Lucky Luke tells the story of a heroic gunslinger (Jean Dujardin) who is – one incident involving the death of his parents aside – the luckiest (French) cowboy in the West! Decked out in some butt-hugging Levis, a red bandana and an emo fringe that would put Tobey Maguire’s evil Spidey to shame, he traverses the salt flats of Utah on his trusty horse, Jolly Jumper, shooting at – but crucially never killing because of that whole dead parents thing – all sorts of baddies. Famed for his seeming invincibility and deadly skill with his Colt pistol, Lucky Luke is entrusted with an important task by none other than the (French) President of the United States: ridding a local town (and Luke’s childhood home) of its criminal population.

Luke throws himself into the task with gusto, riding into town, deposing the villainous Pat Poker (Daniel Prévost) and his cronies, and declaring himself sheriff. Poker, none too pleased about this, hires Billy the Kid (Michaël Youn) to come into town and kill Luke, and in the ensuing scuffle Luke finds himself doing something he never thought he would – committing murder. Horrified with himself, Luke flees town and hangs up his Colt, vowing to never use it again. Events conspire against him and before long, Luke finds himself set upon by all manner of bad guys, seeking to kill him and make their way into the history books for finally offing the famous cowboy. Inevitably, obviously, Luke picks up his Colt again and decides to do the right thing.

In story terms, then, it’s fairly simple. The largely unsettling thing about this film is its shifting tone. I have to say my favourite moments were the ones that resembled a silly spoof such as Hot Shots! e.g. Luke going around in his red onesie and getting slap-happy with his girlfriend (funnier than it sounds). Ultimately, though, the film never moves far enough in one direction to be truly satisfying. Just when you think it’s going to veer into out-and-out comedy, it reins itself in (yes, that was intentional) and becomes a far more traditional adventure story, complete with showdowns, betrayals and clunky exposition.

There is something to be said, though, for Huth’s directorial vision; combining elements of steampunk, the traditional Western, and even the Broadway musical. Heavily influenced by its cartoon roots, Lucky Luke is also strangely theatrical in its appearance, full of dramatic spotlights, bright colours and gaudy sets. In fact it wouldn’t be surprising if the whole cast suddenly burst into song halfway through. It’s this bold approach that raises Lucky Luke above the level of some sort of bland nonsense like Wild Wild West. And indeed, the cast does well with the material. Dujardin is dimple-faced and charming in the lead role, while Youn’s lollipop-sucking Billy the Kid is good fun, popping up at all the right moments to liven things up.

It might not be the most involving of films but there’s something inherently likeable about Lucky Luke. Perhaps it’s because looking at Jean Dujardin’s lovely face reminded me of how good The Artist was. Maybe it was the fact that the horse (SPOILERS!) started talking half way through. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because it’s French and you gotta love French people. Especially when they’re pretending to be cowboys.

Ever since he conducted his crimes in 1888, Jack the Ripper has been a mystery people can’t wait to solve; who was the man who mutilated prostitutes in the streets with a surgeon’s precision, evading the police at every step? Why don’t we know who he is? WHY DON’T WE KNOW WHO HE IS?!

Because Sherlock Holmes didn’t take the case on, that’s why!

Murder By Decree feels, at once, strangely familiar; for those of you who have seen historical flop From Hell, you’ll find that the story follows a similar plot. In fact, the exact same plot; detailing the events of the Whitechapel killings, it soon becomes apparent that someone is having these women wiped out. And, as Sherlock (Plummer) and Watson (Mason) are about to discover, there is a conspiracy in place to protect the killer.

However, despite the sometimes predictable turn of events, Murder By Decree still holds some surprises; who is dogging Holmes’ every step? What secrets will Mary Kelly (Susan Clark) reveal? And why is Dot Cotton wandering the streets of Whitechapel? Shouldn’t she be manning the launderette in Albert Square!?

Unlike Guy Ritchie’s modern take on the classic detective, Murder By Decree‘s Sherlock is a quietly contemplative one. He considers the situation, he mulls things over with his pipe and then he quietly goes about the business of gathering the evidence. There’s none of that insane action sequence gun-toting martial-arts business. In fact, Holmes’ most dangerous weapon is his specially-adapted “death” scarf. And, sadly, this Sherlock lacks the deductive prowess of Downey’s portrayal – Holmes is more of a people person than an intellectual genius.

