The Definitives
Grand Illusion (1937)
Director: Jean Renoir
Cast: Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, and Marcel Dalio
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 114 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
01/20/2009
Original Release Date:
06/08/1937
Flourishing in social truths, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion presents a cadre of individuals in a figurative effort, without reducing the characters to meager symbols to construct its meaning. Uniquely in sync are realistic protagonists contained inside their scenario, fashioned with impeccable verisimilitude, aligned to fit a splendid thesis that identifies the existence of unfortunate ideals which operate to facilitate an easier life. In other words, a consciousness of man-made boundaries that separate through nationalism and xenophobia. The message of Renoir’s picture is political but universal, subscribing to a deft humanism that transcends the restrictions he presents.
Pondering, among other concerns, the downfall of the aristocratic order of European classes in existence before World War I, Renoir examines the nature of friendships, languages, and the understanding and acceptance of diverse cultures, the war notwithstanding. His film’s heart is a group of men, as opposed to political stations, ironically finding their common ground in a series of German POW camps: With his erudite onscreen persona, Pierre Fresnay flawlessly exemplifies the French blueblood Captain de Boieldieu. Parisian everyman Jean Gabin embodies Maréchal, the rugged working-class pilot. And Marcel Dalio plays the Jewish banker, Rosenthal, who shares his care parcels with friends for welcomed meals of chicken, foie gras, mackerel, and cognac.
On the surface, Grand Illusion invents a series of well-followed tropes used in succeeding prison escape yarns. Hiding their hole under floorboards beneath a bunk, the men tie a rope to a single mole digging the passage deeper. Air flows to him through a tube of cans, and a string attaches to a warning tin that he pulls to sound his readiness for relief. The excess earth is stored in small bags and emptied during their faux gardening activities. Later escape-centric films such as Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, John Sturges’ The Great Escape, and Le Trou by Jacques Becker (himself the assistant director on Grand Illusion) each duplicate the escape procedure model established in Renoir’s film.
An unspoken understanding subsists between the men of the camp, where fraternity seems graver than any class division. In spite of rank or nationality or race, everyone works on the tunnel to escape, putting in their time alone in the hole, breathing through a makeshift air tube and scraping out soil, inching closer to freedom. The authenticity of the relationships created by Renoir resonates in the tangible status of everyone from the main players to the supplementary relief like Traquet, the blithe actor played by Julien Carette, and even German security guards such as Arthur, the butt of Traquet’s joke during his staged talent show.
Without begging for brotherhood and internationalism, Renoir disintegrates the frontiers between people. He offers an old German woman regarding the French prisoners, reflecting on the “Poor boys.” He shows the French prisoners looking out the window at the German assembly and confessing, “You have to admit, it’s stirring.” Though his narrative may not dwell on realism with a documentarian’s devotion to reality, Renoir observes decisive details that make the film’s meaning more significant through the abstraction of dramatic wisdom. His entire narrative schema seems to inhabit those moments that point out the real, authentic, or natural relationships, doing so in a way that we forget the film is progressing as a constructed motion picture.
In a way, Renoir’s film centers on identifying the difference between reality and dramatic theatricality, and makes certain to blur the lines between the two. The camp prepares the talent show as diversion, having received trunks of costumes thanks to Rosenthal. Laughter and joking commences as the men look through their inventory, discussing dreamily and longingly how women’s fashions have changed. And then, in the film’s most famous scene, one of the men appears, having tried on a dress and wig, his thin frame just enough to freeze the men, locking them in a reminiscence of femininity. The French soldier looks down at himself awkwardly, “Sure looks funny.” Renoir suggests there is no escape from reality through the unreality of theater, and accordingly he makes his film as authentic as possible, even while hoping for an unquestionable unrealistic ideal.
