Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion, 1937) is Jean Renoir's French anti-war drama you can watch online on iFILM. Jean Gabin plays working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, Pierre Fresnay plays the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu, and Erich von Stroheim plays their German captor von Rauffenstein — a Prussian officer who treats the whole affair with courtly formality. Renoir made the film in 1937, as Europe was already sliding toward another conflict.

The two French officers end up in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and the tensions between them cut deeper than anything between France and Germany. De Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein recognize each other across enemy lines as relics of the same dying world — men shaped by the same codes of honor, caught on opposite sides of a war neither of them invented. Maréchal has no such refuge. His war is purely physical and entirely real.

The film was the first non-English-language picture to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and its argument — that class solidarity outlasts national allegiance — lands with the same unease it did in 1937. Renoir called it his most important film. Stream Grand Illusion (1937) online on iFILM.