The Grand Illusion

If you are new to the blog, for context see the entry on April 20…

If someone forced me to choose my favorite movie I could do worse than to select Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937). The Grand Illusion sets the standard for the prisoner of war movie, providing archetypal images for Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and, shudder, Hogan’s Heroes. The film takes place during the Great War and concerns the relationship between three socially disparate French prisoners and their German commandant. Renoir himself was a veteran of the Great War and this film was his plea for social cooperation and the realization that the German enemy was as human as the French themselves. While perhaps overly sentimental at times, it is a beautiful film that has aged well as is often on lists of “Greatest Films of All Time.”

A notable scene during the film takes place in the compound for Russian POWs. The Russians had just received a large wooden crate from the Czarina Alexandra. Excitedly, the Russians announce to the French the arrival of the crate and they muse about the riches within, “The Czarina has always taken care of her officers” they shout as they fantasize about the caviar, vodka, and other delights inside. As a favor, they invited a few French officers to share in the opening of the crate.

Three sturdy Russians take crowbars to the box and on the count of three they open the lid, revealing straw on top of the contents. The anticipation builds. The straw is swept away and instead of caviar, vodka, and delights, the soldiers are greeted by a number of books and pamphlets: Aristotle, Geometry, Philosophy, Physics, and so forth are what they find. Disgruntled soldiers puzzedly thumb through the books. Is this a joke? What is going on? An unhappier soldier lights some straw on fire and throws it in the crate in disgust causing a larger conflagration…

I had a similar experience last week. As my readers know, in April I ill-advisedly mailed a number of my books, some materials from Publicis, some propaganda I collected at the student protests, and a couple of small gifts for friends from Paris back to the States rather than cart them to London on my way home. After two months I had all but given up hope that the books would ever come. But, last week I received a call from Amanda at my office saying that the books had come finally arrived! I greedily drove to my office and picked up the box and brought it home. I did not need a crowbar to open my box open and after a few snips of the tape I opened it. Suffice it to say that my reaction was little less perturbed than that of the Russian soldiers. There were two of my books in the box, an ancient pocket dictionary that I had had for years and another unimportant book. However, the others were five large books (textbook sized) in Arabic. I had no straw nearby to set them on fire, alas.

What happened? The box did have a stamp on the side indicating it had been received “damaged” at some postal processing center in New Jersey and I have to hypothesize that a number of boxes were damaged and opened, their contents spilling out, with postal workers trying to resort them as best they could. Of course, perhaps something more nefarious took place. I’ll send a letter to the Postmaster General any day now.



The flash drowns out the my hand-scrawled address on the box but you get the idea...



The bitter contents of my box. Alas, no straw...maybe someone at the NSA can translate these for me.