Jean Renoir made the most generous war film in cinema history. The generosity was not distributed equally, and the film does not know this.
PRISONER INTAKE RECORD — WINTERSBORN CAMP
Name: de Boeldieu, Capt. Items confiscated: None of consequence. Items retained: White gloves. Monocle. The habit of command, carried so naturally it no longer requires effort. Name.
Name: Maréchal, Lt. Items confiscated: Most things. Items retained: Accent. The specific frankness of a man who has never needed to perform his place because his place was never in question until it was.
Name: von Rauffenstein, Cmdt. Items confiscated: The full use of his body, almost entirely — the corset, the steel brace, the neck that no longer turns. Items retained: The geranium. One room. The certainty that the world ending around him was, at least, the correct world to have lost.
Name: Rosenthal, Lt. Items confiscated: Nothing yet. Items retained: Everything. The food parcels, the maps, the money, the warmth. For now.
This is not the film’s form. It is the film’s argument.
| Director | Jean Renoir |
|---|---|
| Year | 1937 |
| Runtime | 113 minutes |
| Cast | Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Marcel Dalio |
| Award | First non-English-language film nominated for Academy Award for Best Picture; Grand Prix, Venice 1937 |
| Streaming | MUBI, Criterion Channel |
Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) is set during the First World War in a succession of German prisoner-of-war camps, following French officers captured in aerial combat. Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a mechanic from the working class, and Lieutenant Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), from a wealthy Jewish banking family, are eventually separated from the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and attempt an escape across the Swiss border. The German commandant von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), who captured them and who knows de Boeldieu from the peacetime world of European aristocracy, watches over the camp from the tower where his injuries have confined him. The film was the first non-English-language film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, received the Grand Prix at Venice in 1937, and was called by Orson Welles the greatest film ever made. It arrived in this sequence directly from the previous review on this blog, which praised it as “the film about the preceding generation’s war that refuses to locate the evil in any single class or rank, extending its formal generosity even to the German aristocrat who understands his world is ending.” That was accurate. What it was not, quite, was a complete account of where the generosity comes from, and what it cannot see about itself.
The Paths of Glory review argued that Grand Illusion “does not have villains” and treats “the German aristocrat with the same formal warmth it gives the French Jewish banker and the working-class mechanic.” This is true that the film has no villains. It is not quite true that the warmth is distributed equally. Watch the scenes between de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein — the two aristocrats from opposite sides of the war, conducting their conversations in English as the shared language of their class, handling each other’s presence with the recognitional ease of men who attended the same institutions, read the same books, rode at the same estates. Renoir films these scenes with a sustained tenderness he reserves almost entirely for them: the close-up on von Rauffenstein’s face when de Boeldieu is shot, the sustained take of de Boeldieu dying slowly in the tower, von Rauffenstein cutting the geranium — his single cultivated flower in the stone room, the only living thing he has permitted himself — because it now seems wrong to keep it alive. These are the film’s most formally elaborate moments. This is where the camera stays longest, settles most deeply, registers grief with the most complete attention. Renoir was Auguste Renoir’s son. He had spent his childhood inside the world these two men represent. The warmth he extends to their passing is not neutral humanist generosity. It is the warmth of a man who knew that world from inside it, who watched it end, and who could not help mourning it even while making a film that was supposed to be about something larger than mourning.
The film’s central argument — that the grand illusion is nationality, that class solidarity across enemy lines is more real than the flag either man fights under — assumes that cross-national aristocratic recognition is the most genuine form of human connection available in a world at war. This is not a neutral claim. It is the worldview of the class that benefits most from believing it: the class for whom national borders were always primarily an administrative inconvenience, for whom the real affiliations were social and educational and hereditary, for whom the enemy officer at dinner was always more comprehensible than the enlisted man at one’s own table. De Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein understand each other perfectly. Neither has ever been required to understand Maréchal. The film presents their mutual recognition as civilisation’s highest expression, and in doing so, it accepts without examination the class’s own account of its value. It mourns the passing of a world without asking what the world cost to maintain. The aristocracy did not simply fail to survive the industrial age of warfare. It produced the conditions — the interlocking alliance systems, the professional officer class, the centuries of territorial ambition converted into diplomatic obligation — that made the industrial age of warfare possible. The men von Rauffenstein mourns in his stone tower built the tower. The film cannot bring itself to say this, because it loved the men.