Plummer also gives Holmes a far more emotional side; he angers up at injustice, he tears up when he sees some “pathetic woman” (casual sexism’s always a winner!) and, on the whole, makes him a more human character. It’s basically what would have happened if Captain Von Trapp had fled to England after witnessing the assassination of Maria and his children during a rousing performance of ‘Do Re Mi’.

Mason underplays Watson; unlike Jude Law’s version, he is a staunch monarchist and prone to narrow-mindedness. Not to mention more than a little bumbling! However, he’s the perfect foil to Holmes and brings the always essential old married couple element to their relationship.

The rest of the cast are wonderful; look out in particular for Susan Clark’s wild-eyed prostitute in distress, as well as a haunting performance from Geneviève Bujold (Anne Of A Thousand Days) who, once again, gives a tragic portrayal of a cast-aside lover. Sutherland, on the other hand, is oddly forgettable as psychic Robert Lees; his visions of the murders could have been far more compelling than the yawn-fest they actually were.

In short, it’s a brilliant film, adding an imaginative twist to the ‘whodunnit’ genre. However, thanks to From Hell copying the plot all those years later, not to mention the SEXY new Sherlock Holmes films, Murder By Decree has the potential to come across as outdated and derivative to a modern audience.

A woman (Tuva Novotny) wakes up by a river with a cut on her head. She stumbles to the nearest motel and as she checks in, it becomes apparent that she has no recollection of who she is or how she got here. Furthermore, it turns out she’s in France when in fact she lives in Denmark, and is also the wife of a renowned opera singer, Just Ore (Flemming Enevold). And just who the hell are these menacing-looking men chasing her?

This sense of fearful disorientation makes up the early part of the film, establishing a tense atmosphere in which we feel that our poor amnesiac protagonist has no one in the world to help her. The mystery men following her around the cobbled streets of a French village clearly don’t have good intentions, and we sympathise with the hapless Ida, who seems hopelessly out of her depth in her predicament.

After Ida finds her way back to her husband, there is only a momentary sense of security as she soon discovers from her sister that Just is involved with a violent communist group. What neither Just nor Ida realise is during the period which she’s conveniently forgotten about, Ida inadvertently got caught up in the group’s activities. As such, the only people who get the whole picture are the baddies, who believe that Ida knows the whereabouts of a considerable amount of money that they’ve had stolen from them.

As to be expected, there is a lot of chasing around going on in this film. While the scenes in themselves are dynamically edited and packed with quick-cutting goodness, there’s not much variety when it comes to the thrills. It’s not that explosions are necessary for a good thriller (the recently-released Cleanskin proves that), but this film never really breaks away from the safe routine of running-and-driving, with a few bullets thrown in for good measure. After the first couple of chases, it becomes apparent that these henchmen can’t shoot for shit, making the intensity levels steadily decline as the film goes on.

If there’s something that compensates for the samey action sequences, it’s Tuva Novotny’s performance. At no point does she turn into a smart-quipping, ass-kicking heroine, and doesn’t fire a single bullet throughout the whole film. If anything, she’s a little bit on the cutesy side, but this makes the odds seem even more firmly stacked against her. We root for her because for most of the film she is utterly clueless; an ordinary, terrified woman dragged into something that she never fully understands.

Unlike most thrillers, ID: A doesn’t twist and turn like a pretzel. Most of the plot is uncovered in one particular near-death moment for Ida. During this flashback, Ida’s brother Martin (Carsten Bjørnlund) gets thrown into the fray, as he too is involved with the rebel group’s shady activities. Once Ida snaps back to the present day, the film winds down to a fairly tame climax and warm, predictable conclusion. It’s refreshing to see a thriller in which we never get full clarity on the wider events that the hero gets caught up in, but repetitive chase sequences and mostly underdeveloped characters mean that the film never engages us quite as much as it should.

Shadow of the Sword is set in Central Europe against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, circa 1500. Georg (Peter MacDonald) and Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) are two childhood friends who take contrasting paths as adults; Georg becomes a Catholic priest, while Martin serves as an army captain before eventually becoming an executioner. When the two reunite in adulthood, their friendship is pushed to the limit as Georg gets caught up in the Inquisition, forced to persecute anyone showing signs of rebellion or heresy against the Holy Roman Empire.

