Grand Illusion
(La Grande Illusion)
With Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Marcel Dalio, Erich von Stroheim.
France, 1937, 35mm, black & white, 114 min.
French, German, English and Russian with English subtitles.
Print source: Rialto Pictures
In 1937, with Europe balanced dangerously on the edge of calamity, Jean Renoir looked back to World War I as the setting for one of his greatest works, the story of a group of French POWs determined to escape from a German prison camp. The group’s tireless effort inspires a solidarity that overrules even the deepest-seated class differences and, most remarkably, the fact that one of the French soldiers is Jewish. The poignant yet troubled bond of class that joins an imprisoned aristocrat—played with supercilious elegance by a dashing Pierre Fresnay—and his titled German jailer, serves both as Renoir’s elegy for European transnationalism and as his tribute to Erich von Stroheim, who reaches deep into his Teutonic imagination to invent perhaps his greatest role as an actor. Balancing poetic realism with a sober farewell to the ancien régime, Renoir brings a luminous pathos to the film’s politics and its fearful acknowledgement of the dark storms brewing once again in Europe.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
The Diary of a Chambermaid
This Land is Mine
The Woman on the Beach
Catherine, or A Life Without Joy
The Southerner
The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir
The Elusive Corporal
The Testament of Dr. Cordelier
Boudu Saved From Drowning
Elena and Her Men
Jean Renoir, the Boss, Part 2: Directing the Actor