Renoir’s generosity extends to everyone in the frame. His tenderness, which is a different instrument, belongs almost entirely to the class he was born inside. The film does not know the difference.
Rosenthal is where the film’s most urgent argument lives, and where it is most embedded in what the film cannot state directly. Marcel Dalio plays him with a generosity of spirit that the film matches with its own: he is the source of the food parcels that make imprisonment bearable, the map that makes escape possible, the money that makes the escape survivable. He absorbs Maréchal’s casual antisemitic irritations without converting them into resentment. He is, in the film’s economy of human value, the most indispensable character — and the one whose belonging is most explicitly at stake. The film makes the argument, in 1937, with quiet and absolute clarity, that Rosenthal is French. That his Jewishness is a biographical detail, not a destiny. That the real affiliations are the ones men choose — comradeship, shared risk, the rope over the prison wall at night — rather than the ones imposed by birth or blood or the edicts of governments that have decided, with bureaucratic thoroughness, that some people’s belonging is provisional.
This argument was not casual in 1937. It was an endangered position, made in full knowledge of what was happening in Germany, released into a Europe already organised around the systematic dismantling of exactly the world Renoir was arguing for. Rosenthal is the film’s most political character and its most heartbreaking one, because the film is making his case with such warmth and such formal conviction, and the world was already answering. The intake record at the top of this review lists what Rosenthal retains as “everything — for now.” The “for now” is not in the film. It is what the film cannot say, made in the year it was made, in the country it was made in, by a filmmaker who understood what he was seeing and chose to argue against it through the only instrument he had. The argument was correct. The world was not listening. The two things together — the rightness of the argument and the indifference of the world to its rightness — are what make Rosenthal the most unbearable character in the film, once you understand when the film was made and what happened to the world it was speaking into.
The film that illuminates Grand Illusion‘s limitation most precisely is not an external comparison but Renoir’s own next film. The Rules of the Game (1939), made two years later, returns to the French aristocracy with the same formal warmth and discovers, in the interim, that the warmth has curdled. The château at La Colinière houses the same class Grand Illusion mourns: people of elegance and education who understand the forms of civilised behaviour and conduct their emotional lives with cheerful amorality beneath those forms. But where Grand Illusion could not quite bring itself to examine the class it loved, The Rules of the Game examines it with the dispassion of a filmmaker who has spent two more years watching what that class was doing to France. The hunting sequence — the mechanical slaughter of rabbits and pheasants conducted with the same social ease as the dinner that follows it — is Renoir arriving at something Grand Illusion approached and turned away from: that the class whose passing he mourned was also the class that treated living things as entertainment, that the refinement and the brutality were not in tension but in the same gesture, and that the grand illusion was not nationality. It was the belief that elegance is a form of virtue.
The Rules of the Game was released in June 1939, two months before the war it was implicitly predicting began. French audiences rioted at the première. Renoir cut the film, trying to make it more acceptable. He later said it was the film of his of which he was most proud. Between Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game — between the film that mourned the aristocracy and the film that understood what it was mourning — Renoir became the filmmaker his first instinct had prevented him from being. Grand Illusion is the more beloved film. The Rules of the Game is the more honest one, because it is the film made after Renoir stopped protecting what he loved long enough to see it clearly.
Grand Illusion is the most formally generous film in the history of cinema, and its generosity is real — genuinely, completely real, the warmth of a filmmaker who believed in his bones that the human material inside every person was worth attending to regardless of the uniform or the rank or the flag. But generosity and honesty are different instruments, and the film that could extend warmth to every person in its frame could not extend scrutiny to the class whose passing it was watching. Rosenthal is on the other side of the Swiss border. The geranium is cut. The war continues. And the film that argued, in 1937, that what men share is always more real than what divides them, did not know that the year of its release was already the answer.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939): Renoir’s own next film, in which the humanist warmth of Grand Illusion is tested against the class it was made to mourn — the same French aristocracy, two years later, in a hunting sequence that reveals what Grand Illusion could not bring itself to say; the two films together are the closest cinema has come to watching a filmmaker revise his own most cherished conviction.
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957): our review is on this blog — the war film made twenty years later that knows precisely where the evil is, and whose certainty is both its moral clarity and its formal limitation; placed beside Grand Illusion, the two films represent the defining argument in war cinema between a camera that has no villains and a camera that cannot see past the ones it has found.
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