The plot develops quickly, if a little erratically. Despite Georg and Martin apparently being the best buddies in the world, the script fails to establish a bro-mantic chemistry between the two. Georg is an impotent sap (the kind of guy who’d give you a limp, sweaty-palmed handshake) while Martin is your typical rugged, sword-wielding hero. There just is nothing that connects the two, apart from the fact that they were in the same choir and presumably touched up by the same priest when they were kids. The secondary characters are reduced to stereotypes; from Martin’s passive wife, to the gollum-like Fabio (a waste of Eddie Marsan’s acting talents), to the evil Sith-like Inquisitor (Steven Berkoff), there is too much cliche here for it to be a serious drama.

Things do heat up pretty quickly, as we get a strong sense of the good-intentioned Georg being caught up in events way beyond his control. The swift persecution of the Protestant anabaptists evokes the obligatory horrors of historical genocides, though the impact is reduced somewhat as we don’t see things from their perspective. Considerably more effective are the torture scenes which, despite being mostly off-screen, provide sufficient sound effects to let our imaginations do the rest. The violence may be satisfyingly gritty, but the victims in these scenes aren’t significant characters, so it feels a bit like we’re watching them to satisfy our primal bloodlust rather than the need for narrative development.

Despite all its reductive stereotyping, this is not a dreary film. The costumes and sets are all reasonably convincing, though the over-use of haggard wenches with rotten teeth just makes me think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (not necessarily a bad thing). Berkoff fulfils his role as the villainous Inquisitor with relish, and his ruthlessness heightens the film’s intensity; so much so that we start seeing the odds stacked against our shallow heroes to be nigh-on insurmountable.

It was a brave move by director Simon Aeby to make a film that fairly honestly depicts the brutality and injustice of the Inquisition. To make a film where people actually manage to stand up against one of the most efficient religious cullings in history would be fairy-tale stuff, and Aeby does well to sacrifice the Hollywood ending for the sake of historical accuracy. Shadow of the Sword is a surprisingly good-looking and honest historical snippet into one of the most authoritarian periods in Europe’s history. While it’d make a nice exhibition of ‘what things were like back then,’ the film falls short in character development and a subsequently engaging narrative, making it a superficial historical skim rather than an immersive epic.

The story revolves around a trio of snipers, each with his own vague back-story that is presumably intended to make them more empathetic. OJ is a young cop whose sharp-shooting skills get noticed by a member of Special Force – an elite sniping division used in law enforcement operations. The division is run by Hartman (Richie Ren), who has a chip on his shoulder over the fact that another sniper, Lincoln (Xiaoming Huang), is a better shot than him. Lincoln, however, left the division in disgrace several years earlier, and is out for revenge on Hartman, who he deems responsible for his dismissal.

With a relatively linear plot like that, there’s good reason to fill the film out with enough action set-pieces to blow your mind to the point that you forget about the crap narrative. In fairness, there are plenty of them in the film. The sniping scenes are sufficiently tense, with us being constantly aware of how breathing, wind and other factors affect the final shot. The editing is apt enough to make each sniper showdown suspenseful, but it just doesn’t count for much when we don’t give a shit about the protagonists.

Creating three back-stories for three different heroes proves too much of a task for director Dante Lam, best known for his brutal 1998 action thriller Beast Cops. While Hartman has the usually heart-prodding combination of a sweet kid and suicidal ex-wife, these elements are so underdeveloped that they’d have been better off left out. OJ’s character development goes as far as us knowing that he wants to be the best sniper in the whole universe… ever! In fact, it’s the villainous Lincoln who has the most intriguing backstory, as his time in jail has driven him mad to the point of (SPOILER ALERT) hallucinating that his dead wife is encouraging him to take revenge on the Special Force. Even then, the scenes of emotional depth fall back on unoriginal and tired imagery (photos of happy couples, swelling music, speechless smiling etc.) that makes them impossible to take seriously.

