Rating: 
Summary: The strangely gentle vision of Jean Renoir
Review: I was absolutely floored when I first saw this movie about a year ago, at the house of a friend. I adore old war films (think "The Great Escape," "Stalag 17," and "Bridge on the River Kwai"), and thought I had the genre just about memorized until I saw this. It is an intense film, a grand one, but ultimately gentle. It takes place during World War I, which, the director once said, was "almost a war of gentlmen." The Nazis were two decades from gaining power, the nations of Europe enjoyed relative prosperity, and the upper classes ruled over all. In this setting, the necessary brutality of such films as I've previously mentioned seems out of place. Indeed, in the first few scenes, a German pilot who has shot down two French fliers invites them for lunch with his officers (!). This kind of respect, this illusion that war abides by certain rules and expectations, seems anachronostic and dated at first, in a post-Vietnam, post-9/11 world. But there is such hope, such desire for a world where the classes between nations are united, that the movie never seems jingoistic or naïve, just optimistic.The performances are exceptional; Jean Gabin, Erich von Stroheim, Pierre Fresnay--all seem to really live in their characters, not simply portray them. Von Stroheim, in particular, brings intense poignancy to the tragic figure of the German commandant von Rauffenstein, with his neck brace, stilted walk, and desperate yearning for companionship (which makes him turn to, of all people, his own enemy, Captain de Boeldieu, whom he shot down 18 months previous). Indeed, a lot of the film's message can be summed up in this character: his friendship with an enemy soldier, expressing Renoir's hope for a more peaceful, less divided world; his accoutrements of wealth and station, which hold him firmly in place, unable to change his views of the structure of the world, even as it shifts around him; and his belief in the eponymous "grand illusion" of the continued supremacy of the aristocrats over the working classes in a world scarred by war. As a bit of a side note, this film, considering its age, is in startlingly pristine condition. The story of the film negative is told on the DVD, as part of the many supplements, so I won't bore you with it here. Suffice it to say that this version of this seminal film was lost for over 60 years before its discovery in the 1990s, resulting in its near-perfect condition today. The picture is as sharp as that of any contemporary film, crystal clear, and refreshingly free of dirt and tears that usually mar most older prints by virtue of constant use. This version is about the best you will find, as it has gone through a tedious, time-consuming restoration process that has given it this impressive sheen. My recommendation: Buy this DVD post haste.
Rating: 
Summary: Food for thought
Review: I was expecting something like one of my favorite comic dramas, "The Great Escape." If prisoners of war in a German camp in World War II could dramatically tunnel out, as they had in that film in my childhood, I was sure that World War I would last long enough for the new prisoners in their first camp to dig their way out. Perhaps I thought the prisoners were joking every time the end of the war was mentioned, as rumors about having the boys home in time for Christmas were rampant unsubstantiated speculation that usually turned out to be untrue for a longer conflict later in the 20th century. The plot of this movie is so much more complicated than "The Great Escape" that it isn't surprising the WWII setting became the TV-sitcom with comic ridicule of the prison command structure, while Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" is still just a black and white movie from 1938. But it is a great movie, and transfer to DVD was made in 1999. There is no American point of view in "Grand Illusion." There are Russian prisoners, upset when a big shipment from the czarina turned out to be books instead of vodka. In the opening scene, a German aristocrat is a pilot who shot down a French aristocrat, the first prisoner to appear in the movie. At the prison camp, a rich banker is the source of whatever bounty the prisoners are able to receive, and even the guards respect the right of those with money to have what they are unable to obtain. The tragic element of the movie is the decline of whatever superiority the aristocracy had before World War One, in either France or Germany. The values which were shared between the aristocrats in the film had become piffle, of no value whatever by 1937, when this movie was made, and the discussions between the characters in this movie trace the loss of such distinctions in the greater cataclysm of war on such a large scale. This is a fine film.
Rating:
Summary: As good as it's hype
Review: I was very cautious in my expectations for this film. So much devotion to GRAND ILLUSION seemed to be based on its fantastic history, but would the movie be so good? Would it be dated? Actually, it IS dated. And there's the strength. Renoir captures a time that is forever gone. No modern film could hope to capture this film's beautiful message. A message of honor and universal humanity. A film that takes time to sink in. The morning after my first viewing, I found myself weeping while thinking of Stroheim clipping the flower. I knew I was hooked. How beautifully ironic that a Nazi officer, and then the Soviet Union, were responsible for saving this master print. Renoir surely smiled from heaven. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful (damn, I'm weeping again).
Rating:
Summary: The Restoration is Incredible!
