When a smoke was a smoke… The Grand Illusion at The Grand Illusion

Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion is, of course, up there with films like Citizen Kane, M, The Godfather, Third Man, and so on. Though made only two years before Germany launched the Second World War, it’s about the First World War and mostly set in a German prisoner-of-war camp. The film stars the great Austrian-American director/actor Erich von Stroheim, who plays a German aristocrat, Rittmeister von Rauffenstein, who bonds with one of the camp’s prisoners, a French aristocrat named Captain de Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay). Other French prisoners come from the top of its society—Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), the