For all its lack of human interest, the film moves along at a good pace, keeping moments of downtime short and sweet in between decent action sequences. At points, The Sniper slips into 80s American action film territory, with images of sweaty men running around in camo, narrating some tosh about how all men are competitive and want to be the best (one of the sniper squad members is even called Iceman). Unfortunately, the faux-machismo on show here lacks the kitsch appeal that made those kinds of films timelessly appealing. That being said, the synthy soundtrack may force a nostalgic smile onto some people’s faces.

There isn’t enough dynamism, plot originality or acting talent to make The Sniper a memorable film. It’s very easy to watch, with little time being wasted on the anaemic plot in exchange for some enjoyable all-out action. This culminates in a climax that comes close to matching the kind of action cinema we’ve come to expect from Hong Kong. The problem is that by this point we really don’t care which of the one-dimensional heroes lives or dies. As such, the film feel more like a snipers’ shooting range with cardboard targets than an intense thriller involving actual human subjects.

Nowadays, of course she and Monroe are remembered quite differently. The American starlet’s barbiturate overdose in 1962 has helped her reach a sort of sainthood in some sections – the ultimate tortured celeb’, the benchmark for tragic fame and tarnished beauty. Bardot, through her marriage to an ex-Front National advisor and her occasional press outbursts regarding immigration, has become an unpopular icon of the European right. Yet both women helped herald in a new era of brazen sexuality which would lead to the show-us-yer tits school of female empowerment that we currently enjoy/ endure (delete based on your personal feelings).

They both also made movies and, occasionally, good ones. Bardot’s catalogue is notoriously spotty – for every ground-breaking And God Created Woman there is 3 or 4 Doctor at Seas; for every challenging Contempt, umpteen Marina the Girl in the Bikinis.

Love on a Pillow sits somewhere between the two. A self consciously provocative romance, it tells the story of Genevieve (Bardot) a young upper class French woman living a protected, sterile life in Paris. During a trip to Dijon to settle an inheritance, she happens to stumble into the wrong hotel room where she finds handsome Renaud (Hossein) dying from a suicidal overdose of sleeping pills. Genevieve calls an ambulance just in time and saves Renaud from self-prescribed death.  Renaud, a caustic, intelligent, wild and witty alcoholic, represents all that Genevieve has never experienced in her white bread existence and soon she is drawn into his passionate though self-destructive world. The two begin a torrid love affair that sees Genevieve pulled away from her family and both lovers hurtle towards potential oblivion.

Directed by Bardot’s then husband Roger Vadim (who also made And God Created Woman) Love on a Pillow is, at its strongest points, a skillfully made piece of work. Vadim, a hugely charismatic force behind the camera, paints the Paris of the early sixties with tremendous flourish and allows the film to wander into some agreeably murky emotional territory. Renaud’s grim though thrilling world view has freed Genevieve, sexually, emotionally and intellectually, yet this liberation also makes her free to be hurt, to be manipulated, even to be destroyed. Hossein cuts a suitably rogue-ish figure, possessed with an intoxicating, ruthless lust for carnality and debauchery.

The central problem with Love on a Pillow (aside from that abysmal title; the direct French translation Warrior’s Rest would have been much better) lies, unfortunately, with its leading lady. Though unquestionably, almost inhumanly beautiful, Bardot is a bizarrely awkward presence on screen. While the film insists upon the absolute, end-of-the-world passion that is passing between the two young lovers, little or nothing in Bardot’s performance confirms it. Her delivery during the blazing rows is clunky and unconvincing; her physicality during the blazing love zombie-ish. Early on in proceedings when she tells Renaud that she cannot believe how much she has changed in the ten days since they met, we find ourselves nodding along in agreement, having seen nothing in her performance to evidence the notion.

Which does not make Love on a Pillow a bad movie, just a deeply flawed one. In fact, like Bardot herself, it is now most interesting when viewed as an artefact from an interesting, turbulent period of change in both French cinema and society rather than a gripping tale of bad romance.

