October 714, 1999
movie shorts
recommended
Perhaps the most profound moment in Jean Renoirs 1937 film comes with the first shift in scene from the inside of a French barracks to the inside of a German one. Filmed on the eve of the Second World War and set during the First, the film showed German soldiers living their lives the same way French ones did, and that for both the goal was more to survive the war than to win it. The story of three French soldiers and their attempts to escape from a German POW camp, Grand Illusion prefigures Stalag 17 with its absurd gallows humor, and also serves as Renoirs ambivalent elegy for the landed classes whichever individuals survive the war, nobility is doomed. Renoirs boundless humanity and gift for delicate symbolism look positively magisterial next to a glib entertainment like Three Kings, which only underscores how important the film is now.