1Dominique Kalifa was a scholar of many things, but first and foremost of popular culture and the many ways that the French have imagined and fantasized about popular life. Cinema was one of the vehicles for such imaginings, and in this regard, Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion, with its evocations of POW camaraderie and the pleasures of the common man, is exemplary of the kind of oeuvre that Kalifa was so much drawn to. In Dominique’s honor, it is worth taking a closer look at the film.

2Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion was a box-office smash when it came out in the summer of 1937.1 It opened at the Marivaux cinema where it sold an impressive 200,000 tickets in just two months. Nor was the movie’s success confined to France. In the United States, La grande illusion was nominated as the best foreign film of the year and won.2 A special screening was arranged at the White House in celebration of Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday. Renoir’s triumph may seem puzzling at first glance in light of the director’s various ties to the Parti communiste français. In 1935, he paid an enthusiastic visit to the Soviet Union. At the PCF Party congress the following year, he was honored with a seat next to General Secretary Maurice Thorez.3 Not least of all, Renoir oversaw the making of a film, La vie est à nous, released in connection with the PCF’s 1936 electoral campaign. The movie features fiction vignettes of ordinary people trying to make a go of it in hard times, which adds a human touch to what is otherwise a work of propaganda. For it is the Party that comes to the rescue every time, not to mention that the film concludes with snippets from speeches delivered by communist luminaries, Thorez among them, and an exuberant singing of ‘L’internationale’ belted out by the masses on the march. As for the elections, they were a triumph for the Party, as they were for the leftist coalition, the Popular Front, of which the Party was a part. La grande illusion was made by a director in full fellow-travelling mode, and yet its appeal at the time, and still today, does not seem to recognize political boundaries. Why should this be so?

3First of all, the film dealt with a subject, the Great War, that loomed large in the consciousness of a nation that counted its veterans in the millions. Renoir, a veteran himself, was a self-described ‘homme de 1914’.4 That’s not quite right because he in fact joined up the year before, enlisting in the cavalry. The dash of the dragon lost something of its luster in the mud of the Great War, and Renoir arranged for a transfer to the chasseurs alpins, still a prestigious posting. He was wounded in combat in 1915, an injury that left him with a permanent limp. Disabled or not, Renoir was determined to keep up the fight, which is what led him into the air corps where sturdy legs were not essential. He served as a reconnaissance pilot until the end of hostilities, compiling a war record that was distinguished, even heroic. In the early thirties, while making a film in the Midi, he crossed paths with a wartime comrade, Armand Pinsard, a former fighter pilot who had at one point saved Renoir’s life, chasing off a Fokker that was bearing down on Renoir’s plane. Pinsard told the filmmaker about the many times he had been downed and captured, contriving each time to escape, and the idea came to Renoir to turn the subject into a movie, to start with ‘une banale histoire d’évasion’and elevate it into a ‘film d’aventures’.5

4From this seed gestated the scenario of La grande illusion, a tale of escape, indeed, of more than one. The movie is tightly structured, made up of an intro, three parts, and a coda. The opening scenes, set in 1916, introduce the viewer first to Maréchal, a mechanic in civilian life but now a tousle-haired flier, played by Jean Gabin, a cinema star much beloved by the French public for his everyman qualities. Maréchal is recruited for a reconnaissance mission by a cavalry officer, the suave and aristocratic Capitaine de Boëldieu. A German fighter pilot, von Rauffenstein, shoots the men down, and gentleman soldier that he is, Rauffenstein invites the two Frenchmen to lunch. Maréchal and Boëldieu are then packed off to Hallbach, a POW camp, where they fall in with a band of countrymen: Modot, an engineer; Cartier, an actor; a teacher, never named; and Rosenthal, a well-to-do couturier. The role is interpreted by Marcel Dalio, whom American viewers will recognize as the croupier in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). The Frenchmen devise a plan to tunnel out of the camp, but the plan is scotched when the Germans decide to transfer the officers in the group elsewhere. The movie’s second part finds Maréchal and Boëldieu relocated to a high-security fortress, Wintersborn, reserved for escape-prone officers. They reconnect there with Rosenthal and also with von Rauffenstein, the fortress commandant, who is now reduced to jail-keeping because war wounds have made it impossible for him to serve in any other capacity. The French trio, inveterate plotters, devise yet one more scheme, this one involving a diversion created by Boëldieu, which allows Maréchal and Rosenthal to rappel down the fortress wall on a rope made of twisted bedsheets, not the last time such a maneuver would feature in an escape picture. In part three, the two fugitives find refuge on the farm of a German peasant woman, Elsa, a rural idyll that ends when the men, amidst winter snow, set out to make one final escape, this one from Germany into neutral Switzerland. With that, the film concludes.

