Not the Greatest Anti-War Film, ever,...quite,

Rating: 8/10 (11 August 2012)

The accolade for the greatest anti-war film ever made, must still go to Lewis Milestone's 1930 'All Quiet On the Western Front', though being an American film, feels very European. It's emotive depth and utter despair amongst the trenches reaches far and deep into the souls of everybody who watches it.
Le Grande Illusion, though, always feels like a French farce, albeit a very good one. The script is its master-stroke, as is the characterisation of its lead players. I realise that this tongue-in- cheek laugh-in-the face of adversity is its trump card and it generally does a very good job of keeping the story flowing, as it's nearly two hours long.
Erich von Stroheim, as he did also in Howard Hughes' "Hell's Angels" plays the archetypal German high-officer - his monocled Nosferatu-looks fitting every conceivable stereotype of what such an image of evil should look like. Jean Gabin, of course, known to us who love our (mostly) later French classics is reassuringly amiable and a portrayal of a decent, ordinary Frenchman should be like - rather like how 'our' John Mills would do 'us'.
Maybe I have a problem with this film, in that it all bumbles along so nicely, never gets too heavy and that it's all too easy to simply not think too much, or too deeply about it. I'm on my fourth play now, in as many years, yet I still prefer Kubrick's 'Paths Of Glory', for its real shock of anti-war, how it grips the viewer like a vice, its claustrophobia hanging heavy, like a dose of flu. I also get strange hints of Billy Wilder's 'Stalag 17' - no-one has termed that an anti-war film yet it carries the same camaraderie and unification across the social classes (though not as wide; more racial probably) along with Wilder's infamous satirical wit.
Like another reviewer has said, perhaps Renoir's film has lost its sting through time - how horribly ironic it must have been for French cinema goers to find that these horrors should test them again, just two years later. That is, perhaps the Grande Illusion, the ridiculousness and futility of it all.