The Grand Illusion LaserDisc was made fairly early in the Criterion Collection history, I have the CAV version made in 1987, which looks and sounds exactly like a standard exchange print from Janus — no better and no worse.

It has an odd aspect in the subtitling. There are subtitles in English whenever someone is speaking — even if they are speaking in English. But when Julien Carette begins to sing in French — nothing!

At the beginning of my thinking about this page, I wondered to myself, Grand Illusion – La Grand Illusion? But the more I think of it, the more the English title is appropriate. This is because if there was ever a French film that was widely distributed in the United States prior to Grand Illusion, I don't know what it could be. Naturally, the first foreign film marketed in the US would have to be sold with an English title. Critics everywhere continuously hail Grand Illusion as a "masterpiece," but it is one of those films that, despite the praise, hardly anyone ever looks at anymore.

And this somehow fits. Grand Illusion certainly has all the elements that became clichés in French films. The endless ruminations over the incongruities of life, the concern with eating well even in the most trying circumstances, the taciturn Frenchman who, no longer able to control himself, lashes out at the nearest person. It is only natural that people would want to move beyond the antique, sedate, black-and-white world Grand Illusion creates. After all, Truffaut and Godard and Resnais (not to mention Besson) are waiting in the wings, ready to take over with all their crazy ideas regarding subject matter and editing.

© 1938. 1958, Compagnie Jean Renoir. All Rights Reserved.

My relationship to this film is somewhat fuzzy. When I was growing up, my pals and I attended the NuArt theatre in West Los Angeles. At that time, it was called a "repertory" theatre. They showed a new double feature every night. Many of these double features were booked from Janus Films of New York. Janus had the US rights to a whole raft of great foreign films (this catalog would form the basis of many of the earliest releases of The Voyager Company's "Criterion Collection" of LaserDiscs). The NuArt would run The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion on a double-bill. Management would always show the film they felt was the bigger draw second.

So we would come in and watch The Rules of the Game, which is pretty heavy stuff for a 16-year-old, and then — just try to stay awake through Grand Illusion! I swear, if there is any sound in this world that can make me fall asleep instantly, it would have to be the soundtrack of this film played fairly loud — I can still see myself struggling for conscienceness sprawled out in the fourth row of the NuArt. Somehow we believed that if we sat closer to the screen, the loudness of the sound would keep us awake!

On the basis of this, I have had to re-visit Grand Illusion several times over the course of my life. It gets better and better each time. But how did this stately and non-hysterical film get made in 1938, with the frieght-train storytelling of Gone with the Wind only one year away? This has caused me to wonder about this man who directed the film, Jean Renoir. What do I know about Jean Renoir? Nothing. I have recently met people who don't even know that he is the son of Auguste Renoir the famous French painter. They think that Jean Renoir is just some pretender, shamelessly borrowing the famous artist's name!

In Jean Renoir's memoirs, Jean Renoir: My Life and My Films, Grand Illusion seems to occupy a central position in the director's life. Renoir followed his own instinct regarding his ideas for the cinema, focusing on an intriguing notion of depicting reality in a magical, poetic manner. After an injury-laden career in the Infantry during World War I, which left him with a bad leg ("My spine has been broken in three places," says the character von Rauffenstein), Renoir got married to an actress, then began to make films for her to appear in, lost a great deal of money, thought about going back to being a potter, made some more films, attended his father during his last days, and inherited a large number of Renoir paintings.

Rarely has a cinema artiste been armed with such a war chest. But imagine having to part with Renoirs in order to finance one's future film projects! Whatta guy! My kind of guy.

Renoir had worked with Jean Gabin on an adaptation of Gorky's The Lower Depths, Les Bas Fonds (1936), which was also written by the same duo who wrote the script for Grand Illusion: Charles Spaak and Jean Renoir. Gabin was an idealized version of Renoir himself, so it is not surprising that they collaborated so successfully. Gabin was instrumental in securing the financing for Grand Illusion, going to countless meetings with Renoir until they found a backer.

Renoir has an especially Gallic attitude about his films — that life is a series of random occurrences — which is perhaps especially true in the case of Grand Illusion. While in the Red Cross during World War I, Renoir was being flown to a remote hospital. His plane came under attack by a German fighter, but a French pilot who happened to be nearby shot it down. The man, Major Pinsard, had saved Renoir's life.

