The True Story Behind the First Foreign Feature to Break Out In Hollywood

On May 1, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a major change to the eligibility rules for the best international feature film. No longer would a film have to be nominated by the country of origin; henceforth, it could land in the pool of nominees by winning an award from a list of high-profile international film festivals. Moreover, in recognition of the fact that a person not a nation actually directs the film, the director’s name and not the country’s will be engraved for posterity on the statuette plaque.

The new protocols for the best international film category, née best foreign language film, are the latest rejiggering in what has historically been one of the more contentious and confusing Oscar categories.  Of course, under whatever rules, Oscar validation can mean the difference between multi-platform distribution and oblivion in the American marketplace.   

So, despite the provincialism of allotting a mere five slots to the output of the rest of the planet, foreign filmmakers have been eager to perform due obeisance before the Academy, which since 1957 has granted offshore films a regular seat at the festivities. (The first winner was Federico Fellini’s La Strada.)  Before that, the Academy doled out an Honorary Oscar when the impact and excellence of a foreign film became too conspicuous to ignore, as with Italy’s The Bicycle Thief in 1949 or Japan’s Rashomon in 1952. The honor was voted on by the Board of Governors, to save the full Academy membership from reading subtitles. (Today the nominees are chosen by an Academy-approved Select Committee). Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), nominated for best picture and best foreign language Film (it won the latter), was a landmark border crossing and, in 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite broke the language barrier by becoming the first non-English language film to win best picture.

However, of all the foreign-born incursions into top-tier Oscar territory, the first breakthrough is the most curious. At a time when subtitled films were a species of exotica, and with no major studio backing, Jean Renoir’s antiwar classic La Grande Illusion (1937) — easily translated as Grand Illusion — landed a nomination in the best picture slot, which was then called outstanding production and included ten candidates. (The other nominees were Boys Town, The Citadel, Pygmalion, Test Pilot [all MGM],  Four Daughters, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Jezebel [Warner Bros.], Alexander’s Ragtime Band [20th Century-Fox]  and You Can’t Take It with You [Columbia]. The last, directed by Frank Capra, won.) To be sure, in 1949 a British invader, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, won best picture, but it was at least in English and credited to an A-list screenwriter. But how did Grand Illusion manage to crash the exclusive party?

In 1938, Jean Renoir was not a known name in the US, much less a world-famous auteur.  It seems unbelievable that two of his early masterpieces — Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) were not released in the US until 1967 and 1964 respectively. Renoir’s version of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1936) and his Popular Front documentary The People of France (1936) got only modest arthouse circulation and critical attention, with reviewers sure to identify the director as “the son of the famous French impressionist Auguste Renoir.” Only after Grand Illusion was Renoir acknowledged in his own right as a French master in another medium.

Made in Paris by Les Realisation d’Art Cinematographyque, Grand Illusion was distributed stateside by World Pictures Corp., operated by the legendary foreign film magnate Irvin Shapiro, who began his career importing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and capped it by exporting The Evil Dead (1985).  Like almost all films about the Great War made in its aftermath but before its sequel, it is somber in tone and pacificist in sentiment. There are no scenes of thrilling aerial combat or over-the-top attacks in no man’s land. “A War Story without War Scenes!” warned the advertising. Renoir knew the material first hand, having served as both a cavalry officer and a pilot in the Great War and been wounded twice. 

Two French pilots — Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), a white-gloved aristocrat, and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a gruff former machinist — are shot down over German lines by the ramrod-straight Prussian aviator Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). A chivalric knight of the air, von Rauffenstein plays the gracious host to his prisoner-guests before they must depart for a prison camp. The accommodations in the German POW camp are not half bad and the company is great. De Boeldieu and Marechal encounter a diverse crew of colorful countrymen — a comedian, a literary scholar, and the son of a wealthy Jewish family, Lieutenant Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a stalwart solider who generously shares his bountiful food parcels.  (The affirmative portrait of Rosenthal was certainly by way of apology for the treatment of the most famous Jew in French military history, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had just died in 1935.)

