Apart from its other achievements, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion influenced two famous later movie sequences. The digging of the escape tunnel in The Great Escape and the singing of the Marseillaise to enrage the Germans in Casablanca can first be observed in Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece. Even the details of the tunnel dig are the same–the way the prisoners hide the excavated dirt in their pants and shake it out on the parade ground during exercise. But if Grand Illusion had been merely a source of later inspiration, it wouldn’t be on so many lists of great films. It’s not a movie about a prison escape, nor is it jingoistic in its politics; it’s a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I (…) Jean Renoir, born in 1894, is on any list of the half-dozen greatest filmmakers, and his The Rules of the Games (1939) is even more highly considered than Grand Illusion. He fought in World War I, then quickly returned to Paris and entered the movie business. In his best films observation and sympathy for the characters define every shot; there is hardly a camera decision made for pure effect, without thinking first of where best to stand to see the characters. — Roger Ebert