La Grande Illusion

Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion opened in 1937 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1939 — the first non-English-language film ever nominated for the Academy's top prize. The film entered the Sight & Sound critics' poll's upper tier in 2022, eighty-five years after its release. The film was made in the immediate run-up to the Second World War, with both Renoir and his cast becoming internationally consequential figures in the years that followed.

The First World War. French aviator officers shot down behind German lines pass through a series of POW camps. The film follows two French officers — Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), an aristocrat, and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a working-class mechanic — alongside the wealthy Jewish-French officer Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), through their prison-camp experiences and their eventual escape attempts. Erich von Stroheim plays the German camp commandant Captain von Rauffenstein, an aristocrat whose class identity creates an unexpected complicity with de Boeldieu across enemy lines.

The film's central thesis — that the actual divisions in twentieth-century European society are class-based rather than national — became politically consequential in the immediate pre-war period. Renoir's own Fr political position made the film a target for Nazi Germany after the 1940 occupation, and the original negative was confiscated by the Wehrmacht; it was rediscovered in a Munich military archive in 1958, restored in 1990, and remains the foundational text in the Renoir filmography. Gabin and Dalio's central performances are among the most distinctive of pre-war French cinema.