La Grande Illusion (1937)

La Grande Illusion (1937) is a film about class issues, that doesn't take sides. 

It's an intreresting take, and pretty unusual when you think about it. But La Grande Illusion doesn't present nor admit to a bias and sees everybody as sympathetic, including the tragic aristocrats at the heart of the problems.

La Grande Illusion does at the same pretend to a strange vision of trench warfare.  In the first scene Jean Gabin is in his shoddily built mess, which has a well-stocked bar and waiter.  

The very next scene shows the actor Eric Von Stroheim and the Germans in their own similarly shack-like officers' mess, with an even better bar, again with its own proud barkeep.

Maybe that was what it was like.  I don't know, but the German bar certainly seems to have a hell of a lot of liquor as well as a cocktail shaker.

If we are going to get anywhere with this film noir thing, we have to understand Poetic Realism.  For once, let's not got to WIKIPEDIA.  Instead, I'll try and call this one in pictures of Jean Gabin.

The story goes that when film noir surfaced in America in the early 1940s, it was the product of a mixing of current American themes with two stylistic strands from Europe, the first being German Expressionism and the second being Poetic Realism.

C'EST QUOI CE POETIC REALISM?

It's hard to define this topic of Poetic Realism however, without mentioning another whole heap of -isms, but that is what European art was always about.

It's the difference between movement and genre.  Genres have names like — thriller — comedy — action and adventure — romance — and so forth, and that's because genres are used to create and market certain expectations.

Isms however, such as Poetic Realism, are not so easy to market.  And film noir, if it is anything, is an ism, not a genre.

Jean Gabin in Le Belle Equippe (1936)
Jean Gabin in Le Belle Equippe (1936)
Jean Gabin in Pepe le Mok (1937)
Jean Gabin in Pepe le Moko (1937)

Jean Gabin in La Grande Illusion (1937)
Jean Gabin in La Grande Illusion (1937)

Jean Gabin in Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)
Jean Gabin in Le Quai Des Brumes (1938)

Getting into these isms then, we can see Poetic Realism  as something of a reaction to the Expressionism and Impressionism present in the European cinema of the day. 

Whereas Expressionism sought to exaggerate certain features of setting and action in order to emphasise key themes, Poetic Realism sought to base its action in the real and poor lives of normal citizens.  Even though these films were shot largely on sound stages and against studio sets, the idea was to create a form of realiss, that while not being documentary, was still consistent with life as we might perceive it.

And whereas French Impressionist Cinema sought to use strange optical effects and devices, unusual camera angles and flashback and fantasy in order to express themes and psychological aspects, Poetic Realism sought to create a form of realism of action and setting, although the stories were usually about love, disillusionment, and often ended in death.

The directors most associated with this style of film-making were Pierre Chenal, Jean Vigo, Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, and probably most significantly of all, Jean Renoir

Frequent stars of these films were Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, Simone Signoret, and Michèle Morgan.  Of these, Michèle Morgan even made it to the American screen, and you can see her in the paranoid and rather weird film noir The Chase (1946), which co-starred hapless heel Robert Cumnmings and the popularly villainous Peter Lorre.


A good place to see some poetic realism in action might be Le Quai Des Brumes (1938).  In this down at heel drama, you see love blossom in some truly seedy settings, as Jean Gabin and the above mentioned Michèle Morgan battle fate and crime to try and retain some dignity in the grinding poverty of depression era Europe.

HOW THIS AFFECTED FILM NOIR

Having read that you might already have worked out how this effected film noir.  But when these trends began to be felt in America, what we see in films like Detour (1945) and other early film noirs, are these realistic and poor settings, in which characters' lives are played out to their doomful conclusions, much as they were in the poetic realist films of France.

A further aspect is that poetic realist films often dealt with lower class or criminal characters, and that is soemthing else we feel pretty strongly in film noir.

So while the influence of poetic realism in film noir is not definite, it is still there, nonetheless.  It's perhaps a marginal feeling and an effort in some pretty tough times, to make pretty tough films which somehow reflect social conditions and play out the hopelessness many must have felt tempted to succumb to in the depression era.







Either way it all gets a bit rougher, and maybe even more realist, as the action heads into a First World War prisoner of war camp for French and British.

Although viewers will swear that nothing whatsoever happens for the first half an hour of La Grande Illusion (they arrive at camp - start digging a tunnel) things really speed up after the remarkable set piece, which is a transvestite theatre show culminating in La Marseillaise.

La Grande Illusion is not only a strong precursor to the film noir movement, with its poetically realised charcaters, and touching and revelatory storytelling. It features as assistant director Jacques Becker, who went on to make many of his own films, but two notable and certain noirs in Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1956) and Le Trou (1960).

Also in La Grande Illusion, is a meaty acting role for Eric von Stroheim who is instantly recognisable as being 'Max' in Sunset Boulevard.

All of that now said, what is La Grande Illusion doing featuring on a film noir website? It wasn't made in the right country and at the right time, and doesn't have any hats, hoods, cigarette smoke, dark corners and paranoia. So what's the bunk?

The link is poetic realism, without which there would be no noir. Communism may not have been everybody's cup of tea, and that may remain the case, but there is something to be said for the slowly rising awareness of class issues, being dealt with poetically by filmmakers, as opposed to violently, by politicians.




In Grande Illusion Gabin plays perhaps an entirely hopeful symbol of the victorious proletariat and in the movie, we see through his character, the disintegration of the old aristocratically tiered world, and the rebuilding of a new one after the violent imbalances of World War I.

Here is the working class, heroically and poetically portrayed, with humanity, divided in one direction by borders and in another by social class.  

The movie argues that the war shattered these distinctions, and so the era of gentlemanly combat and glorious deaths, is dead. The new world order, unified in suffering and also success was rising and out of this pain would come a new type of freedom, which would elevate the lower classes and banish the arbitrary divisions that had forever damaged humankind's chances.

Director Jean Renoir, said in his 1974 biography, My Life and My Films:

"If a French farmer should find himself dining at the same table as a French financier, those two Frenchmen would have nothing to say to each other, each being unconcerned with the other's interests. But if a French farmer meets a Chinese farmer they will find any amount to talk about. This theme of the bringing together of men through their callings and common interests has haunted me all my life and does so still. It is the theme of 'La Grande Illusion' and it is present, more or less, in all my works."