Good but stagey

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2004)

Knowing for so long that this is considered one of the greatest movies of all time...I hate to differ.
It's incredibly good, don't get me wrong. Very powerful and moving at times. But for a film that has great exteriors in its later segments...why the heck does this film begin like a staged play? The officer and the mechanic go for a plane ride...and then they're captured by the Germans. It felt like the room in the first scene was just next door to the German camp. Did Renoir have a very low budget? I'm not even saying I want a full-tilt action sequence of the plane being shot down....just a couple of exteriors between them embarking on their flight and being captured. (I'd accept them standing on the damn airfield by a stationary plane!)
I'm not saying that in 1937 French cinema, it was easy to show a plane being shot down. But come on, ten years earlier, "Wings", the first Best Picture winner, has great plane sequences. And i believe "Hells Angels" in 1930 did too.
In other words, if Renoir had Marechal and Rosenthal escape from the prison in one shot...and then he'd cut to the interior of Elsa's farmhouse when they first come upon it....it wouldn't have been as effective as how he DID shoot it, with them traversing the countryside and all.
To me, visually, the film is unbalanced, with too many interiors in the very beginning, and powerful exterior moments later on. As a character piece, about soldiers of all stripes in WWI Europe, its still effective, and I'm sure it was a groundbreaking story for its time. But as an overall film that stands the test of time? In my book, it doesn't hold up that well. And as one who LOVES old movies as much as modern ones, I can't be accused of being unclear as to how all movies were more talky back then. I'm fine with talky. Its just that Renoir's visual scheme was a little too flat for my tastes. I know you can't do much with a POW camp...but for all the platitudes this film has gotten, i feel that had it been more visually creative to match the exemplary dialogue and acting, it would have deserved to be called ONE OF THE BEST MOVIES EVER.
And is it me, or does Jean Gabin look a lot like Kenneth Branagh??