Review: I watched La Grande Illusion several times, mostly on video. When I got the DVD I was amazed at how good the images were! Watch the restoration clips just to see how all the scratches that we have become accustomed to have been removed! As to the movie I think this is one of the greatest ever made. Watch how the subjects of honor, camaraderie, and humanity are treated. Watch how they all get together around meals. Nobody likes the war, and enemies understand each other: they all want it to come to an end. After that, go read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Judging from the wars we let happen, we have certainly not learned.
Rating:
Summary: The Restoration is Incredible!
Review: I watched La Grande Illusion several times, mostly on video. When I got the DVD I was amazed at how good the images were! Watch the restoration clips just to see how all the scratches that we have become accustomed to have been removed! As to the movie I think this is one of the greatest ever made. Watch how the subjects of honor, camaraderie, and humanity are treated. Watch how they all get together around meals. Nobody likes the war, and enemies understand each other: they all want it to come to an end. After that, go read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Judging from the wars we let happen, we have certainly not learned.
Rating:
Summary: Just an interesting fact
Review: I'm told that Jean Renoir is the son of the even-more famous painter, Auguste Renoir. Most people don't seem to know that so I just posted it FYI.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly the most humane, magnificent movie ever made -
Review: If some nasty alien invader from outer space were to ask me to "name 10 good reasons why we shouldn't obliterate you humans from the universe," Jean Renoir's complicated, gorgeous, heartbreakingly human "Grande Illusion" would be one of my 10 (along with Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," Beethoven's late string quartets, "Das Lied von der Erde" of Mahler and Leonardo da Vinci's drawings -- just to give you an idea). This is not a very analytical response (I suggest you view some of the other customer reviews here, for a more intellectual reaction). I can only say, "La Grande Illusion" is one of the truly great works of art I have had the privilege to experience. I feel so lucky to know this work. If you possibly can, see it soon. It will make you proud to be a human being.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, moving, and humane
Review: In a few particulars GRAND ILLUSION does feel like the nearly seventy-year-old movie that it is: the music is scratchy and distorted, some of the dialogue sounds like it was recorded through a tin can, and some of the cinematic conventions are a little cheesy or old-fasioned by today's standards (notably the downing of the main character's airplane in the beginning). But these are quibbles. And they all but disappear as the movie pulls you in with an attraction as inexorable as gravity. The story begins with the main character - a French airman played by the talented and instantly likeable Jean Gabin - being downed, along with his remote, stiff-lipped superior de Boieldieu, behind enemy lines and sent to wait out the duration of the war in a German POW camp. Friendships are made and broken and made again as the two men are transferred from camp to camp, finally arriving at a castle administrated by Captain von Rauffenstein (the legendary Eric von Stroheim), a crippled German airman embittered by his inability to fly but stoic in the execution of his duty. Like Gabin's superior, von Rauffenstein is a nobleman, and the two enemy officers form a bond touching in its awkward sincerity. But events conspire against this turn, and eventually every character is called upon to do what he imagines to be his duty. (And though telling a suspenseful story was admittedly far from Jean Renoir's first goal, the fact remains that GRAND ILLUSION *is* suspenseful - very much so, especially in the last third. The final five minutes are as white-knuckled as anything Hollywood has made since.) Much has been made by critics of the fact that Gabin's working-class pilot and his noble superior do not become fast friends, which makes the movie sound far more stridently class-warrior than it really is. The movie doesn't demonize the officer-class characters, but shows them as sensitive and intelligent people who have far more in common than their mutually belligerent nations would readily admit. Almost every character in GRAND ILLUSION, whether high-born or low, proves to be noble - truly noble - in the end. The movie is a moving paean to human decency and to the highest impulses to which we can aspire: love, friendship, honor, and sacrifice. We need more movies like this. We need more people like this.
Rating:
Summary: war distracts
Review: in tennis, one plays tennis; so with golf. in prison, one lives to escape -- so said the french officer POW in renoir's masterpiece. being true to one's nature, aspiring for freedom and violating the vicissitudes of war amid "escapist" fanfare in a prison camp jumped out of this movie more than anything. "it's the journey, more than the destination" is yet one more adage that comes to mind.
restored film quality is excellent. von stronheim indeed stands out.
Rating:
Summary: The Big Illusion
Review: Incredibly, this film was nominated for 'Best Picture' in 1938 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (a lofty term for Hollywood's Institute for Self-Congratulation). It lost (of course) to Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You, which must have been slightly embarrassing to Capra. Jean Renoir would make only one other great film [La Regle du Jeu] in his career - yet another career forestalled by the Third Reich. Has anyone examined the extent to which Western Art was set back by Nazi Germany? (Rather as Western Civilization, according to Goethe, was set back 500 years by Martin Luther.) Renoir never even approached the glory of La Grande Illusion after the war. It remains one of the handful - perhaps twenty - of films deserving the title 'Great.'
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