tellurikwaves blog : , CINEMA :Les blessures narcissiques d'une vie par procuration (75 Paris)

The little girl who played "Lotte" never saw the film, having died of the flu some weeks before the film was released.

Joseph Goebbels made sure that the film's print was one of the first things seized by the Germans when they occupied France. He referred to Jean Renoir as "Cinematic Public Enemy Number 1". For many years it was assumed that the film had been destroyed in an Allied air raid in 1942. However, a German film archivist named Frank Hansel, then a Nazi officer in Paris, had actually smuggled it back to Berlin. Then when the Russians entered Berlin in 1945, the film found its way to an archive in Moscow. When Renoir came to restore his film in the 1960s, he knew nothing of Hansel's acquisition and was working from an old muddy print. Purely by coincidence at the same time, the Russian archive swapped some material with an archive in Toulouse. Included in that exchange was the original negative print. However, because so many prints of the film existed at the time, it would be another 30 years before anyone realised that the version in Toulouse was actually the original negative.

This is the first film in the prestigious Criterion Collection (spine #1).

The uniform worn by Jean Gabin was actually owned and worn by Jean Renoir, who served in the air force during WWI.

The first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture (French).

The movie title "La Grande Illusion" is a reference to the pre-war book "The Great Illusion" by Norman Angell, which argued that war was outmoded, unscientific, and absurd. Though little-known today, it was a tremendous sensation when first published in 1913, and was often cited as evidence that a long European war "could not happen". Renoir aptly picks the title for his own work, knowing that his audience would recognize the reference.

Frequently cited by Woody Allen as the finest picture ever made.

This pacifist war film shows no combat at all.

Most of the scenes involving Erich von Stroheim were improvised on the day of filming. He and Jean Renoir would discuss in German what they would be doing, von Stroheim would write it out in English and then give it to assistant director Jacques Becker and script girl Francoise Giroud to translate into French for the screenplay.

Viennese-born Erich von Stroheim had spent so many years in America that he spoke hardly any German by the time he made the film.

President Roosevelt was shown a private screening at the White House during November 1937.

The Volpi Award had to be created specially for the film at the Venice Film Festival as it was inconceivable that it should receive the Mussolini Award, given that the film was banned in Italy.

Erich von Stroheim had a very large input on the depiction of his character. He designed his clothes and the neck brace that he wore in the film. He even wanted black sheets on his bed but Jean Renoir drew the line at that request.

The battles in which Elsa's brothers died - Charleroi, Tannenberg and Liege - were all battles from 1914, the first year of the war. The Battle of Liège was the opening battle of the German invasion into Belgium, and the first battle of World War I. The Battle of Charleroi was fought on 21 August 1914 between the French and the Germans. The Battle of Tannenberg was in August 1914 and was fought between the Russians and the Germans.

Jean Renoir had difficulty securing backing for the film until he told his producers that he had Jean Gabin on board. Gabin at the time was France's biggest box office draw.

Cited by actor Christopher Plummer as the film that brought him to tears more often than any other in his lifetime.

Fort Douaumont was the largest fort in the defenses of Verdun. It was taken by the Germans on February 24th 1916 and recaptured by the French on October 24th 1916 as part of the Battle of Verdun (February 21st 1916 to December 18th 1916). The recapture of the fort is estimated to have cost the French army 100,000 casualties. The selection of this battle for the film is significant as German and French historians often use the battle to represent the horrors of the Great War. Estimates of total deaths (French and German) range around the 300,000 mark, with total casualties between 750,000 and 1,000,000. Note also that Elsa's husband was killed at the battle for Verdun.

Jean Renoir's assistant director on this film, Jacques Becker, has a very brief role early in the film as a temperamental British officer who destroys his pocket watch rather than allow the Germans to confiscate it. Becker would himself later become a great director (e.g., Casque d'or (1952)).

For the script, Jean Renoir and screenwriter Charles Spaak drew from Jean des Vallieres' book "Kavalier Scharnhost" without acknowledgment. This led to a plagiarist suit in court.

In France, the First World War was referred to as "La Der des Ders" - the last one of all. The film's title La grande illusion (1937) explicitly points out that such a notion was indeed an illusion.

The art director, Eugène Lourié, was the one who carved the nativity figures out of potatoes for the Christmas scene towards the film's end.

Jean Gabin would have his eyes spotlit in close-ups to make them appear brighter.