Renoir’s camera style shapes the film’s sense of reality, or more accurately, its sense of truth. Shooting plainly, but narratively dense, Renoir employs fluid but not showy camera movements to avoid cutting a scene into choppy sections. The director creates a dramatically complete sequence by involving the viewer on a visual level; he uses a vast depth of field and moves the camera’s position and reframes the image, avoiding fragmentary cuts that would detach the audience from the unfolding story. Renoir’s approach resides in his desire to singularly characterize the relationships between men with unquestionable clarity and precision.
During WWI, Renoir shot aerial photography for a reconnaissance squad, taking photos of German lines from a slow twin-engine airplane. Swooping to his rescue one day, pilot Armand Pinsard shot down attacking German planes, saving Renoir from certain death. Many years later when Renoir became a filmmaker, he had a chance meeting with Pinsard, now a commander, during his filming of Toni (1935). The two began to meet regularly and recollect the war. Renoir was particularly taken by Pinsard’s stories about his captures by and subsequent escapes from the Germans. These retellings, along with those of Renoir’s friend and co-writer Charles Spaak, who served on the French Front in 1915 and was also captured and imprisoned by the Germans, served as the inspiration for Grand Illusion, though only in a skeletal form.
Few of Pinsard and Spaak’s stories were translated directly to the screen. Renoir’s process was one of evolution, and rarely did his initial vision become the picture that was written or that ended up onscreen. His films were those of “invention, not simple documentary reproduction.” They contain a flow and natural movement, versus an adherence to a schematized plot. And perhaps Renoir’s sense of authenticity informs his films’ realist presentations, helping them to proceed with a progressive dramatic poetry that feels genuine, yet clearly allows the director to wink through the camera.
Take the role of Captain von Rauffenstein, the German administrator who captures Boeldieu and Maréchal and oversees their final POW camp, a reinforced 13th century castle. This was originally an inconsequential role broadened specifically because Renoir happened to cast his own idol, Erich von Stroheim. An incredible influence over Renoir’s work, the director of the maligned Greed and The Wedding March had become shunned in Hollywood. So when a nervous and doting fan asked his artistic inspiration, who had since become a desperate erstwhile figure, to take a role in his new picture, suddenly the minor part grew, becoming something much more telling. Renoir worked closely with Von Stroheim to deepen the Von Rauffenstein character, expanding its potential to include aristocratic airs, adding much of the film’s class commentary into the already prevalent social and political allusions.
Throughout the picture, Von Rauffenstein demonstrates his favoritism for officers, beginning when he shoots down Boeldieu and Maréchal in the first scenes. “If they’re officers, invite them for lunch,” he tells a solider, and then later apologizes to the Frenchmen for bringing down their plane. His outlook relies on elitist views that officers are the privileged, the upper-class of the military hierarchy. Renoir’s officers are described without the stiffness of strict and inhuman corporeal regimentation; rather they contain a very French decency, what Renoir describes as an “easygoing spirit” laden with refined grace and noble pride. His representations of this sort are left chiefly to Von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu, whereas Renoir believed the modern military to be “plebeian,” a generation of blue-collar figures like Maréchal. Furthermore, both Von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu come from esteemed backgrounds, moneyed families, nobility that exists within a ladder of military bound by social distinctions that disappeared after WWI. Indeed, Stroheim’s character points out the war “will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.”
Without the chance inclusion of Renoir’s hero Von Stroheim, birthing the resultant expansion of Von Rauffenstein and his inferred subtext on classes, Grand Illusion might never have developed its message to such universal extremes. The character’s presence and his class-driven civility during wartime delineates the insanity of war and the demise of his class, from his conversations in English with Boldieu to his insistence that men like them have nothing in common with grunts like Maréchal and Rosenthal. Boldieu is more accepting of his class’ disintegration, arguing that they cannot impede progress. But just by Von Rauffenstein’s appearance, wrought with war wounds ranging from his neck stiff in a brace to fire-scared hands covered by white gloves, Renoir illustrates a member of a dying breed. At the same time, Renoir’s rendering of the aristocratic military code has an elegant appeal, despite the inherent paradox, ripening the film’s anti-war thesis. Ultimately, the aristocrats destroy each other when Von Rauffenstein is forced to shoot down Boldieu, who sacrifices himself for Maréchal and Rosenthal’s escape, thus robbing Von Rauffenstein of his only pseudo-companion in the war.
