Grand Illusion (1937) on Netflix
During World War I, a German aviator shoots down two French pilots, Captain de Boeldieu, an aristocrat, and Lieutenant Maréchal, a working-class mechanic. Both are held in a prisoner-of-war camp.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb8.0/1041,400 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Captain de Boeldieu, an aristocrat, and Lieutenant Maréchal, a working-class mechanic, serve as French officers in World War I and are shot down by the German aviator von Rauffenstein while flying to examine a blurred spot on earlier reconnaissance photographs. Von Rauffenstein has the captured officers brought to lunch, and he and de Boeldieu find they know people in common. The pair are then sent to a camp for captured officers, where they meet other French prisoners and join the digging of an escape tunnel. At a vaudeville performance staged by the prisoners, word comes that French forces have retaken Fort Douaumont. Maréchal stops the act, and the men sing their national anthem.
Cast
- Werner Florianas Le sergent Arthur
- Sylvain Itkineas Le lieutenant Demolder
Show all 20 cast
- Pierre Blondyas Un soldat
- Albert Brouettas Un prisonnier
- Karl Heilas Un officier de la forteresse
- Carl Kochas Von Rauffenstein's Orderly (uncredited)
- George Forsteras Maison-Neuve
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Grand Illusion (1937)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Renoir's life was saved in 1915 by French pilot Armand Pinsard, who was shot down, captured and escaped from German POW camps seven times each; Pinsard told Renoir that story in 1935, inspired the film, and became the model for Lieutenant Maréchal.
- Benito Mussolini overruled the Venice Film Festival jury in 1937 to stop the film taking the Mussolini Cup, and the episode prompted France's education minister Jean Zay to propose a French festival that became the Cannes Film Festival.
- Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels branded La Grande Illusion 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1' and had its prints confiscated and destroyed, while Vichy French authorities banned it in 1940 for the duration of hostilities to appease Hitler before the German occupation.
- At the 11th Academy Awards, held on 23 February 1939, La Grande Illusion became the first foreign language film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
- Erich von Stroheim, born in Vienna but living in the United States since 1909, spoke little German and struggled to learn his lines between filming scenes, so Renoir hired a dialect coach to get him through them.
- The film's original nitrate negative was returned to France in the 1960s but sat unidentified in storage at the Toulouse Cinémathèque for over 30 years, because nobody suspected it had survived, and was only rediscovered in the early 1990s.
- Renoir used his own uniform as Jean Gabin's costume, and several other cast members had also fought in the war, among them Marcel Dalio, who won the Croix de Guerre for his actions with the French artillery at Villers-Cotterêts in 1914.
