Word: boeldieu
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...