La Grande Illusion 75th Anniversary [DVD]

NB: As is their wont, Amazon have unhelpfully lumped together the reviews of various editions and formats of this title. This review refers to StudioCanal's DVD and Blu-ray releases, which conain different extras.La Grande Illusion is one of those films whose reputation as one of the pinnacles of cinematic achievement has always seemed unfathomable to me. If anything, its reputation does the film a great disservice. It IS a good film - a very good film, in fact - but it's not the great one it may have seemed before so many P.O.W. films burrowed through similar ground after the war, and it seems to have less to say with each passing year, gradually turning into yet another prisoner of war movie moving from boarding school hijinks to slightly superficial comments on the class system. There are a few excellent scenes in the last third, not least once Von Stroheim re-enters the film, but it feels at times as if there's more French studio system craft than substance. Certainly as an anti-war film it's surprisingly ineffective compared to Pabst or Milestone's earlier efforts.Studio Canal's 75th Anniversary edition DVD is an improvement over the previous Warners/Canal + release, this has a restored sequence missing from the earlier release and an introduction by film historian Ginette Vincendreau. Also included are two of Renoir's silent short films:Made with film stock left over from the production of Nana, 1927's Sur un Air de Charleston is described as a holiday film for all concerned, and that's the best way to view it. Jean Renoir seems never to have thought enough of it to even edit the footage together. The plot is a simple reversion of racial stereotypes - in 2028 a black explorer travels to a post-holocaust Paris where a white native girl teaches him the Charleston (naturally he assumes she's a savage whose dancing is a prelude to her eating him before giving in to the seductive beat of `White Aborigine' music). There are plenty of surreal touches, be it the pet gorilla eating the flowers in Catherine Hessling's hair, the angels the girl telephones (Renoir and producer Pierre Braunberger among them) or the fact that black performer Johnny Huggins plays his part in minstrel blackface while Hessling's dancing ability is almost completely nonexistent, and there are some interesting occasional experiments with slow motion, but there's not really enough to sustain it for its modest two reels.1928 short La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes aka The Little Match Girl also suffers from an unconvincing and badly cast lead performance from Mrs Renoir, Catherine Hessling, who looks anything but little and more than capable of looking after herself, which certainly takes the edge off Hans Christian Andersen's tale. Indeed, the film makes a couple of attempts to write itself out of the problem by portraying her as more than usually stupid, but they feel more like in-jokes than anything else. It's a shame, because the film itself is an impressively staged fantasy with great special effects and some interesting visual experimentation with camera speed and focus amid the unashamedly romantic treatment of the fantasy scenes, especially the sequence where the girl and her toy soldier are chased through the clouds by Death in the form of a relentless Hussar. If only you could care about the character...After a few disappointments like their truly dismal Blu-ray transfer of  Ran [Blu-ray ], Studio Canal's Blu-ray comes with a very impressive new transfer that's slightly let down by ridiculously tiny subtitles that will be troublesome for some watching on anything less than a 40inch set - why is it that so many Blu-ray producers seem to assume everybody will be watching on a 60inch screen? On the plus side there's a plethora of featurettes, including the reminiscences of script girl Francois Giroud in an extract from a 1986 French TV programme that saw her revisiting the castle location for the film, a couple of restoration pieces, critical appraisals by Olivier Curchod, John Truby and Ginette Vincendeau and both the original and 1958 reissue trailers. The latter is particularly interesting, with Renoir 'doing a Hitchcock' and simply addressing the camera for six minutes with his own reminiscences about the film. Unlike their earlier DVD special edition, it's missing one of the Renoir silent short films, the surreal Sur un Air de Charleston, instead offering only 1928's La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes aka The Little Match Girl.The same Blu-ray edition that StudioCanal have released in France and Germany with the same language and subtitle options, initial copies of the UK Blu-ray come in digibook packaging with an English-language booklet about the film - though be warned, it's a bit difficult getting the disc back into the packaging.

Well, no it isn't as that honour must surely go to 'Casablanca' but it is still pretty damn near the top of the list.Director Jean Renoir saw the world as being organised along parallel lines - i.e. a French farmer having more in common with a Chinese farmer than with a French financier - and he explores this philosophy in 'La Grande Illusion', turning what in the hands of a lesser director would be a run-of -the-mill prisoner of war drama into a moving study of friendship. Indeed, the more Renoir explores the common bonds that unite soldiers, prisoners and civilians irrespective of national boundaries, the more the viewer is tempted to ask "what was the point of the 1914 - 1918 war?" - perhaps that is the Illusion of the film's title. As one character states:"Frontiers are an invention of men. Nature doesn't give a hoot".The heart of the film is the relationship between prisoner and gaoler: the aristocratic French captain de Boeldieu and his German counterpart von Rauffenstein. Both men are much easier and more relaxed in each other's company than they are with their own 'working class' army compatriots, readily swapping stories about Maxim's in Paris and horse racing in Liverpool. But Rauffenstein's faith in his class background is ultimately misguided (a grand delusion?). Whereas Boeldieu has accepted the decline and ultimate demise of the status of the aristocracy and respects the talent of his fellow soldiers without actually befriending them, Rauffenstein yearns for the maintenance of the old social order and can even barely acknowledge the working class as genuine army officers. This clash between Rauffenstein's misplaced upper-class idealism and Boeldieu's pragmatic realism leads only to tragedy.In one notable scene, the Germans sing their patriotic song 'Die Wacht am Rhein', only for the French to retort with 'La Marseillaise'. Hang on a second: didn't Michael Curtiz copy that in Casablanca 5 years later in 1942? Hmm ... maybe 'Casablanca' is not so great after all!If you have already seen 'La Grande Illusion', see it again. If you have not, then buy this film.

"La Grande Illusion" is often considered one of the best movies ever made, and people like Woody Allen see it every day or something like that. It was directed in 1937 by Jean Renoir, son of painter Auguste Renoir. The setting is the 1st world war, and the protagonists are prisoners of war: three frenchmen, an aristocrat, an officer and a jew are captured by the germans. But this is no usual war film. First of all, there is no simple propagandistic message or depictions of good vs evil. On the contrary, enemy soldiers are behaving like gentlemen towards each other (often producing comic effects, as when a german guard tries to console one of the prisoners by giving him a harmonica, or the officer who begs the escapee he shot for forgiveness). And questions like why the war started and how it will end is put aside. Instead, more existential questions come to the fore. Like the futility of it all. And social questions like class relations and nationalities. It is interesting how nationalities are mixed, in the film german, french and english is spoken making it a film about Europe. Europe before the EU and before Hitler. But even so it has a timeless quality. This is an anti war-film, but not by depicting people being slaughtered or cities in ruins. Instead it feels like a celebration of life and friendship which makes the war going on seem all the more insane and a grand illusion indeed.The DVD from Optimum is very good. The picture/transfer is excellent in every way, I watched it on a projector and it looked like new. And there are good extras: two early short movies by Renoir and two introductions, one by Renoir himself and one by film critic Jeanette Vincendeau. Both are well worth watching, Renoir gives an inspired speech to the audience and Vincendeau an analysis of the film.Strongly recommended!