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Directed by:
Jean Renoir 
Written by:
Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak
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| Released: |
1937 |
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| Genre: |
FOREIGN
WAR
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| Origin: |
France |
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| Length: |
117 |
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PRO Reviews
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| PRO | | | "Artistically masterful." | | (Variety) | | | "Justifies the reports, and in addition, has the virtue of shocking timeliness with respect to current war threat... It does not preach; it shows. The film's performances are flawless... Their admirable restraint is matched by abilities to give full meaning to their roles ... and a happy conjunction of significant subject matter, a director equal to his task, and actors equal to theirs. A masterpiece is the inevitable result. English sub-titles ... [are] too few in number... My only objection is that in a picture of such absorbing interest, it is annoying to miss a single word." | | (Archer Winston, New York Post) | | | | "Like most of Jean Renoir's films, Grand Illusion is an example of... intensive cinema ... What, asks Renoir, is the experience of a man in modern war? | | (Richard Griffith, Nation) | | | | "A film about World War One made on the brink of World War Two, is a milestone masterpiece, a war movie without a single battle scene. Above all, it is concerned with the illusions of elitism and of nationalism, the artificial boundaries man creates for his legal and illegal killings, the stupidities of the bigotries and class barriers that lead men to destroy each other... Perhaps the ultimate film about war." | | (Judith Crist) | | | | "One of the true masterpieces of the screen." | | (Pauline Kael) | | | "A powerful attack on the stupidity and spiritual waste of war... A profound, almost great film dominated by the intellectual arguments of its script. It stands with Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick's Paths of Glory as one of the most important antiwar films ever made." | | (R.A.E. Pickard, Dictionary of 1000 Best Films, 1971 ) | | | | "With the exception of Dovjenko's Arsenal , the most telling shaft which the cinema has ever directed against the institution of war ... It touched upon the possibility that there is some perversity in the nature of man which is drawn to the unreasonable and profitless destruction which is brought by war ...Today its argument, besides being profuse and rambling is wide of the mark... La Grande Illusion expressed itself entirely through dialogue and the actors who spoke it. Very accomplished actors they were, Stroheim, Gain, and Fresnay, but their methods were of the theatre, all except Stroheim, whose vivid presence dominated and somewhat outbalanced the film." | | (Paul Rotha & Richard Griffith The Film Till Now, 1949) | | | | "The film was about the First World War, but the ideas in it were dangerously appropriate to the next. Wars, it said, are run for an elite. They will always be against the interests of most of the men who fight them. The flag is a remote symbol, and military honor is bunk; it is class, not honor, that unites the French and German officers in the film." | | (Penelope Gilliatt) | | | "Indisputably a classic of the screen. A big theme: war and man's fundamental humanity to man, against a background which protests the very opposite. Renoir directs his prisoner-of-war story with a masterly blend of humour and suspense - and the acting is memorable." | | (NFT Bulletin, 1974) | | | | |
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