Made during the Popular Front era in France, and while the Spanish Civil War was at its height, Renoir’s film addresses the concerns of the time, from Fascism to pacifism via class war and antisemitism. Above all it is a humanist picture, in which the blood and guts of warfare moves to the background and the foreground is given over to empathy and sympathy. 

The illusion of the title is both the idea that war can be a solution – a topical point today – and that the traditional martial values of chivalry can moderate it. The film is thus elegiac for a disappearing world, embodied by the aristocratic de Boëldieu (Fresnay) and von Rauffenstein (von Stroheim), but also hopeful about the virtues of democracy embodied in the everyman Maréchal, played by Jean Gabin, and his burgeoning love for a German widow, played by Dita Parlo.

The film resonates through cinema history, not only in the obvious POW echoes of The Colditz Story and The Great Escape, but more subtly in Casablanca’s Marseillaise scene and the class fraternisation of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It was also the trigger for the eventual creation of the Cannes Film Festival (in 1946) after Mussolini ensured it won nothing at the Venice Film festival of 1937. It casts a long shadow.

“Timely on its first appearance in 1937, Renoir’s masterpiece is now accepted as timeless, although it has suffered a little dangerous neglect. As the continent stumbled towards a second world war, this story of prisoners of war finding friendship, solidarity and hope behind enemy lines voiced the mounting pacifist sentiment in France and offered a vision of European unity.” Pamela Hutchinson, BFI (2017)

“[A]udiences wary of official masterpieces should know that it’s an overwhelming experience, with a robust humor and poignancy that tingle afresh in this prematurely grizzled new millennium.” Michael Sagrow, The New Yorker (2012)