Film review: Grand Illusion (1937)

Continuing our quest to watch all 50 of the films in our 50 years of Janus Films box set, we have this classic.  If a film is an acknowledged favorite of Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Billy Wilder you know it must be on to something, and this is indeed really something.  It's bracingly humanistic, strikingly modern, beautiful, wistful and romantic, all of which is pretty surprising for what is nominally a war film and a prison film.  Of course, the romance part is helped immeasurably by the presence of Jean Gabin, AKA the even hunkier Belmondo before Belmondo (that hair! that nose!)  But really, it is also rather a confounding film.  All but a couple of major events related by the film happen off-screen.  It features daring pilots who are shot down, but we don't even see them near any planes.  It features an accident that disfigures the von Stroheim character, but we just see him before and long after, suddenly wearing that Baron Underbbeit chin attachment and white gloves.  We see plenty of reports of famous battles, but no actual battle scenes. It purports to be a prison-escape film, but not only does a carefully-dug tunnel go unused, we find out halfway through that we haven't been shown at least half-a-dozen (exciting sounding) attempted escapes by our main characters.

The basic outline is of a story of French prisoners-of-war repeatedly plotting escape and eventually succeeding. In the course of it it reveals the various cross-cultural class divisions and class loyalties, a dying system that the war will do much to undermine.  We also see anti-semitism and racism even in supposed protagonists.  But we are left with a hopeful message that love and basic human attachments will win out.  Really the film is a series of loosely-coonected scenes, many of which are just indelible.  These can include comedic scenes of the prisoners of war putting on plays that involve most of them in drag, 

fascinating scenes of the French aristocratic pilot Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay - who really fought heroically in WWI) chatting with von Stroheim's von Rauffenstein about how they have more in common with each other (they actually know a lot of the same people because they moved in the same pre-war European aristocratic circles) than with their respective comrades in arms, but also how their kind is going to disappear with the war (a fact Rauffenstein regrets apparently more than Boëldieu. 

There are also poignant scenes: Rauffenstein is forced to shoot Boëldieu and he would have been better off shooting himself, and there is a more thrilling, rousing use of La Marseillaise than in the later Casablanca.

The film can essentially be divided into three segments.  The first begins wih Jean Gabin's Maréchal, currently a pilot in the French Air Force, but (as we later learn) in his civilian life a humble mechanic being recruited by Boëldieu to investigate a strange grey patch on a reconnaissance photo, just when he thinks he's about to get some leave.  The very next scene has the Red Baron-esque Rauffenstein reporting that he's shot down a plane and if its survivors are officers, they are to be invited to dinner, and of course they turn out to be Maréchal and Boëldieu.  They are then sent off to their first prisoner of war camp, where life is surprisingly cushy, largely thanks to the luxurious food parcels that a fellow imprisoned officer, the Jewish son of immigrant bankers, Rosenthal, generously shares with his comrades.  This group, which includes the irrepressible forever punning-and-singing Cartier, divide their time between digging a tunnel (their methods of disposing of the dirt were stolen for The Great Escape) and putting on vaudeville shows.A notable sequence in this segment is the back-and-forth over German forces taking over a particular French town.  As they do it at first, the Germans really celebrate, which depresses the allied prisoners.  But then, midway through the slapstick cross-dressing performance mentioned earlier, Maréchal sees a report that the French have won it back and leads everyone in that rousing performance of La Marseillaise.  For this (and various escape attempts we learn about later) he gets solitary confinement - again, shades of The Great Escape - to which he does not take half as well as Steve McQueen. 

Then, just as he comes out and everyone is preparing to make their break for it, they are told they are to be shipped out to a more secure camp. Maréchal tries desperately to tell the new prisoners who are to take over their dorm about the tunnel under the floorboards, but alas, they speak no French and he speaks no English.  And off Maréchal, Boëldieu and one other are whisked to a much more forbidding castle-like prison, which houses two coincidences - their old pal Rosenthal, and the now-disfigured and promoted away from the action Rauffenstein, who is again the picture of old world courtesy.  This time one of their roommates is a black French soldier, to which our heroes are noticeably cold, which cannot be an accident, and presumably is part of Renoir's message that wedges are forever being driven between humans whose interests are identical.  This time the escape has to be by rope, and after a raucous scene where rooms full of prisoners distract (and annoy) the guards by playing first tin whistles, and then when these are confiscated, saucepans and whatever comes to hand, Rosenthal and Maréchal escape, while Boëldieu, to Maréchal's distress, insists on staying behind to act as a decoy.  

It is while so serving that he is shot in the gut, a mortal wound for him, but a far worse spiritual wound for the shooter.

The third section of the film is Maréchal and Rosenthal first on the run, then living on a beautiful mountainside farm with a German widow, whose husband and brothers have been killed in various battles, all - she reports bitterly - Germany's most famous victories.  

Rosenthal, who has injured his ankle, which is why the two men were hiding in her shed when she discovers them, can speak German and translate for her and her adorable young daughter.  Predictably, the initially suspicious Maréchal falls for her, and she for him, another illustration of the pointlessness of this war.  But it can't last - German soldiers keep passing through and our two (remaining) heroes have to make a break for Switzerland.  Can the couple (the second best romance in the film after Boëldieu and Rauffenstein) bear to part?  Will they make it to Switzerland?  Well, you'll have to watch it, won't you.