5So, La grande illusion was, indeed, an adventure film, buoyed by a star performance, and it was a good one that established a template for a movie genre with a long life ahead of it (think, for example, of the 1963 American movie The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen in a Maréchal-like role). It was also a film with special appeal to Great War veterans. Renoir took some care on this score. He conferred with veterans’ groups ahead of time in order to get things right. Maréchal was costumed in the selfsame flight jacket Renoir himself had worn when he was in air reconnaissance. As for details about German military life, the director had an informed consultant ready to hand in the person of Carl Koch, his German-born assistant, who also happened to be a Great War veteran. It is little wonder that old soldiers took a shine to the movie.6 In the 1990s, when L’Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne was building its film collection, curators asked still surviving veterans about their preferences, and hands down, the palm went to La grande illusion.7

6A powerful current of pacifist feeling coursed through the veterans’ community of interwar France. La patrie was not repudiated but war was, a blend of sentiments captured in the phrase, ‘patriotisme pacifiste,’ coined by the historian Antoine Prost.8 La grande illusion mined the pacifist vein, to be sure, but it was not an antiwar movie as so often claimed, in the end hitting more patriotic notes than pacifist ones. No doubt, it does represent the war as interminable. In the concluding sequences of the movie’s first part, Maréchal has been consigned to the Hallbach camp brig. His fault? The prisoners have put on a variety show. In the midst of the theatrics, they learn that Fort Douaumont has been recaptured by the French (the Battle of Verdun is then in full throttle, don’t forget). Maréchal steps forward to announce the good news, and the audience, to the consternation of the Germans present, erupts into song, intoning a heartfelt ‘Marseillaise,’ an iconic movie moment later reprised in Casablanca. Maréchal’s patriotic gesture lands him in stir, and solitary confinement drives him to an outburst. He misses spoken French more than anything else. One jailer asks another what the commotion is all about: ‘The war’s is lasting too long’ comes the reply in German. And no doubt again, the war cost too many lives. In the film’s final segment, Maréchal and Rosenthal find refuge in Elsa’s home. There is a portrait on the wall. ‘Mein Mann,’ Elsa explains, who died at Verdun. The camera pans to a group photo of the husband and three brothers. Liège, Charleroi, Tannenberg, she recites, not naming the young men but listing the battles in which they died. ‘Our greatest victories,’ she adds with bitter irony. The scene then shifts to the farmhouse’s long kitchen table. Elsa’s daughter, Lotte, is eating alone. The table has gotten too big, Elsa announces, an oblique allusion to the men who will no longer sup there, an absence betokened by two empty chairs stacked on the tabletop. Maréchal and Rosenthal go on to make a home for themselves on Elsa’s farm.

7In the end, however, they decide to move on and return to the fight. As awful as the war is, the patriotic urge wins out, a reading that jibes with the facts of Renoir’s own life. In mid-September 1938, sensing a second war near at hand, he did not take to the streets to protest, instead writing to Prime Minister Daladier to offer his talents to the army’s cinematographic services. He opposed the Munich Accords, signed not long thereafter, as a capitulation. Then in1939, when the war he had anticipated finally broke out, the director put on his uniform yet once more, this time as a lieutenant in the reserves. The story does not end there. After the defeat, Renoir made his way to Hollywood where he was eventually joined by his son Alain. The young man thought about joining the Free French, but, on his father’s urging, enlisted in the US Army.9 Pacifists do not encourage their sons to join up. Renoir knew first-hand the costs of war, and he had nothing but contempt for a braying nationalism. At the same time, he felt a deep, emotional attachment to the fighting men he had known in the Great War. ‘[B]raves gens qui faisaient leur devoir le faisaient sans mots superflus,’ as he described them, and he meant La grande illusion as an homage to their quiet heroism and tempered-steel determination.10

