Outstandingly slow!

Rating: 10/10 (28 April 2005)

I should clarify. In what is known as the first prison break film ever made, I was initially surprised at how similar Grand Illusion was to the 1963 film The Great Escape, which is to be expected, of course, since this film probably had such a profound impact on that one (and any respectable break-out movie that has ever come out, as it were). I was also surprised to see that, not only does the movie move at an alarmingly slow pace during much of the middle of it, but several of the characters come across as almost stereotypical caricatures, like they are filling in expected roles in a formula film.
But then (and here is where it really struck me how great this movie is), before I even realized anything was changing in my mind, it occurred to me that the combination of the slow pace and the caricatures were almost like a cinematic justification of the pace of the film and the characters that appeared in it. After more and more seemingly slow or even irrelevant scenes, you suddenly see these caricatures not only as characters rather than caricatures, but as people rather than characters.
At least as important is Director Jean Renoir's desire to present it not as a movie about relationships between people of different nationalities (an understandable conclusion, since it takes place in a time of war), but of HUMAN relationships, of common bonds of humanity rather than nationality. He explains this in a wonderful video introduction to the film, in which he also talks about the film's nearly miraculous survival after years of having been lost. If you get a chance to catch it on DVD, you will be watching a copy that was thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis decades ago!