Barnes & Noble

One of the greatest war films ever made -- and the first foreign film to get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture -- Grand Illusion contains not a single battle scene. Instead, Jean Renoir's 1937 masterpiece about a group of French officers trying to escape from a German POW camp during World War I focuses on how the extraordinary circumstances of war bridge the differences of class and nationality between people, if only temporarily. Banned by the Nazis, this paean to tolerance is a triumph of ensemble acting. Renoir's supple, unobtrusive camera allows each of the characters to emerge as fully realized individuals. French superstar Jean Gabin is the sympathetic proletarian; Marcel Dalio is a Jewish banker; Pierre Fresnay is the aristocratic French career officer; and Erich von Stroheim is the equally aristocratic German commandant who, for all his class-bound formality, emerges as a sympathetic and poignant character. The titular "illusion" here refers to many things, but mostly it denotes the false assumption that any single person or group can avoid being a victim in times of war. With a sensitivity that never veers into forced sentimentality, Renoir creates a moving meditation on the essential humanity that binds even enemies together. Kryssa Schemmerling

All Movie Guide

Frequently cited as both one of the greatest films about war and one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion is an often witty, sometimes poignant, frequently moving examination of the futility of war. During World War I, twoFrench airmen are shot down while taking surveillance photographs in German territory: Capt. de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), a wealthy and aristocratic officer; Lt. Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a burly but intelligent working-class mechanic. The three are brought to a P.O.W. camp, where they encounter and befriend Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a prosperous Jewish banker, and the commander, Von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), takes an immediate liking to de Boeldieu.They are members of the same social class and believe that the political and intellectual ideals of the Europe they once knew will soon be a thing of the past with the rise to power of the proletariat. The three Frenchmen discover that their fellow prisoners have been digging an escape tunnel, and all of them agree to help -- Maréchal and Rosenthal with enthusiasm, de Boeldieu out of a sense of duty. As he puts it, when on a golf course, one plays golf, and while in a prison camp, one tries to escape -- it's the accepted thing to do. As Von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu become friends, and the rank-and-file soldiers banter as much with the German guards as with each other, the characters seem involved less in a war than in some vast, petty game, albeit one with deadly consequences; they often talk about women and food, while never mentioning political ideology. Mark Deming

Product Details

• UPC: 715515032629
• Source: CRITERION
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: Dolby Digital Mono
• Language: Français
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:54:00
• Sales Rank: 5,915

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Essential Art House, Volume 1

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