8But if pacifism was not Renoir’s creed, then what was? To say that he was a loyal Frenchman, a patriot but no jingo, is a start but not more than that, for there are many Frances. Which of them did Renoir believe in? The France of the Revolution, for starters, and La grande illusion makes that plain. Think again of that stirring rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’ (a subject to which Renoir would return in fulsome detail the following year when he released a feature-length film by that very title, La Marseillaise). In the Wintersborn sequences, Boëldieu and Rauffenstein have more than one occasion to interact. In one, Rauffenstein inspects the prisoners’ quarters, hunting for forbidden items. Ever the aristocrat, he will make an exception for Boëldieu’s bunk, provided Boëldieu swears he has nothing to conceal. Why make an exception of me, Boëldieu wants to know? Doesn’t the word of honor of a Maréchal or a Rosenthal count as much as mine? Rauffenstein’s laconic and doubting reply is ‘peut-être.’ That same ‘peut-être,’ now uttered by Boëldieu, is repeated in a later conversation. Rauffenstein has invited Boëldieu to his chambers for a chat. The future, opines the commandant, lies not with the nobly born like themselves but with Maréchal and Rosenthal, simulacra of officers. It is a sad state of affairs, ‘un joli cadeau de la Révolution française,’ as Rauffenstein puts it, and he solicits Boëldieu’s agreement. The French officer, however, won’t play along, mustering a doubtful ‘peut-être’ of his own. The Revolution has given birth to a democratizing world, and the aristocrats know it, Rauffenstein expressing regret and Boëldieu rueful acceptance. In fact, it is Boëldieu who is the first and only character to utter a version of the word, democracy, in the film. In one of the Wintersborn episodes, Rosenthal talks to his mates about contracting a venereal disease. Maréchal associates the malady with aristocrats, prompting Boëldieu to acknowledge that it was indeed once a ‘privilège’ of the upper crust but no more, not in a world where ‘tout se démocratise’.

9Renoir also defines France by what it is not, and to this end, casts Germany, or better Germanism, in the role of foil. The movie indeed opens with just such a contrast, a scene of a French popote, all informality with no one in charge, followed by one of a German mess, all order and hierarchy, presided over by an imperious Rauffenstein.11 The French prisoners are then dispatched to Hallbach, and they are treated to a reading of the camp rules. The ranking German officer on hand punctuates the proceedings with the repeated enjoinder, streng verboten, a phrase, which then becomes one of the film’s running jokes. The officer, broad-chested in build and helmeted in a Pickelhaube, calls to mind no one so much as Otto von Bismarck. What Germanism amounts to is conveyed not only by word and appearance. Renoir’s camera films, not just the prisoners’ barracks, but also German living spaces, and the attentive viewer will note, tucked away in the frame, portraits of the Kaiser and Kaiserin. When it comes to evocative décor, however, it is hard to match Rauffenstein’s quarters in the Wintersborn castle. The castle itself is a medieval pile, stony and dismal. Rauffenstein’s room, a converted chapel featuring a huge Crucifix, is just as forbidding, featuring grilled windows that impart a cell-like feel to the space.12 But it is sound, more than anything else, that stands in for what France is up against. In the Hallbach camp, as Maréchal and company prepare costumes for the upcoming theatrics, they are drawn to the window by the sound of German troops parading to the accompaniment of drums and fifes. The viewer doesn’t see the marchers but hears the pounding of their feet on hard pavement. What the viewer does see is the window, the camera filming in from the outside, creating a group portrait. Six Frenchmen, of all classes and conditions, are gathered there in the frame, a picture of national unity confronting the real enemy, which Maréchal identifies in a tone of disgust as ‘le bruit des pas’. Democratic France has an adversary, and it is German authoritarianism in all its guises from medieval times through the Wilhelmine era down to the present day. Renoir, moreover, knew something first-hand about German militarism in its 1930s incarnation. He found himself in Berlin in 1933, just after Hitler’s elevation to the office of Chancellor, and witnessed what he called an ‘incident abominable,’ brawny Brown Shirts compelling an old Jewish woman to kneel and lick the sidewalk.13

