Word: fresnay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Grand Illusion Jean Renoir Perhaps the most beloved film on any list of all-time greats, this World War I saga prefigures many a Great Escape prison-camp movie--it pits a German commandant (Erich von Stroheim) against two captured French officers (Pierre Fresnay and Jean Gabin) in a gradually warming debate on the codes of honor and survival. But Renoir the humanist is no sentimentalist, as the film's French title makes clear: La Grande Illusion translates as The Big Illusion. This was the first Criterion DVD release, and the supplements show that the company was on its game...
...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...
Died. Pierre Fresnay, 77, cinemactor and onetime member of the Comédie Française of heart disease; in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Hailed at his death as the greatest French actor of his generation, Fresnay starred in some 70 films. His most renowned role, in Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1938), placed him opposite German prisoner-of-war camp Commandant Erich von Stroheim as anachronistically gallant aristocrats trapped in the horrors of World...
Grand Illusion evoked nostalgia for the comfortable 1914 world that charmed the audiences of the thirties and continues to charm viewers today. Renoir's screenplay innovations (like the famous "Marseillaise" Scene that Micheal Curtiz lifted for Casablanca) were well supported by three superb performances from Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin, and Erich von Stroheim...
Whereas the exchanges between Fresnay and von Stroheim are classics in character portrayal as well as landmarks in cimema history, Jean-Pierre Cassel finds the role of the Corporal rather tough going. He never manages to convince the audience that the man really wants to escape, much less arouse our sympathy. Ballochet, the stock bespectacled "intellectual" who worships the Corporal, is abysmally parodied by Claude Rich, who marches forth to death like those two poor souls in the opening of Stalag 17. Claude Brasseur's part as another crony is never clearly defined in the script, and the actor avails...