The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean Renoir · La Grande Illusion · a film · 1937 · written with Charles Spaak · in French, with German, English and some Russian · the film as released, about 113 to 114 minutes as restored
Mode
War film without a battle; prison and escape picture, elegy for a caste and fable of class across nations in one film
Mythos
The last knights of a dying order, one choosing the people and the other killing him with courtesy; the passage out of the underworld of fortresses into winter; a stable at Christmas with a child and a foreign mother; a frontier that cannot be seen
Phase
The First World War behind the lines, from the officers’ bar at a French airfield to two men walking off through the Swiss snow, through a camp, a fortress and a farm
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, mono optical sound, in French with German, English and some Russian; Christian Matras’s photography, Joseph Kosma’s music, songs sung inside the story; the film as released in 1937, restored from its original camera negative
Register
From a camp revue in borrowed corsets to a deathbed in a fortress; farce and elegy under one sympathy, the tone never breaking
Scale
Three social orders in three places, four nations, a Jewish banker’s son and a German widow, and an aristocratic Europe at its end
Governing Proposition
Two French airmen, a mechanic made officer and an aristocrat with a monocle, are shot down and held by the Germans, first in a camp where men of every class dig a tunnel they never use, then in a fortress commanded by a German aristocrat who shares more with his French prisoner than either shares with his own men. The aristocrat dies to let the mechanic and a Jewish banker’s son escape, and the two quarrel in the snow, shelter on a German widow’s farm and cross a frontier no one can see. The wager of the film is that a war film with no battle can show that the lines dividing men run across nations and not along them, and that every bond the war ignores is also a barrier.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in an officers’ bar at a French airfield. Maréchal, played by Jean Gabin, a mechanic made officer, listens to a record at the bar. de Boëldieu, played by Pierre Fresnay, wears a monocle. Before either is captured the film has set its first line, which is not between nations but between a mechanic and a gentleman of the same air force. The aerial combat that brings them down is not shown.
Jean Renoir made it from a screenplay he wrote with Charles Spaak, for Réalisation d’Art Cinématographique, and it was released in Paris in June 1937. Christian Matras photographed it in black and white, and Joseph Kosma wrote the music. It is spoken in French, with German, English and some Russian, and it moves in three movements, each a place: a prison camp at Hallbach, a fortress at Wintersborn, and the snow and a farm on the way to the Swiss frontier. The camp is the first and the longest. No battle is shown, and one killing is seen. The versions of the film differ; the film judged here is the film as released in 1937, about 113 to 114 minutes as restored from its original camera negative.
The two Frenchmen are taken to the German officers’ mess as guests. The host is Rauffenstein, played by Erich von Stroheim, an airman himself, and at table a German officer cuts the meat of the wounded Maréchal for him. The courtesy of the enemy is set before the war is shown at all. The film has drawn its second line, the one that crosses nations, and it will run through the fortress to come.
Movement II
The camp at Hallbach is a commons. Rosenthal, played by Marcel Dalio, the son of a Jewish banking family, receives food parcels and shares them, and the officers of every class eat together from them. Cartier, played by Julien Carette, keeps up a stream of comedy, and an engineer is among them. They dig a tunnel, men of every class taking their turn in it. The film keeps many men in one shot, so that the class of each is visible in how he sits, eats and speaks, and no cut is needed to say who belongs with whom.
The prisoners stage a revue. A soldier comes on dressed as a woman and the room falls silent. In the middle of the show the news of Douaumont comes, and the men in women’s clothes stop the comedy and sing the Marseillaise. Laughter that had crossed the line between prisoners and guards is cut off, and the line of nation is redrawn in one song. Maréchal is held in solitary confinement, alone with the war he cannot leave.
Before the tunnel can be used the officers are transferred. The secret is to be handed on to an English prisoner, and the Englishman does not understand French. The effort of every man in the camp is lost to a language and to an order from above. The tunnel is never used, and that is its purpose in the film: the war is indifferent to effort, and moves men about without knowing what they have made. The transfers that follow are compressed, and the film goes to the fortress.
