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enitharmon
That would be French for 'The Great Escape.' Well no, not really, you knew that anyway. All the same, La Grande Illusion is the parent of all those POW films, and very respectful children they are too. Furtively dropping bags of dirt from the tunnel into the vegetable patch? Fans of TGE get an instant sense of déjà vû. That scene in Casablanca where Rick's French clients strike up a defiant Marseillaise? First seen in La Grande Illusion.
That's only a small part of the story. This is a very different war, one in which aristocratic German officers invite their enemy brother officers round for tea when they get shot down. (It's not quite the same WW1 that I learned about either. No lions dragged by donkeys through the poison mud of Flanders; something altogether more gentlemanly in the forests of Wurtemburg). But things are changing: It's all very well when rival captains have genuine blue blood in their veins but some of these dastardly enemy officers were mechanics and even, heaven forfend, Jews! (that must have been a telling blow in 1937, no wonder the Nazis confiscated all the prints) Time, then, for the old order to give way gracefully to the new.
