Grand Illusion (1937) - Reviewed by Roger Ebert [View all]

Apart from its other achievements, Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” influenced two famous later movie sequences. The digging of the escape tunnel in “The Great Escape” and the singing of the “Marseilles” to enrage the Germans in “Casablanca” can first be observed in Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece. Even the details of the tunnel dig are the same–the way the prisoners hide the excavated dirt in their pants and shake it out on the parade ground during exercise.

But if “Grand Illusion” had been merely a source of later inspiration, it wouldn’t be on so many lists of great films. It’s not a movie about a prison escape, nor is it jingoistic in its politics; it’s a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I.

“Neither you nor I can stop the march of time,” the captured French aristocrat Capt. de Boieldieu tells the German prison camp commandant, Von Rauffenstein. A little later, distracting the guards during an escape of others from the high-security German fortress, the Frenchman forces the German to shoot him, reluctantly, and they have a final deathbed exchange. `” didn’t know a bullet in the stomach hurt so much,” he tells the German. “I aimed at your legs,” says the German, near tears. And a little later he says: “For a commoner, dying in a war is a tragedy. But for you and I–it’s a good way out.”

What the Frenchman knows and the German won’t admit is that the new world belongs to commoners. It changed hands when the gentlemen of Europe declared war. And the “grand illusion” of Renoir’s title is the notion that the upper classes somehow stand above war. The German cannot believe that his prisoners, whom he treats almost as guests, would try to escape. After all, they have given their word not to.

continued at

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-grand-illusion-1937

You can watch it with English subtitles here
https://ok.ru/video/2231511943707