Grand Illusion - Criterion Collection
by Jean Renoir
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dita Parlo, Erich von Stroheim, Jean Gabin, Julien Carette, Pierre FresnayDirector: Jean Renoir
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Christian Matras
Writer: Jean Renoir
Editor: Marguerite Renoir
Editor: Marthe Huguet
Producer: Albert Pinkovitch
Producer: Frank Rollmer
Writer: Charles Spaak
DVD: 2 Layers, Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 114 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-11-23
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Grand Illusion - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: When two brave men meet face to face...though they come to the ends of the earth.'
Summary: 5 Stars
'Grand Illusions' is not as gritty or pessimistic as are Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' or Cobb's 'Paths of Glory' but must be rated as one of the all-time great anti-war films. The interaction between the French captive, de Boieldeu, and his German captor, Von Rauttenstein, is especially poignant. They have known each other before the war in Paris where they evidently shared the same 'girlfriend'. More importantly...at least to the German...is that he and the Frenchman are of the same aristocratic class and both are career military officers in the finest sense of the word.
Boieldeu is the captive but doesn't disagree with his German Commandant. The Commandant tells him...so correctly as it turns out...that the War will be the end of people of their class and temprament. As it turns out, the German is dead right and his forced to shoot his old friend as he provides a diversion...in the noblest tradition...for the escape of his two lower class officer friends.
Erich von Stroheim is more than perfect as von Rauttenstein. He walks stiffly erect not simply because of his Prussian underpinnings but because 'my back was broken in two places and I have a silver plate in my skull and knee.' von Rauttenstein has contempt for his role as a jailer but, again in tune with his aristrocratic birth, 'I do my duty.'
Stroheim steals the film as the intense but sympathetic officer who 'does his duty' and shoots his friend. He grieves as Boieldeau lies dying and tells him that 'at least you die was we should die but...me...I missed my chance.' Boieldeau lies dead and the camera catches the German's hand...solemnly lovingly...closing Boeldeau's open eyes. We see his opposite hand clenched in a fist. Powerful.
Apparently Hitler banned this film in Germany...and little wonder. Not only was it anti-war but, just as importantly, it anticipated the Nazi Party's leveling and destruction of the German aristocracy in favor of the common working man...the Nazi proletariat.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--'Skull Rack' and 'Hummingbird God'--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Summary of Grand Illusion - Criterion Collection
One of the very first prison escape movies, Grand Illusion is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Jean Renoir's antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay, as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein. Following a smash theatrical re-release, Criterion is proud to present Grand Illusion in a new special edition, with a beautifully restored digital transfer.It's long been one of the revered classics of international cinema, but there is no fine layer of dust over La Grande Illusion. Jean Renoir's film is just as vibrant, exciting, and wise as it has ever been. The story is set during World War I, mostly in a couple of German POW camps, where two very different French prisoners plot to escape: the working-class officer Mar?chal (Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy) and the upper-class de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay). The suspenseful backbone of the story is formed by these escape attempts, but Renoir is primarily concerned with the way people treat each other, and especially with how class and nationality inform human relations. Most compelling of all the film's characters is the aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, unforgettably incarnated by stiff-backed Erich von Stroheim; although he runs a prison camp, von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with de Boieldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility. There is nothing dewy or naive about Renoir's vision (and two years after the release of this antiwar film, Europe was plunged into another world war), yet Grand Illusion is one of those movies that makes you feel good about such long-outmoded ideas as sacrifice and brotherhood. After it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared the film "Cinematographic Enemy Number One." There can be no higher praise. --Robert Horton
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