So this is a movie by Jean Renoir, who we last saw all the way back at #4, with The Rules of the Game, a farce of the French upper class on the eve of WW2. This time around, we’re looking at a movie set in WW1 POW camps, where we follow a handful of captured French officers throughout their imprisonment and escape attempts.

So it’s obviously very different, but it’s still deeply concerned about social class. One of the captured officers is a member of the old aristocracy, another is a commoner, and a third is a nouveau riche Jewish guy. (And even though I know it’s a WW1 movie and that WW2 was a totally different thing, I still expected that to get him in trouble with the Germans, but nope.)

And so there’s a whole subplot with the head of the German POW camp, who’s also old nobility, and the relationship that he and the French noble officer have, and the ways in which class crosses national borders… but also the ways in which nationality crosses class borders. And of course, underlying all of this is the reality that WW1 will mark the end, in many ways, of the old nobility, which gets some foreshadowing-y dialogue.

But the exploration of class is kind of a sub-theme in the movie; the larger overriding point of the movie is its anti-war message, which is pretty clear but not delivered in the usual way. Usually, anti-war movies show the horrific aftermath of battles and the tragic cost of war. This doesn’t do that at all. Instead, it’s simply showing the essential humanity and capability for decency of people on both sides of the conflict — in the POW camps, and then in a farmhouse afterward.

Also, this is another one of those movies that has an astonishingly recent restoration story: Because of its anti-war message, Goebbels declared the film “Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1”, and when the Nazis took Paris, they seized the negatives and original prints, which is remarkable in its own right. But and so everyone assumed they had been destroyed in Allied bombing of Paris, but it turns out the Nazis had shipped the prints back to Berlin. And then after the war, they were in the Russian zone of Berlin, and were shipped back to Soviet film archives, and then in the 1960s, there was some kind of exchange with France where it was sent back to Paris… BUT NOBODY EVEN KNEW IT, because nobody had looked at what all this film was. And so finally in the 1990s it was discovered and used to make restored prints, but up until then, people had been watching it on blurry and scratched copies of prints.

Anyway, this is another good one. I think Renoir fans were right to put The Rules of the Game above this, but I will take the brave stance of saying that they’re both excellent movies.