Elsa Casanova (Kruger) is a world renowned war correspondent working in Afghanistan. While investigating a case of human trafficking, Elsa is kidnapped by young, charismatic, Bin Laden-ish Jihadi Ahmed Zaef (Degan, who’s actually Israeli – Ironarama!). Though he seems somewhat taken with her, Zaef releases a video to the world announcing that he will behead the attractive reporter. Outraged and fearing a hugely embarrassing spectacle should she be executed, the French government call in a Special Forces unit of seven hardcore Frenchmen led by Commander Kovax (Hounsou). After being dropped into the Pakistani tribal area where Elsa is held, the team manage to free her from capture but their planned extraction fails under heavy gunfire from the Taliban. Left with no other choice Kovax draws up what may be a suicide mission – a gruelling trek through mountains that shade the Afghan/ Pakistan border. The team begin their daring escape, bringing Casanova with them, but Zaef and his minions are close behind.

For the best part of an hour or so Special Forces rattles out exactly as you would expect. Lots of expositional dialogue, baddies being unspeakably bad, heroes being gruff and macho and heroines being tough and resilient. The stale, homogenous nature of the narrative is not assisted by the action sequences which are stifled by plain, unremarkable direction. While they contain all the relevant and expected criteria (soldiers shout “Allez! Allez!”/ guns go bang/ terrorists go flying) there is a strange lack of force behind their execution and gunfight after gunfight flicks by with nothing but dullness to remark upon.

Then, somewhere near the final act, things begin to get more interesting. As Kovak and the gang are cast out in the Pakistani wilderness the film locates not just its nerve but its heart, brain and balls too. Struggling through the unforgiving heat of the desert, the rugged, frozen impossibility of the mountains and the never ending danger of the lowlands, littered as they are with hostile forces, the muscle men of the film’s earlier passages become real people, new dimensions revealed as they struggle not just against the elements and the enemy but against their own resolve. Rybojad too comes into his own in this landscape and the unexceptional action scenes we saw earlier are replaced by breathless, overpowering photography utilising the scenery of Tajikistan, where much of the film was shot, to gripping effect.

Special Forces builds to a genuinely emotional climax as the team are whittled down by enemy bullets and the cruelty of nature, and the quality of the cast list, particularly Kruger and Menochet as Kovax’s best buddy Lucas, finally begins to show on screen. As welcome as this final third is, however, it chiefly serves to leave you even more disappointed by the plain-Jane, bang-bang vacuum that preceded it.

The plot follows Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), who is struggling to come to terms with a murderous rampage committed by her son. The entire film intercuts between Eva’s present-day loneliness, sounds and blurry images surrounding the night of her son’s crime, and her upbringing of her son, the titular Kevin (played by three different child actors, all with equal menace). The film’s style, brilliantly executed by director Lynne Ramsay, throws us into right into the tormented mind of Eva, who, despite her external stoicism, seems doomed to forever obsess over just what the hell went wrong with her relationship with her deviant child.

To some extent, the lack of explanation for Kevin’s behaviour is frustrating, as summed up by Kevin unhelpfully saying ‘there is no point. That’s the point.’ Much more revealing, however, is the perpetual shock on Tilda Swinton’s face throughout the film, which suggests a self-pity in Eva’s character resulting from her very status of being a mother. Her performance doesn’t so much evoke sympathy, as depict a woman who’s not ready to make the great sacrifice that motherhood requires. Both before and after Kevin’s rampage, Swinton infuses her character with a cold sense of superiority. Incapable of self-reflection, Eva never develops the motherly instinct to blame herself for Kevin’s misbehaviour, seemingly settling in her own mind early on that her son is the devil incarnate. Giving up on forming any kind of relationship with Kevin, Eva decides to have another child against her husband’s will, played by a painfully cute Ashley Gerasimovich; a brash move that simply places another completely innocent person at Kevin’s mercy.

Right from giving birth to Kevin, Eva cuts an isolated figure as her well-meaning but oafish husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) cradles Kevin. This sets the stage for the rest of the film, in which Eva’s life is subsumed into the child while Franklin becomes the archetypal ‘cool dad’ who plays with his son and buys him a top-of-the-range bow and arrow (the perfect accompaniment to a high-school killing spree, it would seem). Kevin’s malicious intelligence is evident from early on. Whether it’s him not passing his ball back to his mother as a toddler, cutting off her ‘birds-and-bees’ talk by asking if she’s talking about ‘fucking’ as a child, and a whole series of increasingly violent stunts as a teenager, Kevin’s behaviour at times seems to go beyond the explicably psychopathic, and towards genuine evil.

