French Cinema: Le Grand Illusion by Jean Renoir (1937)

I can't say I liked the film when I started watching it, but by the time is was over I was in tears.  For me it takes a while and some patience to settle into whatever the story is supposed to be.  I knew it was supposed to be about World War I prisoners of war trying to escape.  I was expecting something edgier and more grim than what I saw.  There was little violence and no really evil characters, which for me, raised as I was on films like "Stalag 17" was a bit of a cognitive dissonance.  The Germans in military guise, almost by definition are evil, murdering, racist and creepy, and not as they were portrayed here.  In this film the German officers are gentlemen who show true respect for their opponents in arms. 

The German prison guards seem to like their captives and feel remorse at having to shoot them occasionally.   They are all doing their jobs, and don't much care for the job they have.  This is after all the first world war, which while a truly horrible war in which atrocities happened and poison gas was used, but the Germans in the war were not as yet as virulently anti-Semitic as they became. 

Yet here with the luck of having been captured with Lieutenant Rosenthal, who is a French Jew from a wealthy family,  they are treated to his largesse via the care packages his family sends him. Lieutenant Mareschal becomes his best friend in the POW camp.  

I suppose it isn't so unreal for the life of a POW to be much more lighthearted than that of the regular soldier, after all, for the POW the war is over, and provided your captors are not cruel (a truly big if) then it is an enviable state.  Reading a book like Robert Grave's "Goodbye to All That" certainly would disabuse anyone of the idea that WWI was pleasant.

  

I am not going to reveal anything about the ending other than it is very affecting.  The message of the film is a hopeful one made as it was in the darkening years of the late 1930s, when another war with Germany was coming.  Whether it was a fond hope or not I leave to you.   I thought it was an exceptional film.