La Grande Illusion

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

It is the First World War, and French aviator officers shot down behind German lines are passing through a series of POW camps. The film follows two of them, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a working-class mechanic, along with the wealthy Jewish-French officer Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), through life in the camps and their attempts at escape. 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.

Its central argument, that the real divisions in twentieth-century European society ran along lines of class and not of nation, carried political weight in the years just before the war. Renoir's own political position made the film a target for Nazi Germany after the 1940 occupation, and the Wehrmacht confiscated the original negative; it was rediscovered in a Munich military archive in 1958 and restored in 1990, and it remains the foundational text of the Renoir filmography. Gabin and Dalio give two of the most distinctive performances of pre-war French cinema.