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Overview
User Rating:
Director:
Writers:
Charles Spaak (scenario and dialogue) &
Jean Renoir (scenario and dialogue)
Release Date:
12 September 1938 (USA) more
Plot:
During 1st WW, two French officers are captured. Captain De Boeldieu is an aristocrat while Lieutenant Marechal was a mechanic in civilian life... more | add synopsis
Awards:
Nominated for Oscar. Another 3 wins & 1 nomination more
NewsDesk:
(2 articles)
Woody Allen Calls Himself "A Failed Artist"
(From Studio Briefing - Film News. 28 October 2002)
Woody To Talk About Favorite Films (None Are American)
(From Studio Briefing - Film News. 7 September 2001)
User Comments:
A Humanist Classic more (86 total)
Cast
(Complete credited cast)| Jean Gabin | ... | Lt. Maréchal | |
| Dita Parlo | ... | Elsa (farm woman) | |
| Pierre Fresnay | ... | Capt. de Boeldieu | |
| Erich von Stroheim | ... | Capt. von Rauffenstein (as Eric von Stroheim) | |
| Julien Carette | ... | Cartier, l'acteur (as Carette) | |
| Georges Péclet | ... | Le serrurier (as Peclet) | |
| Werner Florian | ... | Sgt. Arthur | |
| Jean Dasté | ... | The teacher (as Daste) | |
| Sylvain Itkine | ... | Lt. Demolder (as Itkine) | |
| Gaston Modot | ... | The engineer (as Modot) | |
| Marcel Dalio | ... | Lt. Rosenthal (as Dalio) |
Additional Details
Also Known As:
The Grand Illusion (USA)
more
Parents Guide:
Runtime:
114 min | 94 min (1937 release) | Germany:107 min
Country:
Color:
Aspect Ratio:
1.37 : 1 more
Sound Mix:
Mono (Western Electric Sound System)
Certification:
Finland:(Banned) (1942) | Finland:K-16 (1937) | Finland:K-8 (1959) | Malaysia:U | Norway:12 (1959) | Norway:16 (1937) | Germany:12 (f) (1948) | Portugal:M/6 | Australia:G | Germany:(Banned) (1937-1945) | Italy:(Banned) (1938-1945) | South Korea:12 | Sweden:15 | USA:Unrated | UK:U (video rating) | UK:A (original rating) (cut)
Filming Locations:
Fun Stuff
Trivia:
Goebbels made sure that the film's print was one of the first things seized by the Germans when they occupied France. He referred to Jean Renoir as "Cinematic Public Enemy Number 1". For many years it was assumed that the film had been destroyed in an Allied air raid in 1942. However, a German film archivist named Frank Hansel, then a Nazi officer in Paris, had actually smuggled it back to Berlin. Then when the Russians entered Berlin in 1945, the film found its way to an archive in Moscow. When Jean Renoir came to restore his film in the 1960s, he knew nothing of Hansel's acquisition and was working from an old muddy print. Purely by coincidence at the same time, the Russian archive swapped some material with an archive in Toulouse. Included in that exchange was the original negative print. However, because so many prints of the film existed at the time, it would be another 30 years before anyone realised that the version in Toulouse was actually the original negative. more
Goofs:
Anachronisms: As the WWI German soldiers are celebrating a French fort's capture, the map on the wall of the officers club is clearly an inter-war (1919-1938) map of Germany. more
Quotes:
Capt. de Boeldieu:
I think we can do nothing to stop the march of time.
Capt. von Rauffenstein:
Believe me, I don't know who is going to win this war the end, whatever it is will be the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.
more
Movie Connections:
Featured in Jean Renoir: Part One - From La Belle Époque to World War II (1993) (TV) more
Soundtrack:
La Marseillaise more
FAQ
This FAQ is empty. Add the first question.more (86 total)
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Grand Illusion is a movie about class that doesn't hate anyone. How often does that happen? Yes, there are namby-pamby movies that "show all sides" and bore everyone with their non-existent point-of-view, but that's not what I mean. And, of course, there are plenty of movies about class that reveal their biases from the start; I'm rather fond of Eat the Rich movies, myself. But Grand Illusion is about class without dismissing any of its characters. The aristocrats whose world is disappearing are presented as tragic figures, stuck in a code of life that is rapidly becoming meaningless. Both aristocrats know their time is past; the French one accepts this as probably a good thing, the German one doesn't (and blames the French one's sentiments on the French Revolution), but they both know their way of life is soon to be forgotten. And it would be easy for Renoir, when he made the film in the mid-30s a French communist with proletarian sympathies, to demonize these two. But he doesn't; he allows them their humanity, which is the most characteristic feature of Renoir movies in any event (he is the great humanist of movie history).
Nor does he show the collapse of the old way as an unfortunate preface to chaos. The bourgeois characters are good people. The world might be safe in their hands, as safe as in any other hands at least (except for the propensity among nations for war). All of the middle and lower-class characters in the movie are presented as people, not stereotypes. But Renoir doesn't accomplish this by collapsing all class boundaries into some homogenous universalism. These characters remain trapped within their class, and their class is clear to the viewer. The movie is not about the absence of class but about the crushing ironies of the very real existence of class in the lives of the characters. To show all classes without condescension, while retaining a particular point of view (that while people are good, it's best that the aristocratic world is in decline), is pretty amazing.
In Grand Illusion, the nominal hero is working/middle-class, but the upper class isn't evil and the lower class isn't romanticized or dismissed. And it's all accomplished in such a seamless way that many, if not most, first-time viewers might easily think it was a fine movie but something less than great. It sneaks up on you, and more than just about any film you can name, rewards multiple viewings.