10Is this over-emphasizing nation-ness in the film? Most of the Germans in the movie are decent sorts after all, jailers no doubt but also ordinary soldiers doing a job. Not just that: in the movie’s final part, a German woman extends genuine hospitality to two Frenchmen on the run, a moment of connection that raises the specter of a higher unity, one binding all nations. That is right so far as it goes, but several additional points bear making. The international unity Renoir imagines is of a people-to-people sort that joins together peasants like Elsa and working men like Maréchal to the exclusion of the high and mighty. It is also a unity that lives but for a fleeting moment. Maréchal leaves the farmhouse to go back to the front, promising to return but not until peace is restored. A fraternity that endures is thus adjourned until an uncertain future, while, in the meantime, the call of the nation prevails. On more than one occasion in the 1930s, Renoir himself pronounced on the importance of the nation in art. As he affirmed in a 1934 letter addressed to filmmaking colleagues: ‘Je crois que le film doit être national dans son esprit. Nous devons créer une École qui rayonnera dans le monde…’14 From this angle, the path to internationalism begins in a sense of national belonging that is primary and deeply felt.

11Renoir’s understanding of the nation, it needs to be underlined, was not exclusivist. The France he felt attached to was a revolutionary, democratic nation, one that had a message for the world and that continuously renewed itself through the welcome of outsiders. Nation also mattered to Renoir in a second sense, no less important, perhaps even more so. Renoir’s France is a nation that had pioneered and continued to pioneer, as his own oeuvre demonstrated, in the arts. In the arts de vivre to begin with. There is a celebrated scene in the Hallbach camp in which Rosenthal receives a care package from home. He shares the contents with his comrades, and attention is paid to itemizing all the treats passed around: petits pois, foie gras, cognac. Maréchal lets on that he doesn’t like fancy things. The high-end restaurants that the aristocrats talk about, Maxim’s and Fouquet’s, are not for him. He prefers the bistro and ‘du bon pinard’. But these too are part of France, and Renoir liked to let on that his own tastes, like Maréchal’s, ran to the unpretentious. In his memoirs, he explained why he found the working-class comrades he had known in fellow-travelling days so sympathetic: ‘Je me sentais à l’aise avec eux, aimant les mêmes chansons populaires et le même vin rouge.’15 Renoir in fact made effective use of popular song in La grande illusion. The movie soundtrack opens with the playing of a song, ‘Frou Frou,’ on the mess-hall gramophone. To enable Maréchal and Rosenthal’s escape from Wintersborn, Boëldieu helps to distract the guards by piping on a penny flute ‘Il était un petit navire,’ ‘une chanson des rues’ as Renoir himself later characterized it.16

12But of all the arts, it was that of spectacle that most captured Renoir’s imagination. Little surprise then that spectacle is so central to the structuring of La grande illusion. The movie, as noted, is broken into three parts, and in each, a performance of some kind is enacted.17 That’s obvious in part one, which features a variety show concocted by the prisoners. It stars Chartier, identified as a veteran of the popular stage–he once played the Bouffes du Nord, we are told–, and not by chance, the real-life actor who interpreted the role, Julien Carette, was himself a sometime music-hall performer. The variety-show sequence concludes in chaos when news of the recapture of Fort Douaumont by French troops leads to a singing of ‘La Marseillaise,’ spectacle and patriotism feeding into each other. But, in addition to that, the film associates spectacle with eros. It’s not just that the variety show performers are all, with the exception of Chartier, men dressed in drag, one of them singing in a mannered falsetto. In the lead-up to the performance, the prisoners try on their costumes, women’s clothes, which sparks banter about contemporary Parisian fashions. Shorts skirts are now all the rage, one prisoner reports, and short hair too, prompting another to chime in that sleeping with such a woman would be like sleeping with a boy. Then the heads turn, and a general quiet descends. A young man, in the full vigor of life, slips into a dress, and the sight of him generates a collective moment of longing for the wives and lovers who have been left behind, the intensity of the moment ratcheted up by the ambient silence.

