The Great Escape.
The
first half of La
Grande Illusion is a
bit slow depending on your patience for scenes of bored French
soldiers sitting around talking about what they miss back home, the
bars they frequented in the Champs Elyssees and the current fashions
in women's hemlines in Paris. But I liked the scene where they get on
stage and sing a French version of 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary',
and then 'La Marseillaise'. Renoir shows the French defiant against
their German captors, but as they do so half of them are wearing
dresses: he seems to be having some fun at the whole concept of
nationalism. And as Gary Cooper's iconic face was once used to
represent the resilience of America manhood, Jean Gabin's features
seemed to personify French strengths in the 1930's, and there are
some beautiful shots of him. They are fine examples of what was
special about the French poetic realist style of that decade, the
soft impressionistic beauty that Renoir, Carne, Duvivier and a few
other directors achieved.
If
the first half served as the prototype for The
Great Escape, the
second half surely did likewise for The
Colditz Story: a few
of the men, including Marechal and Boeldieu, are moved further into
Germany to an ancient castle that's being used as a prison. Much is
made of class differences in the movie. Renoir was fascinated by how
German and French aristocrats had things in common with each other
which they didn't have with their fellow countrymen of lower status,
bonds which even war couldn't break. Erich Von Stroheim, playing a
rigid-necked Prussian officer in charge of the castle, apologises to
Boeldieu when he shoots him; it grieves him greatly to have killed a
fellow nobleman, despite the fact he comes from an unfriendly nation.
Gabin's
character, Marechal, has earlier described Boeldieu as 'OK, but hoity
toity' and says there's always a wall between them. Yet it's Boeldieu
who causes the main diversion that allows Marechal and Rosenthal (the
latter played by the wonderfully impish Marcel Dalio) to escape, and
for this he pays with his life. The two free men then make their way
through the German countryside, to a house overlooking a beautiful
valley, and some of the vistas here are as beautiful as anything
painted by Jean Renoir's father, Auguste. After sleeping in a barn,
the two fugitives are found by the German woman who owns the farm it
resides on, and she takes them in and feeds them. She tells them of
her husband and brothers, all dead in the war, and soon Gabin is
falling in love with her and getting Renoir's 'We are all one'
message across by talking to the German cows, saying 'What do you
care if you're fed by a Frenchman?', telling them 'You have the same
good smell as the cows in France'.
Remembering
that this film was made in 1937, it's notable how sympathetically the
Germans are portrayed. The guards exhibit none of the brutality we
expect from later films depicting the Germans of World War Two; they
are all as gentle as the one 'Good Nazi' who befriends Steve McQueen
in The Great Escape.
It's almost as if Renoir was placating the Germans of the time and
trying to make the Nazis understand pacifism and humanism the way he
did. Of course if that was the case it now seems that it was he
himself who was suffering from a ‘Grand Illusion’.
