Jean Renoir directed the classic “Grand Illusion” (1937) starring Pierre Fresnay, left, and Erich Von Stroheim.
By A. O. SCOTT
“GRAND ILLUSION” had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, and it has been around ever since, by enduring consensus one of the greatest films ever made. It is true that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief and cultural arbiter, was not a fan, but Mussolini, patron of the festival and Europe’s leading fascist cinephile, kept a print in his personal collection. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “all the democracies in the world must see this film,” which is still sound advice. The nations that fall within that rubric may have grown in number since those days, but none of those democracies, old or new, is so secure as to be immune to the lessons of Jean Renoir’s great and piercing antiwar comedy.
Which is not to say that “Grand Illusion” is didactic, though it is, like much of the art of its era, unapologetic about its social concerns and political implications. It survives partly as a document of those volatile times, and of the idealism that persisted through them even as history prepared a new, unimaginable round of horrors. Seventy-five years on, Europe is far from a state of war, but in light of its current crisis — which is not only economic and political, but also, once again, a crisis of identity — Renoir’s film is still news.
In France the late 1930s were the years of the Popular Front, an attempt by the left to counter the rise of fascism and overcome its own tendencies toward sectarianism and orthodoxy. The political face of the front was Léon Blum, a moderate Jewish Socialist whose two truncated, frustrating terms as prime minister coincided with the production and release of Renoir’s film. It is hardly incidental that the friendship at the heart of “Grand Illusion” — the alliance that carries the germ of its political hope — is between Lieutenant Maréchal, a proudly working-class Parisian played by Jean Gabin, and Rosenthal, an assimilated, wealthy French Jew played by Marcel Dalio. The action takes place during World War I (in which Renoir had served as a pilot), when the Dreyfus Affair was still a recent memory, but it has an eye on contemporary anti-Semitism and labor militancy as well as a subtle, anxious premonition of global conflicts to come.
Renoir was a man of the left and would remain so through a career that took him to Hollywood in the 1940s, to India (where he made “The River” and inspired the great Bengali director Satyajit Ray) and then back home to France. But while injustice, inequality and the abuse of power are problems that surface in every phase of his work — he started out making silent films and was still going in the age of television, Technicolor and CinemaScope — Renoir rarely used the medium to send simple messages. His movies are sensual, funny, and, for all their meticulous artistry, invitingly informal.
The emblematic Renoir shot may be of a room or a stretch of landscape bustling with people passing the time together in a mood that is suspended between gravity and whimsy. They are at a party, putting on a show, embroiled in argument or attending to everyday tasks or pleasures. The camera moves in their midst like a discreet, curious guest, drawing the viewer into a situation of sociable intimacy. Confidences are overheard, jokes are shared, and the overdone, censorious distinction between playfulness and seriousness melts away. As the American critic Andrew Sarris once put it, “The easy paths of sentimentality and cynicism have never appealed” to Renoir, “and his unyielding sincerity is one of the glories of cinema.”
That quality, and the warm, democratic sensibility that accompanies it, are among the reasons that “Grand Illusion” remains, after 75 years, so fresh and vibrant. The new, digitally restored 35-millimeter print (made from a newly unearthed camera negative) playing at Film Forum in Manhattan through May 24 is not a revelation or a rediscovery. It is, instead, a sparkling reminder of how a movie absorbed in its own historical moment and preoccupied with the legacies of the past can resonate into a future that lies beyond its specific range of imagination (while looking at least as luminous as it did when Mussolini first laid eyes on it).
This is not simply a matter of fuzzily applied universal themes. Or of paying dutiful homage to an established masterpiece. Renoir’s humanism is always grounded in particulars, and while the characters in “Grand Illusion” — principally a group of French prisoners of war and, crucially, the German officer who is their keeper — can be understood as types, they are also highly specific, fully fleshed-out individuals. Rosenthal and Maréchal may represent an oppressed minority and an embattled proletariat, but they are so fully embodied by Dalio and Gabin that they wear their allegorical significance as comfortably as their overcoats.
Besides, the habit of classifying people according to ethnicity or social status is identified, in the film, with the reactionary thinking of the old order. The highest-ranking French prisoner, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), is an aristocratic career officer who seems to have more in common with his German jailer than with his fellow prisoners. Boeldieu and Captain von Rauffenstein (played by the German director Erich von Stroheim) recognize each other as members of an elite whose customs, tastes and family connections link them across national boundaries. When the prisoner’s beds are being searched for evidence of a suspected escape plan, Rauffenstein offers to take Boeldieu at this word that he has nothing to hide, since they share a gentleman’s code of honor. But he cannot accept the word of “a Maréchal or a Rosenthal.”
The measure of Renoir’s generous spirit is that Rauffenstein and Boeldieu are also spared caricature. Renoir would hardly have forced von Stroheim, a director he revered, to play a cartoonish Prussian villain, and the script, by Renoir and Charles Spaak, takes pains to emphasize the tragic aspect of Rauffenstein’s situation. Once a dashing flyer, he has been terribly injured in a plane crash, and his physical agony amplifies his pessimism. He foresees a future with no place for him and Boeldieu, a new Europe that belongs to the Maréchals and Rosenthals.
Boeldieu sees it coming too, and embraces it as a cause. This is partly patriotism, a devotion to the bonds of common nationality that link the prisoners in the French part of the prison. In addition to the worker and the Jew there is an intellectual — devoted to the Greek poet Pindar, who has never been properly translated — and a music-hall entertainer played by the great comic actor Julien Carette.
In the midst of a catastrophic war, far from the nightmare of the trenches, the gas and what seemed like the collective suicide of a civilization, they live in a peaceful microcosm of Europe. Care packages arrive full of the tastes of home. (In one hilarious scene the prisoners gather in the Russian barracks, waiting to share the caviar and vodka that must be in a newly arrived crate. But the czar has sent his loyal soldiers books instead, inciting a comic riot.) Much time is spent planning and performing sketches and musical numbers, including a cross-dressed version of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” by British soldiers that segues into a stirring, impromptu rendition of “La Marseillaise.”
It may not be an accident that that scene prefigures one of the most famous moments in “Casablanca.” One of the singers in that film, Rick’s erstwhile mistress, Yvonne, is played by Madeleine LeBeau, at the time married to Dalio, seen in the role of Emil the croupier. Small world!
Which is, in its way, the films’ common moral. “Casablanca” aimed partly to rally Americans to the cause of democratic Europe, a cause that animates the hopes of “Grand Illusion.” The title, taken from a 1909 book by Norman Angell (later called “The Great Illusion”), refers to the fallacy that the divisions among nations are inevitable causes of war, an illusion that is large (“grand” in French) but not necessarily exalted or noble.
But is it also, in retrospect, an illusion that those divisions can be permanently overcome, that decency and fellowship can take the place of combat? The long history of modern Europe — in particular of France and Germany, the focal points of Renoir’s film and of the present real-life Continental drama — pivots between a dream of community and a nightmare of conflict. Renoir traces both possibilities to a common source in the realm of ordinary human feelings and aspirations. Which is why Roosevelt’s advice is still worth heeding, for statesmen and citizens alike.
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