13It might not be as easy to spot the episode of spectacle in the movie’s second part, let alone pick up on its sexual undercurrent, but the spectacle and eroticism are there. The show is the diversion scene Boëldieu stages to allow his comrades to escape, and he is not just its metteur en scène but also its star.18 As any star, he takes care with the costuming, donning his dress white gloves, freshly washed, and the eye-catching regalia of a captain of the hussars. He then ascends to the upper reaches of the castle and performs a popular tune, drawing the attention of the German jailers who try to fix him in a spotlight. Boëldieu’s gesture is a bravura act and an act of self-sacrifice, which serves its purpose even as it gets him shot. It is Rauffenstein who pulls the trigger, obliged by circumstance and an unforgiving sense of duty to take the life a man for whom he has feelings.19 Renoir opened Boudu sauvé des eaux (released five years before La grande illusion) with a shot of a satyr seducing a nymph to the tune of the pan-pipe. In Partie de campagne (1936), there is also a seduction scene, a boatsman wooing a middle-aged Parisienne out for a day on the Seine. He performs an impromptu mating dance and, as part of the display, picks up two sticks and makes of them a pretend double flute.20 Boëldieu’s flute in La grande illusion is also a device to catch someone’s attention, in the event Rauffenstein’s, and it succeeds. Rauffenstein is forced to act but very much against his will, pleading with Boëldieu to come down off the battlements. ‘I beg you man to man,’ a pained Rauffenstein cries out in English. Boëldieu will die of his wounds, giving rise to a tender death bed scene between the two men. Then the camp commandant cuts the geranium he has cultivated on his chamber windowsill. It was a bright spot in a citadel otherwise unrelenting in its dankness. Something beautiful has come to an end. The movie’s scenarist, Charles Spaak, didn’t like the scene, which he felt added a note of regrettable mawkishness to the relationship–the ‘flirt,’ as he called it–between the two aristocrats.21

14There is no hint of mawkishness, however, in the spectacle scene in the movie’s final part. The scene in question is one of childish delight as little Lotte is roused from bed by the adults–Elsa, Maréchal, and Rosenthal–who have fabricated a crèche out of pieces of bread. She is thrilled by the sight and wants to eat the baby Jesus, settling for the Joseph figurine as a substitute. Then it’s off to bed, where Lotte is tucked in by Maréchal, with Elsa looking on, a touching scene of a family cobbled together amidst wartime loss. Afterward, the grown-ups head to bed themselves, Maréchal and Elsa, sort of parents, doing what parents do, sleeping together. The sequence ends in a mature, erotic encounter, lonely people finding what love they can in harrowing times. It all seems so natural, so lacking in artifice. Where then is the spectacle?

15As Maréchal and Elsa are about to wake Lotte at the scene’s beginning, Rosenthal asks for a moment’s pause. He wants the candles lit, and the lights turned off. Renoir’s camera then homes in on a record-player, which Rosenthal cranks up. This is an echo of the shot with which the movie opened, a close-up of a gramophone playing ‘Frou Frou.’ As at the beginning, so too now, the camera proceeds to retreat, revealing the crèche with the adults gathered around it, a spectacle of light, sound, and staging that will bring delight to the little girl.22

16It’s an astonishing piece of filmmaking and also one that packs a powerful thematic punch. The Holy Family occupies the foreground, and in its glow a sort-of family, made up of a German woman and a French man, Maréchal, comes together. But not just Maréchal belongs. Rosenthal is also in the picture, and he in fact makes an explicit claim to membership by referring to the baby Jesus in a humorous aside as ‘mon frère de race’.

