Feckless...

Rating: 2/10 (19 November 2007)

Granted, Jean Renoir had yet to experience the long Nazi nacht to come (as his disclaimer on the Criterion disc makes perfectly clear), but, to see an all-singing, all-dancing pro-war film made just prior to same is more than a little mind-boggling. "I owe these riches to the misfortunes of war," one of the Upper Crust boasts early on. As well he might: in addition to great accommodations (a castle), there's caviar and vodka and fine clothes (including spit-and-polished uniforms and jackboots); all pilfered from the dead. "Where there are Germans, there is order." Uh-huh... Erich Von Stroheim is hilarious as Herr Hermann the Humane. "I beg you," he pleads with an escaping prisoner: "Come down!" When the prisoner refuses, Stroheim reluctantly caps him. "Forgive me," he asks the wounded man: "I aimed at your legs." "It was five hundred feet, with poor visibility," the all-too-forgiving recaptured prisoner replies: "Besides, I was running..." "Please, no excuses," Stroheim persists with a clearly pained expression: "I was clumsy." This is just one exchange among many that make THE GRAND DELUSION rife for ribbing. (One can only imagine what the crew of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 could make of this one...) Renoir's contention is that "The war of 1914 was almost a war of gentlemen." When escapee Gabin and his buddy, in plain sight of their German pursuers, are allowed to cross a mythical border into Switzerland, one almost expects them to stop and turn and wave. Perhaps Renoir never heard about strafing or machinegun nests or poison gas. This movie certainly suggests as much.