Later, in 1933, Renoir was shooting a film called Toni on location in the south of France. They were shooting with live sound, but as it happened, there was a military airfield nearby, so the planes were "no good for sound." Renoir personally went over to find the squadron commander to ask them to stop flying until the scenes were completed. The squadron commander was none other than Pinsard!

Eventually they fell into reminising about the war, with Renoir taking it all in. Grand Illusion is a rather seamless amalgam of both Pinsard's recollections and Renoir's poetic realism.

© 1938. 1958, Compagnie Jean Renoir. All Rights Reserved.

This realism is one of the things that is a constant in writings about Grand Illusion. It is a war film, and yet war as such is not depicted. It is very realistic and atmospheric, and yet it was practically all shot on sets in a studio. Some of the formality displayed by the German kommandant, von Rauffenstein, is almost comic in its impossibility, and yet — we buy it.

Renoir surrounded himself with a small squadron of his own, from assistant director Jacques Becker, to technical advisor Carl Koch, with whom Renoir had toured Germany many times in the early 30s. Gabin of course, but one of the things that fascinates is the appearance of Erich von Stroheim in the film.

After years of seeing von Stroheim in nothing but Sunset Boulevard (1950), it is somewhat unnerving to see Max in a German uniform speaking French — and yet, there he is. Grand Illusion is von Stroheim's film. I can't help it. He walks away with the thing almost from the beginning, when he is seen struggling to get out of his tunic in an officer's canteen. Renoir had been in awe of von Stroheim since seeing Foolish Wives (1922) — he thought Greed (1925) the pinnacle of cinema.

von Stroheim had stopped directing by 1934, but he was still acting in a startling number of films in the US, England and France. Renoir leapt at the chance to work with his hero, just as Billy Wilder would do later in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). von Rauffenstein is such an interesting character, and von Stroheim plays it with such authority, that his becomes one of the greatest second-lead performances ever. I love the scene where he is looking over the escape records of the French prisoners — shot from just the right low angle — as he inspects their paperwork with a letter-opener.

Then there is that strange bit where the prisoners create a diversion by playing small flutes, which are confiscated by the guards. Did you never notice that von Stroheim is nowhere to be seen during this sequence? The Frenchies are making fools of the Krauts, and we can't have von Strohiem playing the fool.

Then later, when de Boieldieu is up on the roof and von Rauffenstein must get him to stop, he breaks into English! As though what he has to say to the Frenchman ("stop or I'll shoot" essentially) is not worth sullying their respective languages with.

Renoir has a way with his material. There is a scene early on where the prisoners are digging a tunnel. Some of the practical considerations are talked about. There is a reference to tying a string to the leg of the tunneler, which is attached to a tin can up on a shelf; if the tunneler is in trouble, he pulls the string, the tin can falls on the floor, and this alerts his comrades.

Another director would demonstrate to the audience how this works, but Renoir is confident enough to allow the actors to explain it (and in the process allow us to become familiar with their characters), and then, when it does come time to show it work — it fails. The tin can falls on a pillow so that no one hears it — another random occurrence.

© 1938. 1958, Compagnie Jean Renoir. All Rights Reserved.

But of course the main theme of the film is the humanity of the people forced to participate in war. von Rauffenstein is courteous to the French officers because that is his patrician code. But he does not extend it fully to non-patrician class Frenchmen. The scene where he explains this to de Boieldieu is stunning in its candor.

Then there is the sense that the reserve de Boieldieu holds towards his fellow Frenchmen is also a "code" prerogative. Pierre Fresnay was a well-known star in France, having starred in Pagnol's Marius Trilogy. He brings just the right degree of charm to the role of de Boieldieu. He clearly is not one of us, with his monocle and pomaded hair, and yet, over the course of the film we come too see some of ourselves in him.

But it is simply impossible not too feel the awkwardness in the final scene with him and Gabin. Each of us has had a moment like that — when we try to reach out to someone who is a bit colder than we — and who choose to remain so.

I am rather roaming all over the map on this one, but it is the strength of this film that its structure remains hidden so completely, that when someone steps up and asks you what it's about, saying that it's about POWs is about as far off the mark as you can be. Zillions of filmmakers have tried to follow in this path, producing films of such opaque purpose, that one exits the theatre saying, "what was that all about?"

You do not have that sense at the conclusion of Grand Illusion; it remains the most cunning and ethereal accomplishment in film.

12.17.01