The biggest shift in the story came about after Erich von Stroheim was cast. The actor-director-writer had recently returned to Europe in an effort to salvage his fading career. Various stories exist about how he came to be cast and what role he was originally offered, but what is clear is that Von Stroheim suggested he play both the gracious, aristocratic captor who first receives Marechal and Boeldieu as prisoners and the commandant of the fortress prison where they end up. Struggling through language barriers (each spoke different degrees of French, German and English), a collaboration between director and actor grew, combining both roles into one and enriching Von Rauffenstein from a sketchy character in the script into one who played a pivotal part in the film's themes of class differences, bonds stretching across borders, and the death-knell of the old aristocracy.

Erich von Stroheim was encouraged to write whole segments of his own dialogue. He helped create a relationship with the other aristocratic character, De Boeldieu, making it more complex and full and adding greatly to the exploration of the film's themes. He was also in synch with the director in their intention not to make the character a retread of the stereotypical "Horrible Hun" that Stroheim had played in American war films produced in World War I.

Erich von Stroheim clashed with Jean Renoir in the early days of shooting, and the director later said the actor "behaved intolerably." They had one argument over whether or not there should be prostitutes in the German quarters, a detail Von Stroheim thought would lend greater authenticity but which Renoir rejected as a childish cliche. The dispute so distressed Renoir he burst into tears, which caused Von Stroheim to do the same. They fell into each other's arms, and Renoir said that rather than quarrel with an artist he so greatly admired, he would give up directing the film altogether. Von Stroheim promised from that point on to follow Renoir's instructions to the letter, and he kept his word. Looking back on the production, the actor said, "I have never found a more sympathetic, understanding and artistic director and friend than Jean Renoir."

Jean Renoir had no problems at all with Jean Gabin. "There you have a true film actor - with a capital F," he later said. "I've filmed many people in my life, and I have never met such a cinematic power; he's a cinematic force, it's fantastic, it's incredible. It must come from his great honesty. He's certainly the most honest man I've ever met in my life."

On this and all his films, Jean Renoir worked very collaboratively with everyone, readily accepting suggestions from cast and crew and frequently improvising scenes to achieve a great sense of spontaneity.

Jean Renoir had to work quickly in order to catch the winter snows before they melted. When they did, plaster was used instead.

The screenplay had been written with Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay firmly in mind for the leading roles.

Being an actor himself, Jean Renoir also knew how to get the best performances from his cast. When Boeldieu creates a diversion to allow his fellow inmates to escape, Renoir told Erich von Stroheim to shout to him in English, "I beg you, man to man, come back," in a way that would sound like a man pleading with his mistress.

Before the producers agreed to finance the film, they questioned every expense including a stipulation in the script for the use of genuine silver dinner service. Renoir had to agree to make do with silver plate.

Jean Renoir had to abandon the idea of filming numerous planned shots of planes, airfields, and aerial combat (in the final film, we simply see characters leaving a room to go off on a flying mission, and later entering a room after being shot down and captured). The producers said they could not acquire the necessary planes but were also relieved to avoid a major expense. Renoir was furious at first but later considered it a fortunate accident, realizing his film worked much better without this footage.

Because shooting in Nazi Germany was out of the question, exteriors were done in the Alsace, the easternmost region of France, which retains a rather German character (and had been under German rule on and off, most recently from the late 19th century until World War I).

The prisoners' quarters were actually military barracks that had been constructed by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who also built the château that doubled for the final fortress prison.

Somewhere between early scripting and production, the character of Dolette developed into the wealthy Jewish character Rosenthal, which gave Jean Renoir the opportunity of not only joining race and ethnicity to the examination of class themes but, with Rosenthal written as a middle-class character, of adding nuance to the dichotomy between the working-class Marechal and the aristocratic De Boeldieu. The character was made more complex with the help of producer Albert Pinkovitch, who was Jewish and frequently offered suggestions for building the role into a plum part for Jewish actor Marcel Dalio.

Erich von Stroheim gave Von Rauffenstein his physical dimensions, creating a backstory in which, between the character's first and second appearances, he has been shot down and now exists in a painful and rigid orthopedic apparatus due to a broken back and constantly wears white gloves to conceal burns. An orthopedist had to be found in Colmar, a city near where they were shooting, to create the device in just a few days.

Erich von Stroheim's contributions extended to the look of the officer's uniform and the décor of his fortress chambers: the Gothic bed, the solitary geranium in the window that came to figure so prominently in his relationship with Boeldieu. Jean Renoir did not accept all his suggestions. He nixed the idea of covering the chambers in black crepe. But by and large, theirs was a very productive collaboration that gave new shape and meaning to the film.

The working relationship between Erich von Stroheim and the crew was not always smooth. He quarrelled furiously with technical adviser Carl Koch over the uniform worn by the army nurse. Fuelled by too much wine, the argument escalated into vicious insults and the throwing of wine glasses before the two men were calmed.