Grand Illusion 2012 National Release - Rialto Pictures

Starring JEAN GABIN & ERICH VON STROHEIM
STUNNING NEW 4K RESTORATION! NEW 35mm PRINT!
Rialto Pictures presents Jean Renoir’s masterpiece GRAND ILLUSION (1937),
starring Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, and Erich von Stroheim in a spectacular
new 4K restoration in honor of its 75 th anniversary. Available in 35mm and DCP.
WWI, and it’s a POW camp for French man-of-the-people flyboy Jean Gabin and
aristocratic staff observer Pierre Fresnay after they’re shot down by equally
aristocratic German Erich von Stroheim. But meanwhile there are escapes —
one by tunnel — to be planned; fellowship with Jewish moneybags Marcel Dalio,
music hall cut-up Carette, and engineer Gaston Modot; a necessarily all-male
musical revue, interrupted by a dramatic announcement; and a reunion with
Stroheim at an escape-proof castle keep.
Partly inspired by stories of the air ace who had saved Renoir’s life in the war,
this was, on the brink of another one, a celebration of the brotherhood of man,
across class, across frontiers, as well a kind of elegy for an international
aristocracy (Fresnay and Stroheim, going monocle to monocle, speak much of
the time in English, a language no one else understands). Internationally
acclaimed, Grand Illusion received Best Foreign Film awards from the New York
Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, Best Overall Artistic
Contribution from the Venice Film Festival (under Mussolini), and an Academy
Award nomination for Best Picture – the first ever for a foreign film.
Long acknowledged as one of the world’s great classics, GRAND ILLUSION was
at one time thought lost. Declared "cinema enemy number one" by Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, its camera negative was confiscated by
the Germans soon after they occupied France in 1940, then sent to Berlin's
Reichsfilmarchiv, which in turn was seized by the Red Army in 1945. Although

the negative was completely intact and safely stored, even Renoir didn't know of
its existence and had to assemble a new dupe negative for its 1958 reissue.
In the mid-60s, the Cinémathèque of Toulouse, France, reached a détente with
its Soviet counterpart. The GRAND ILLUSION negative was part of a film
exchange, but it sat on a shelf in Toulouse for decades before anyone noticed. In
the late 90s, the material was transferred to the French State Film Archive for
inventory and, in 1999, the first restoration was undertaken by Canal+ Image
(now Studiocanal).
In 2011, Studiocanal and the Cinémathèque de Toulouse embarked on a new
restoration using the latest digital technology. The nitrate camera negative (which
was still in remarkable condition) was digitized in 4K by the Immagine Ritrovata
laboratory in Bologna. The sound was given special treatment; the nitrate
variable density soundtrack was scanned, allowing a restoration with sharper
sound quality. A 35mm record of the restored element will guarantee the film’s
preservation for at least a century. Newly-revised subtitles capturing the wit of the
Renoir-Charles Spaak screenplay like never before. One of the legends of
cinema, Grand Illusion now looks and sounds better than ever.
"A MAGNIFICENT RESTORATION
WE MUST ALL BE GRATEFUL FOR."
-- Martin Scorsese
“Cinema Enemy No. 1.”
-- Joseph Goebbels
“All the democracies of the world
must see this film.”
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“IF I HAD ONLY ONE FILM IN
THE WORLD TO SAVE,
IT WOULD BE GRAND ILLUSION.”
-- Orson Welles
114 min | 1937 | b&w
A Rialto Pictures Release
Contact: Diana Wade
media@rialtopictures.com
212-620-0986