The 1930s were seasoned with films about World War I, including Howard Hughes’ epic Hell’s Angels (1930). They were not merely yarns about fighter pilots, as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and James Whale’s Journey’s End (1930) proved with their stringent anti-war themes. Actionized or not, these pictures depicted the horrors of war in definite terms, honing then-popular anti-war sentiments. As years passed, those attitudes calmed, and when Renoir set out to make Grand Illusion, audiences were more interested in diverting yarns like Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol (1938) starring Errol Flynn and David Niven.
And yet, Renoir and the film earned international recognition, awakening the world to the filmmaker’s name for better or worse. Grand Illusion was first shown in Paris at Marivaux cinema in June of 1937. Shortly thereafter, Léon Blum's government fell. Despite this grim political environment, the film was a success, particularly in the American foreign market where Renoir would later find his home, albeit temporarily. After his screening, President Roosevelt announced, “Everyone who believes in democracy should see this film.” Subsequently, the picture ran for twenty-six weeks in New York after its American premiere on September 12th, 1938.
In Italy, meanwhile, Mussolini banned the film from exhibition. And Goebbels, of course, not only banned Grand Illusion but, as his troops marched across Europe, they seized copies of the negative. The film was believed to be lost altogether, but the Nazis’ obsession for storage was almost as potent as their capacity to destroy. American soldiers uncovered a negative in Munich in 1945, ironically preserved to near perfection, stored away in an act of control. Similar German warehouses throughout Europe contained prohibited films, rare books, and priceless works of censured art.
A restored treatment of the film was released in 1946, though incomplete and then considered too kind to the Germans and, in light of the very recent liberation, even anti-Semitic for its lacking condemnation of the enemy. After all, Renoir’s film was made before Hitler and the Nazis, before people resisted the idea that Germans were human beings. In 1958, Renoir and Spaak edited together another version of the picture, this one almost identical to the film’s first cut exhibited in 1937. The re-release was as much of a success as the original distribution, and the film’s popularity and appreciation would flower over time as distance came between audiences and World War II, and as the lasting, timeless themes of the picture revealed themselves outside of whatever then-current wartime climate presented itself.
Grand Illusion features no “war is Hell” scenes of gristly trench warfare, therein conveying the chaotic bloody truth of battle. There are no rousing speeches where characters stand up and divulge the film’s entire subtext. And neither sentimentalism nor melodrama have roles in Renoir’s narrative. Avoiding strong subjective illustrations, Renoir’s film remains impartially political, even while he makes humanist indictments and remains a jealous disciple of his homeland. The permanence of the film’s message resides in its ecumenical function regardless of borders or nationality.
Consider the final scenes after Maréchal and Rosenthal have escaped their last POW stronghold, walking for days through fields and rugged terrain on their way to Switzerland. They find sanctuary on a farm occupied by a German war widow named Elsa, played by Dita Parlow, and her daughter, virtually the only feminine presence in the film. Maréchal and Elsa have no problem communicating, though neither speaks the other’s language. They fall in love in these scenes, their affections surpassing the illusion of the war. But eventually Maréchal and Rosenthal must move on. Continuing on their journey through snowy mountains, a German patrol sees them, but lets them go. “Forget it. They’re in Switzerland.” Certainly the Germans are shown to be limited for their adherence to the absurdity of borders.
Recommended reading:
Bazin, Andre´; Truffaut, Francois. Jean Renoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Bergan, Ronald. Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise. New York: The Overlook Press, 1992.
Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.
Sesonske, Alexandre. Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.