Grand Illusion (1937)

Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion arrives from 1937 bearing the weight of unanimous reverence, and it is easy to see why the canon has kept it polished. The film follows French officers through German prison camps, trading battle scenes for the quieter miseries of confinement, and it concerns itself chiefly with the slow dissolution of the European aristocracy. Captain de Boeldieu and the German Rauffenstein discover they have more in common with each other than with the men of their own nations, a shared cosmopolitanism that the war renders obsolete. Renoir treats this decline with genuine tenderness. It is a humanist film about humanist things, which is to say it predates the modern vocabulary of social consciousness by several decades and shows no interest in acquiring it.

On the matter of representation, the film offers a Jewish prisoner, Rosenthal, whose generosity quietly refutes the antisemitic caricature, and a Black French officer who appears at Wintersborn only to be ignored and shrugged off by his comrades. These are gestures of common decency, not a program. The female character, Elsa, is a war widow who takes in the fugitives and falls for Marechal across a language barrier; she is drawn with sympathy and given no agenda beyond grief and longing. The class conflict that runs through the picture targets a dying nobility, not the machinery of capital, so the eat-the-rich impulse stays dormant.

The anti-war thesis is stated plainly, though Renoir smuggles it through character and tragedy instead of a sermon. There is no environmental lament, no inquiry into bodily self-acceptance, no consideration of neurodivergence, and no reworking of the historical record. It is a great film. Greatness, as ever, is not the same as being current.