OVP: Grand Illusion (1938)

Film: Grand Illusion (1938...technically 1937 but it gets a 1938 Oscar year so we're going with that because this is an Oscar-centered blog)

Stars: Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim

Director: Jean Renoir

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Two years ago, Oscar made history by awarding Parasite the trophy for Best Picture, a truly seismic moment in Oscar history as it was the first film not primarily in English to win Oscar's top prize.  This might beg the question to the curious (and if you read this blog, I assume that includes you), of what was the first film to be nominated for Best Picture to not be in English.  This happened much earlier than you would expect, at the 11th Academy Awards, with Jean Renoir's celebrated opus Grand Illusion.  Weirdly, modern cinephiles might not think about this film in the same way that others did at the time in part because Renoir, while a celebrated filmmaker, has seen a later film of his, The Rules of the Game, which was dismissed by critics at the time, supplant Grand Illusion as his greatest film (Rules regularly shows up on lists of the greatest films ever made).  However, this was far more popular at the time, and established Renoir's, the son of the famed impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (whose painting Le Moulin de la Galette I'm sitting under a print of right now), reputation as one of the first true auteur directors.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in World War I, where French Lieutenant Marechal (Gabin) and Captain Boeldieu (Fresnay) are taken prisoner by the Germans, specifically Captain (later Major) von Rauffenstein (von Stroheim).  In the opening scenes, they are given the courtesy of their position as officers, but as the film progresses, they are put through considerably stronger hardships, forced to live in barracks with a group of other prisoners.  These prisoners, it turns out, are planning an escape from the camp, and have dug a tunnel out of the prison.  We see the men, from different backgrounds and classes, begin to form a camaraderie, which eventually culminates in a spontaneous round of "Le Marsaillaise" when the French capture Fort Douaumont at the Battle of Verdun (this scene supposedly inspired the later, more famous sequence in Casablanca where the French anthem was sung at a moment of victory).  The men are not able to use their tunnel, though, as they are transported just before it is completed, and Marechal & Boeldieu are brought to a variety of camps, never successfully escaping.  They eventually are brought back to Rauffenstein's authority, with him now promoted & badly injured to the point where he wears a neck brace the remainder of the movie.  They reunite with Rosenthal (Dalio), a Jewish lieutenant from their first camp, and the three French men decide to escape. In executing their plan, Boeldieu essentially sacrifices his life so that the other two men have a chance, and they succeed in escaping, first taking refuge in the home of a widowed German woman (who falls in love with Marechal), and then running to Switzerland, with their fates beyond that are unknown.

Renoir, between Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, was deeply critical of the fascist movements that were rising up in Europe at the time, and both of these films serve as veiled critiques of the far right movements springing up in Germany, Italy, and Spain at the time (Renoir, it should be noted, had to flee France to Hollywood in 1940, likely a result of his films being banned by the Nazis).  In Grand Illusion, for example, we regularly see the increased prevalence of antisemitism (in the treatment of the Rosenthal character by both Rauffenstein & Marechal), and the film also has a lot to say about the class system.  In his deathbed scene, we understand that Boeldieu, who is from an aristocratic background like Rauffenstein (despite being on different sides of the war), feels that it might be better for a man like him to die in battle, that a new era of wealth & opportunity has finally supplanted the privileged ones who have had that position for generations.  This scene is powerfully told because it essentially shows the two men understanding that their time has passed, a particularly powerful & melancholic message for a film from the late-1930's.

The movie's attitude toward war is also quite obvious, and not complimentary.  The movie repeatedly, constantly has characters essentially at war for reasons that they don't understand.  A known pacifist, Renoir is certain to show that not only a war like World War I was fought over essentially nothing (few knew why this had happened, and the result was a generation lost), but that war is inevitable because man will always keep fighting.  With war that would ravage Europe just a few years away, Renoir's film feels deeply prescient, horrifying but prescient.

But that's what it was about-what did I think of it?  I thought it was terrific.  I wasn't entirely into the film in the opening thirty minutes, when the motley crew of men were trying to dig their tunnel.  I thought it was a bit glib, and while it was fun to see the inspirations (everything from The Great Escape to The Shawshank Redemption has clearly been behind this movie), I wasn't into it.  But as the movie started to progress, giving us a better picture of where we were going with this deeply anti-war film, it felt more alive.  The script allowed for moments of brief pause, sometimes moving (like the "Le Marseillaise" scene) others a bit abstract (there's a random scene where this younger man, in gay parlance a "twink," dresses like a girl and actually looks quite feminine in a dress & wig, and the men all stand awestruck, forgetting what a woman looks like...it's queer coding & clearly meant to be gay, and I'm shocked that censors at the time would allow something like this past as while it might have comedic setup, it's not how it reads by the end of the scene).

The performances got better as well as the movie went by.  Gabin plays his everyman very straight, but also with enough growth as the film progresses to feel like war has changed him in ways he can't quite comprehend yet.  Better yet are Fresnay & von Stroheim, playing men who are actually seeing something of their way-of-life lost coming out of World War I.  There's a bit of a homoeroticism in this performance as well, but it's more so that they are bitter that they understand they'll never get back what they lost.  The other men dream of what their future will be, but these men know their fate is sealed, that  they are relics in a new world that no longer will have use for them.  It's smart, informed acting, and much like the script, they say things you'd rarely hear in a film from the late 1930's (in any language).