Movement III
The fortress of Wintersborn is commanded by Rauffenstein, a broken flier, his chin held in a brace, his office a chapel. Boëldieu is his equal; Maréchal and Rosenthal are his prisoners. In his rooms there is a geranium. The fortress is the aristocrats’ room, as the camp was the commons, and in it the two officers of one order talk as no one else in the film can talk to either of them.
What they share they both know is ending. Boëldieu says as much to Rauffenstein: whichever side wins, their caste is dying, and the war is finishing it. Rauffenstein holds to the forms of an order with no future, gloves and courtesy, and Boëldieu keeps the same forms. The friendship is real, and it is also a barrier: Boëldieu understands Rauffenstein better than he will ever understand Maréchal, and still he chooses the other side of the line that runs across nations.
The fortress holds Russian officers too, and a crate that comes to them holds books: the nations under one roof, and the war indifferent to all of them. Maréchal and Rosenthal plan an escape, and Boëldieu will make the diversion that covers them. The choice is his order choosing its own end: the gentleman gives himself up so that the mechanic and the banker’s son can go.
Movement IV
Boëldieu is seen on the ramparts at night, playing “Il était un petit navire” on a flute. Searchlights hunt him across the stone, and voices call from below. Rauffenstein comes out and asks him, in English, to come down. Boëldieu goes on playing, and while the fortress looks at him, Maréchal and Rosenthal get away.
Rauffenstein shoots him. It is the one killing the film shows, and it is done by a friend, with courtesy. At the deathbed Rauffenstein apologises. The two men speak to each other in the only language left to them, and it is the language that has killed one of them. Courtesy and death are held in one frame.
When Boëldieu has died Rauffenstein goes to the window and cuts the geranium. It is the summit of the film in miniature: a gesture where a speech would be, and the last thing the fortress has to say about the end of a caste. The sequence on the ramparts is lit and sounded with great exactness, searchlights, the flute and the voices below; it is among the great sustained passages of the cinema of the 1930s.
Movement V
Maréchal and Rosenthal walk through the German winter. In the snow they quarrel, and Maréchal half utters a slur against Rosenthal and walks on alone. Then he returns. The film does not answer the slur in speech: it answers it by the return, and the two men go on together. The disclosure of the film, that the lines men share run across nations, is turned on its own heroes, and holds only because one of them chooses to come back.
They shelter on a farm kept by Elsa, played by Dita Parlo, a German widow, with her daughter Lotte. On the wall are photographs of her husband and brothers, killed in battle. Maréchal works her land, as a soldier who was a mechanic, and learns German words at her table, and the viewer stands where he stands, outside the language and slowly inside it. At Christmas Rosenthal builds a crèche for the child. Maréchal and Elsa love each other, and the love crosses the frontier without abolishing it. When the two men leave, Maréchal promises to come back after the war.