Of course, the prisoners are digging a tunnel to escape. “A golf course is for golf, a tennis court for tennis, a prison camp for escape,” observes de Boeldieu. When not excavating and eating Rosenthal’s bread and cheese, the men rehearse for a musical comedy performance featuring a chorus line of men in drag. The shenanigans are interrupted by news that the French have retaken Fort Douaumont, marking the end of the carnage at Verdun. In an outburst of patriotism, the prisoners rise to sing “La Marseillaise,” a scene that ranks as the second most stirring rendition of the French National anthem in motion picture history.   

As recidivist would-be escapees, de Boeldieu, Marechal, and Rosenthal are transferred to an impregnable medieval fortress, commanded by Captain von Rauffenstein, now burnt, broken in body, and wearing a neck brace. Knowing their days of bloodline privilege are numbered, the German and the French aristocrat bond, their class affinities binding them more tightly than the uniforms that separate them. Renoir told film historian Arthur Knight that if a French farmer and a French financier dined together, they would sit in uncomfortable silence, but if a French farmer and a Chinese farmer dined together, they would find plenty to talk about.

Still, a French prisoner must do his duty: de Boeldieu gallantly stages a diversion so Maréchal and Rosenthal can escape, during which a reluctant von Rauffenstein is forced to shoot his class comrade. On his death bed, de Boeldieu accepts the fortunes of war as Von Ruffenstein grieves.  

The third act finds Maréchal and Rosenthal scurrying through the woods and fields, squabbling and miserable, until they come upon a farmhouse run by a fetching German war widow (Dita Parlo) with an adorable daughter. She takes them in, gives them shelter and food, and falls hard for Marechal, 1937 being the year of peak Jean Gabin. In too short a time, though, the pair must leave the idyll. Against odds, they escape into Switzerland. The guards on the German side see no point in firing as, in the distance, the men plod through the snow to freedom. In Great War territory, this counts as a happy ending.

On June 8, 1937, La Grande Illusion premiered at the 1250-seat Marivaux Theater in Paris, to a packed house made up of “members of Paris society, Paris cinema and theater circles, writers and press representatives” who, at the end, “gave long and loud applause.” The French critics, then as now a surly and hard-to-please lot, were unanimous in praise: “an important and extremely happy event in French cinema history” (Le Temps); “a masterpiece of cinema”; (Mariane); and “a very fine film, a beautiful human work” (Oeuvre). In the theater that night was Pierre Autre, Motion Picture Herald’s man in Paris, who first sent word back to American readers, a rave that has stood the test of time. “La Grande Illusion is, by far, the best French film of the year, up to date — in fact, it is one of the best French films ever made.” The Hollywood Reporter also predicted that “the smash hit” should “go well in the States.”

It did better than well. In America, Grand Illusion became the most widely circulated and highly praised foreign film of the 1930s.

On Sept. 12, 1938, Grand Illusion opened at the newly refurbished Filmarte Theater in New York with columnist Dorothy Thompson, novelist Fannie Hurst, playwright Clifford Odets, and actress Aline MacMahon in attendance. The Filmarte was run by a pioneering importer of foreign film, Jean H. Lenauer, whose arthouse was emblematic of what were called “sure seaters” in the trade because a small but devoted clientele was sure to buy a ticket to whatever foreign film happened to be booked. Grand Illusion played the Filmarte for a record-breaking 27 weeks. The lobby was decorated with reproductions of Impressionist paintings by Auguste Renoir.

Meanwhile, the word on Grand Illusion was getting out beyond the insular arthouse crowd. Samuel Goldwyn called it “the most brilliantly directed film I have seen in years — a challenge to Hollywood.” Producer Walter Wanger, director Mervyn LeRoy, and the actresses Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes also offered endorsements. The New York Film Critics named Grand Illusion the year’s best foreign film. The National Board of Review dispensed with qualifiers and named it “the best film of the year from any country.”  The Film Daily ran out of superlatives and finally just said, “you owe it to yourself to see this picture — it will send you out thinking.”