Jean Renoir (1937)

I’m always apprehensive about seeing an officially great film for the first time.  Time was I didn’t dare say what I really thought.  Although that’s no longer the case, I often think I’ll be unworthy of the classic – in the case of this one, I’m sure I am.  To be honest, I sat stupid through much of La grande illusion and was relieved when it was over.  This wasn’t a question of saying to myself, ‘I don’t really think this is all it’s cracked up to be’.  It was a matter of not really thinking at all:  I couldn’t get what I was watching to mean anything to me.  I realise it makes things worse, in writing this note, to major on how I felt – especially when the problem was that I didn’t feel – but the note will be pointless if I don’t admit its context.  I wonder if the prisoner of war setting, and recoiling from it, is to do with my father’s having been a POW – or whether (more likely) I loathe the whole idea of being in the armed forces and the male camaraderie essential to them.  (I’m so grateful that I’ve never had to do any kind of national service and never will now.)  The humorous concert party sequence in La grande illusion is especially resistible to me.  Whatever the reasons, I clearly have a strong aversion to warfare and companies of men involved with it.  It’s the prospect of the war parts that always puts me off reading War and Peace.

Once the Great War lieutenants Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) eventually escape, make their way through the German countryside towards Switzerland, and find themselves taking refuge in the shed of a German farmer’s widow (Dita Parlo) whose husband was killed at Verdun, my feelings about La grande illusion were transformed.  The relationships between the woman and her child (Little Peters) and the two soldiers are wonderfully described.  I think I’ll remember for a long time the way that the woman, now in love with Maréchal and deeply upset after he and Rosenthal have gone on their way, clears from the table the plates they’ve just eaten from.   I can see throughout the film the evidence of Renoir’s ability to dramatise universal human themes through utterly natural means and individual characters.  The very last shot of a snowy landscape, empty of people except for the tiny and receding figures of Maréchal and Rosenthal, now safely over the Swiss border, is beautiful.

The film’s title echoes that of a 1909 book by the British economist Norman Angell:  his thesis was that European war was futile because of the shared economic interests of the continent’s nations.   In Renoir’s film, which he co-wrote with Charles Spaak, the title refers to what is, in the last analysis, the illusion of human beings’ difference as a result of class as well as of nationality.  At the same time, the particular social status of each of the major characters – the aristocrat Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), the lower class Maréchal, the nouveau riche Jew Rosenthal, and the German officer Rauffenstein (Eric von Stroheim), also an aristocrat – is crucial to the drama’s complexity.  All the actors are very fine, especially Gabin.  Eric von Stroheim’s physique is extraordinary:  he wears his tight uniform like a skin.  The supporting players include Gaston Modot and Jean Dasté (although I somehow missed him).

17 April 2012