At the frontier the snow lies over everything, and the line between Germany and Switzerland cannot be seen. A German patrol sees two figures in the snow and lowers its rifles. The last shot is a long one, two dots crossing the snow. The line no one can see is still obeyed. The film was refused in Germany, its negative was seized in 1940, and it survives now whole from that negative, restored. Its title’s illusion is left plural: that this war ends war, that frontiers are real, that escape solves anything, and the film states none of them flatly.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test movement by movement, and the three places resist it. The opening is required: Maréchal, the mechanic made officer, at a bar with a record, and Boëldieu with his monocle set the class line before either is captured; in Rauffenstein’s mess a German officer cuts the wounded Maréchal’s meat, and the line that crosses nations is set. Hallbach is the commons, and its tunnel is never used: that waste is the point, the war’s indifference to effort. Wintersborn is the aristocrats’ room, the farm the people’s, and Boëldieu’s death frees the two who could not be his friends. What gives is in the first camp: the revue’s preparations, Cartier’s comedy and some barrack exchanges are episodic and could be shortened without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: the lines that divide men run across nations and not along them, and the war is fought by people whose real loyalties, to class, trade, food, a woman, a language learned at a table, it ignores. Boëldieu and Rauffenstein share more with each other than with Maréchal, and both know their caste is dying whichever side wins. Then the film turns the disclosure on itself: Maréchal and Rosenthal, mechanic and banker’s son, quarrel in the snow, and the slur Maréchal half utters is answered only by his return. The farm shows that love crosses the frontier and does not abolish it. The title’s illusion is left plural. Held below 9.0 because the humane thesis is, at moments, stated more than discovered.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The elevation is frequent and mostly quiet. In the camp revue the news of Douaumont comes, and men in women’s clothes sing the Marseillaise: a comic scene lifted into a collective act with menace in it. Boëldieu on the ramparts at night, playing “Il était un petit navire” on a flute while searchlights hunt him and Rauffenstein asks him in English to come down, is one of the great sustained passages of the decade, courtesy and death in one frame. The cutting of the geranium is the summit in miniature, a gesture where a speech would be. The last shot of two dots crossing snow is warm elevation. Held below the top because Renoir refuses grandeur by temperament, and the first camp keeps to the ground.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Some myth is built. The death of a caste bears load: Boëldieu and Rauffenstein are the last knights, gloves, monocle, the chin brace of a broken flier, a chapel for an office, and the plot needs one of them to choose the people over his order and the other to kill him for it, with courtesy. The escape is a passage out of the underworld of fortresses into a winter landscape: a stable at Christmas, a child, a foreign mother, a crèche built by a Jew, and a frontier invisible in the snow. Held a tenth below the bar of 8.5 because the archetype is more often evoked than constructed: the Christmas is a gentle allusion, the frontier a figure made visible, and the prison break a genre pattern more than a deep one.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the war film of the 1920s and early 1930s, heroic or pacifist, and the escape adventure. The pacifist films of the time, All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 among them, showed the horror of the trenches; this one shows the society behind them and finds the war incidental to its real divisions: no battle, an enemy shown with more courtesy than many allies, escapes interrupted or mild. The stake was paid. Made in 1937, with a sympathetic German officer, a Jewish hero and a Franco-German love, it was refused in Germany, and its negative was seized in 1940. Held below the top because its means, a clear story with stars, were the mainstream’s: the swerve is in vision and sympathy more than form.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The three places are the argument: a commons, an aristocrat’s keep and a farmhouse, each a social order, passed through in the order the film’s thought requires. The staging carries the class lines inside the frame: Renoir and Matras use depth and a moving camera to hold many men in one shot, so that the officers’ talk, the guards and the furniture of class share the image, and a cut is rarely needed to say who belongs with whom. Language is form: at the farm the viewer stands where Maréchal stands, outside German and then slowly inside it. The cost: the first movement’s episodes could be arranged otherwise, and the form governs more by its places than by moment-to-moment necessity.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Eighty-nine years of return are evidence. The film has been read as the great pacifist film; as a Popular Front film about class over nation; as an elegy for aristocracy; as internationalism under the shadow of 1937; and, some argue, as a film whose Jewish character is drawn with stock traits it also overturns, a strain that stays live. André Bazin’s writing on Renoir’s depth and moving camera made it a text of film theory, taught for decades. Re-viewing hardens the second half: Boëldieu’s sacrifice reads less as nobility than as a caste choosing its end, and Maréchal’s promise to return to Elsa as a hope the film knows to be illusion. What holds the axis: the readings converge on one humane centre, and the film does not rearrange itself on return.