17This moment is not the first of its kind in La grande illusion but the culmination of many in a movie that takes a hard look at the question of Jewish belonging. It is established early on that Rosenthal is in many respects a stereotypical Jew. Maréchal has just arrived at Hallbach, his arm in a sling, the result of an injury sustained when his plane was shot down. The Engineer bathes Marechal’s feet, and the two men talk about Rosenthal. He’s from a wealthy banking family, the Engineer explains, and the owner of a ‘grande maison de couture’. The Engineer later takes a dig at Rosenthal, insinuating that he was born in Jerusalem. Rosenthal shoots back that he was in in fact born in Vienna, which helps to explain why he knows German, a knowledge that will later come in handy when Maréchal and he join Elsa’s German-speaking family. As the Engineer’s remark denotes, there are plenty of Frenchmen who are doubtful of Rosenthal’s French-ness, and Maréchal himself is not immune to expressions of prejudice. While in flight from Wintersborn castle, the two escapees take to the road. Their progress is impeded, however, by Rosenthal, who has injured a foot and developed a limp. The two men fall out for a moment, and Maréchal, susceptible to fits of temper, ends up bellowing: ‘Les juifs, j’ai jamais pu les blairer.’

18But Renoir is at pains to dramatize that Rosenthal does belong, stereotypes and prejudice notwithstanding. It’s not just that he proves himself a ‘bon copain’, (that’s Maréchal’s phrase), who is willing to share, to join in the escape planning, and to shed a tear when a haggard Maréchal returns from solitary. There is a second foot-washing scene in the movie, when Maréchal and Rosenthal first find refuge in Elsa’s home. It is Rosenthal, the man with a limp, who is the beneficiary and Elsa who does the washing. Remember now that Renoir also had a limp, a point of identification between the director and the Jewish character, and it is not the only one. Rosenthal, as orchestrator of the crèche spectacle, is in a manner of speaking a metteur-en-scène himself.23

19In the POW camp scenes, Rosenthal is affirmed as a member of the national community. In the rural idyll sequence, Renoir goes a step further, elevating the Jewish character into the director’s near Doppelgänger. At the same, it’s important to note the terms on which this doubling happens. Elsa’s household is very much a Christian space. There is a Christmas scene, and a foot-washing one too, which calls to mind Jesus’s washing of his disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday, a gesture that is both an act of kindness and a lesson in humility. There is a place for Rosenthal in the reconciled world of tomorrow, but it is that of a Jew in a community circumscribed by its Christian horizons.

20This is not to say that Renoir was himself a Christian in any conventional sense. He did attend Church services in later years with his second wife, Dido. But more pertinent in this context is a letter he wrote in 1963 during Christmas season in Hollywood. Renoir allowed that he hated the sight of Santa Claus, who reminded him of an old drunk. ‘Je ne vois aucun rapport entre ce silène et l’Enfant Jésus,’ he went on. ‘Je ferme les yeux et pense aux crèches de mon enfance.24’ Renoir had no use for the giant Christ who towered in Rauffenstein’s chapel turned bedroom. But Christianity understood as a religion of humility, close to the people, that was another matter. This religion was not alien to France but part and parcel of its make-up. Even as Rosenthal is welcomed into the national community as a good buddy and sometime spectacle-maker, the viewer is reminded that the France, which takes him in, is a Christian France.

21So, of course, movie-goers loved La grande illusion. It was an adventure story that featured superb acting and, in Jean Gabin, a working-class hero of established box-office appeal. The adventure touched on a trauma, the Great War, which was national in its impact, and Renoir made sure that France’s veterans would recognize in the movie a sympathetic portrait of themselves as steadfast men who had served heroically but without fanfare. Above all, La grande illusion is a paean to a certain idea of France, and Renoir’s France is a rich amalgam. It is a democratic, revolutionary nation with a message for the world, a message of fraternity that stands resolute in the face of the authoritarian ‘bruit des pas.’ It is a nation populated by ordinary people, maybe believers, maybe not, who come from all backgrounds and all walks of life. And it is a nation of people who like to live well, with living well understood as a many-splendored thing, encompassing good food and drink, sex in all its permutations, and the music of the streets. But perhaps most important of all to Renoir was spectacle, above all of the popular sort from music hall to the movies themselves.25

22Renoir fellow-travelled in the era of the Popular Front. The promise of popular unity that it held out was one that the director embraced. In La grande illusion, he turned that promise into cinema, crafting a work of imagination that spoke of the nation in sympathetic, even mythic accents that resonated with French men and women of the day. And not just with them. Dominique Kalifa was a man who knew how to build bridges, to bring together people from different backgrounds and cultures. That spirit of connection, which lies at the heart of Renoir’s film, also lies at the heart of Dominique’s life and work.