A Man's World

To that end, while the characters occasionally border on the grotesque, they are never less than pitifully, frailly human, none more so than Hollywood outcast von Stroheim, whose subtly modulated performance is a masterpiece of pride and pathos. The German captain's stiff, lurching physicality (the actor came up with his own costume, including the bizarre neck brace) makes a startling contrast to the tenderness of his sentiments, especially toward de Boeldieu. Critics have often focused on the philosophical and political content of the pair's curious relationship, but the image of the two men talking easily together on a banquette, matching wits and good manners, reveals that this is as much a love story as it is a film about war. Which is precisely what makes the film so moving and, at least in ghastly hindsight, something different from what it was upon its release: a hopeful, lyric epilogue made in the wake of what was, at that time, the most devastating war in the modern world, a film about essential human goodness.

An exchange at the end between Maréchal and Rosenthal on the illusion of national borders helps explain the film's title, though only in part. In his unfinished book on the director, written in the late '50s, Bazin argued that Grand Illusion exposes the falseness of those illusions that divide human beings -- race, class, nationality -- even as it acknowledges that such illusions can also be beautiful, and life-affirming, as with one prisoner's consuming need to translate the Greek poet Pindar. "The grand illusions are the illusion of hatred, which arbitrarily divides men who in reality are not separated by anything," Bazin wrote, while acknowledging that these illusions, these boundaries, nonetheless exist. What he left unsaid, of course, is that these very illusions would lead straight to Auschwitz. A moralist and a humanist both, Renoir had no way of knowing that the humanity he had such faith in would turn out to be less truthful than his remarkable art.

GRAND ILLUSION | Directed by JEAN RENOIR | Written by RENOIR and CHARLES SPAAK | Produced by ALBERT PINKOVITCH and FRANK ROLLMER | Re-released by Rialto Pictures | At Laemmle's Royal

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN | Directed by PATRICE CHéREAU | Written by DANI...LE THOMPSON, CHéREAU and PIERRE TRIVIDIC Produced by CHARLES GASSOT | Released by Kino International | At the Nuart