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1937, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a real enlargement of what the war film and the prison film could hold: society behind the lines, class across nations, a sympathetic enemy, carried by a staging in depth that Renoir was developing through the decade and that this film, more than any of his before The Rules of the Game, brought to a world audience. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: refused in Germany, which marked its reach as a threat; made a text of film theory by Bazin and taught for decades. Held a step down because its formal reach passes largely through Renoir’s later work and through Bazin rather than through this film alone.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole from its original camera negative, seized in 1940, recovered and restored; restoration is repair. The charge on form is for history: the versions differ, and for a long span the work as released was partly replaced by shortened, altered versions whose full history is not settled. Presence: continuous since 1937 in repertory, in teaching and in critical lists, wide but not of the widest, known to film audiences more than to the public at large. Fabric: the optical sound and lenses of 1937, small charges. A span of eighty-nine years would carry the medium’s ceiling of 8.8; the long life of the altered versions holds it a tenth below.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Renoir directs a mixed cast in three languages, from Gabin’s working-class ease to Stroheim’s carved stiffness, so that acting styles are themselves class markers. Matras’s camera moves through barracks and fortress rooms with a fluency rare in 1937, composing exits and entrances inside the frame. The ramparts are a lesson in lighting and sound: searchlights, the flute, the voices from below. The cutting is patient and almost invisible; Kosma’s score is used sparingly beside songs sung inside the story. Held below Citizen Kane at 9.4 and The Third Man at 9.0: some studio exteriors and the escape’s snow show their making, and the first movement’s pace loosens.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the camp revue, with its men in corsets, comic patter and a gramophone, and the death of Boëldieu, shot by a friend who apologises. One law governs both: men are held by bonds the war did not make and cannot dissolve, and every bond is also a barrier. In the revue laughter crosses the line between prisoners and guards until the news of Douaumont redraws it; at the deathbed two aristocrats’ courtesy is the only language left to them, and it has killed one of them. The law holds at the farm, love across a line the line will reclaim, and at the frontier, invisible in snow and still obeyed. The range runs from farce to elegy. The strain is in Cartier’s broadest comedy.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held in one structure: class, in three strata, each with its manners, food and speech; the nation, in French, German, British and Russian officers and a frontier; war, as a condition without a battle; race and religion, in Rosenthal and a Christmas crèche; labour, in the mechanic and on the farm, where a soldier works a widow’s land; the family, in a widow, her daughter and the photographs of a husband and brothers killed in battle; love; the ending of an aristocratic Europe; and food shared as a social order. Each order is a line men cross or are stopped by. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside and in talk, the women are one woman and a child, the state is felt as walls, and the sacred is touched lightly.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.9, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.8. A disclosure that holds, that the lines dividing men run across nations and not along them, turned at the end on its own heroes; a making in which acting styles mark class, the camera holds many men in depth and a night on the ramparts is lit and sounded to the frame; and one law, that every bond is also a barrier, running from a camp revue in corsets to a deathbed in a fortress.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: class, nation, war, race and religion, labour, the family, love and history are held and joined as lines men cross, but consciousness is rendered from outside, the women are one woman and a child, the state is felt as walls and the sacred is touched lightly. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: the death of a caste is built and bears load, while the Christmas, the frontier and the prison break are evoked patterns more than constructed myth.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.6 from a sum of 103.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of La Grande Illusion as released in Paris in June 1937, from the officers’ bar at the French airfield to the two men walking off through the Swiss snow, about 113 to 114 minutes as restored from the original camera negative: directed by Jean Renoir from a screenplay by Charles Spaak and Jean Renoir, for Réalisation d’Art Cinématographique, photographed by Christian Matras, with music by Joseph Kosma. The versions of the film differ; later shortened versions are variants, are not judged, and their history bears on survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the film in its own languages, French with German, English and some Russian; English renderings are the desk’s own and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted and speech is described; one song is named. Details that could not be verified, among them the editing credit, the producers, the exact running time, the dates and contents of the shortened versions, the route by which the negative returned to France and the dates of its restorations, the film’s prizes and nominations, its later bans and the films said to descend from it, are not given.