Great movie

Rating: 9/10 (16 April 2005)

The image is grainy, the sound tinny, and it's a great movie, one of only a handful of movies that are truly anti-war. The ordinary "anti-war movie" typically gives us plenty of blood and intestines to show us how awful war is -- and then at the end, we win. Nobody really wins here, although I guess two French officers escape from the German POW camp successfully and reach Switzerland. But this film gives us no battles, no gore, only one death, and no long speeches about how fruitless it all is.
There are four principal actors -- Gabin, Dalio, Fresnay, and von Stroheim (who picked up his "von" from the same place Claus von Bulow got his). Gabin has big eyes and a homely face that seems made of putty. Fresnay projects aristocracy and good breeding. Dalio is Rosenthal, the Jewish French lieutenant. He speaks German with a Yiddish accent, like James Cagney did. Dalio was in a number of French movies that have become classics of their kind then, barely escaping the Nazis, came to Hollywood where he played in three movies made from Hemingway stories, leading to his apotheosis on the silver screen as the gay interior decorator in "Pillow Talk."
The "grand illusion" in the title comes from an exchange between Gabin and Dalio as they are crossing the German countryside in civilian clothes. Gabin says, I don't know who will win this war "but let's hope it is the last," and Dalio dismisses the hope as an illusion. History has come down on Dalio's side. As Santayana put it, "only the dead have seen the end of war."
The film takes a trajectory from amusing to tragic, involving several POW plot touchstones -- the digging of the tunnel, the musical show in which prisoners dress up as girls, the hidden contraband in the barracks. The comedy is pretty good sometimes. The Russian prisoners receive a big box, a present from the Tsaritsa. "Caviar and booze!" They invite the French and English prisoners to the coming feast, but when they break open the crate it's full of books -- "Introduction to Grammar," "Elements of Philosophy." They are so enraged they set fire to the box and its contents and brawl with the guards. The Russian aristocracy might have avoided revolution if they'd understood the needs of the common man.
The saddest part is near the end, when Gabin and Dalio take shelter in a farmhouse with a German widow and her young daughter. The widow is plain looking, young but not too young, and blond, and she's lost all the men in her family to the war. The little girl, Charlotte, is trusting but not cute. Over time Gabin and the widow fall in love. He teaches her a bit of French and she teaches him a little German -- "Lotte hat blaue Augen." It's all very understated. No one weeps when Gabin and Dalio leave, except perhaps the viewer. I'm moved every time I see it, enveloped in a loathsome sentiment.
It's well worth watching, if only for Eric von Stroheim's performance as the major in charge of the prisoner's castle. He is an aristocrat and so is one of the French prisoners, Fresnay. Von Stroheim treats Fresnay with masculine affection, like the geranium he cultivates in his stone fortress. The two aristocrats know their time has come, that the world belongs to commoners like Gabin and Dalio. They're like the gunfighters or gangs of the disappearing Old West, unable to adjust to the changes.
Fresnay is philosophical about it. Von Stroheim regrets having only been severely wounded and not killed outright. That monocle! Those braces on his neck! The cigarette holder! And I swear that he speaks French with an American accent! See the major click his heels and bow. See him drape his greatcoat over his shoulders like a cape. See the movie!