Word: boeldieu
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...scenes appear both surreal and promising. The film is set in 1916, before war-weariness had begun to be epidemic among troops and their homelands. The Germans shoot down a French reconnaissance plane that holds two of the movie's main characters, Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay). The film almost prompts laughter, for Erich von Stroheim's Captain von Rauffenstein invites the captured parties for a meal before sending them off to a prison camp...
...opening scenes have some odd nuances aside from the after-capture meal. Strangely, the subtitles break for the occasional English sparring between Rauffenstein and Boeldieu. One must assume that these phrases are inserted to emphasize the class difference between the two career officers and the others in the opening scene...
...find Marechal, Boeldieu, Rosenthal (Marcel Dialio), a Jewish couturier, and Cartier (Julien Carette), a music hall performer comfortable in a beautiful German setting. When the camera pans, Tudor manors and a sweeping countryside grace the vista. Similarly, while the camp is a POW camp, the prisoners are fed, exercised and treated reasonably well...
...least kinetic and one of the most absorbing of cinema's innumerable treatments of the World War. Concerned not with fighting but with respite from fighting, it investigates a group of French inmates of a German prison camp. The prisoners-principally an austere patrician, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), his mechanic, Marechal (Jean Gabin), and a generous fellow, Rosenthal (Dalio), who shares the canned delicacies sent by his rich family-naturally try to escape. Director Renoir, however, builds his plot, not around the success or failure of this enterprise, but around their relations with each other, with their guards...
Many war pictures have dwelt, for purposes of irony, on the small gallantries of modern armed conflict. Grand Illusion does the same thing, but for a different reason. This time the monstrous irony is war itself rather than the lie de Boeldieu tells to save his friends, the flower that von Rauffenstein places on de Boeldieu's chest after shooting him through the stomach. For the heroics of ordinary war pictures, Grand Illusion substitutes a pastoral interlude when Marechal and Rosenthal try to escape to Switzerland, and a German peasant woman shelters them on her lonely farm. The pastoral...