Lynne Ramsay does a great job in forming a sense of creeping dread around a disaster that we’re aware of from the start. The recurrence of the colour red, an unpleasant lingering of the picture and sound on Kevin eating, and the disruption of Eva’s memories with the terrified screams of Kevin’s victims all infuse the whole film with an unceasing discomfort. Perhaps creating such a sense of inevitability around a subject as controversial as murderous youths is a bit too deterministic, especially when the film is ambivalent about the explanation, but it certainly makes for powerful drama.

Kevin is a stark film that adeptly expresses a parent’s worst fears through a combination of cold, intense performances and a heavily subjective visual style. Its absolute focus on how Eva perceives her relationship with her child means that we get little clarity as to why Kevin turned out the way he did, but giving an explanation would surely over-simplify the difficult subject matter. By not giving a judgement on the source of Kevin’s problem, the film is frustrating, terrifying, and uncomfortably echoing of real-world events.

There is little to say in terms of DVD extras. Aside from the obligatory trailer, there’s a 15-minute video featuring interviews with all the main players in the film, most of whom don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about it. In short, just watch the film.

Cut to a bright, well-to-do living room. “As you can see, Giles is a real peach” Holly is telling a gathering of desperate housewives as the camera pans, rather incongruously, past Giles’s scrotum. Before long the pair of them are down on the shag-pile doing moany sex noises as the ladies sip champagne and cross their legs a lot. Eventually, Giles stands up, eyes closed, a look of deep concentration on his face. “Uuugh!” he says. “Uuuuugh! UUUUUGGHH!” – a load of splattery graphics hit the screen: X: NIGHT OF VENGEANCE, they announce. The message is clear. This film…. is JIZZ.

Holly (the impressively stoic Viva Bianca), an experienced escort working the high-end of Sydney’s boutique hotels, has her bags packed and her ticket to Paris booked. All she has to do is get through one last night on the job and it’s goodbye sinister bent copper boyfriend; goodbye the shame of selling her downstairs down under; hello the shame of realising it hasn’t been acceptable to summon a waiter with the term ‘Garcon’ in Paris since 1956. Unfortunately, the success of the last job, a blonde/brunette duo, is jeopardised when her co-worker slips in the shower while giving herself a soapy tit massage in front of her own Yorkshire Terrier. Holly needs a brunette and she needs one fast.

Enter Shay (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), a beautiful teenage runaway who is trying to survive her first night on the streets and who’s only experience of prostitution so far has been wanking an old man off so hard he cums his car into the side of a skip. Problem solved, thinks Holly. But things take a turn for the worse when the women are witness to the murder of their drug-dealing client by Bent Copper 2 – not the sinister boyfriend one this time, a scary-eyed, woman-hating, psycho-killer one. Oh yes. They’re in trouble now.

This thing was co-written by director Jon Hewitt and his partner Belinda McClory. “As a woman,” McClory explains in the special features portion of the DVD, “it’s important to me to create strong female characters on screen,” Yeah, and then kick the shit out of them for an hour and a half. The trick the pair have tried to pull off here is the one where you install some bullshit, pseudo-feminist sub-text, and then use it as a rationalisation to bombard the audience with images of extreme female degradation. Frankly, the lurid, violent, show-us-yer-tits-darlin, ‘hunt’n’kill the hookers’ lurch through the neon-lit back streets of Sydney that makes up the rest of this self-proclaimed cum-splash of a movie left me wondering if I didn’t require a couple of tetanus jabs to the eyes.

Come to think of it, none of the characters in X: NIGHT OF VENGEANCE actually appears to be seeking vengeance on anyone, so exactly whose vengeance is being meted out here, and to whom? The most likely answer is a sort of general misogynistic vengeance against women. Their secretive vaginas, after all, do indicate they have something to hide, and therefore they are hateful – as Bent Copper 2 helpfully explains before punching Holly several times in the face (you see how when you put the violence into some kind of gender-political context beforehand, it makes it OK to sit back and just enjoy it?). At the end of the day, relentlessly and explicitly showing the exploitation of women is not to make a feminist statement about the exploitation of women. The filmmakers know this full well, and the inherent hypocrisy is degrading to us all. Avoid.

By Andrew Burt

Directed by Jean ‘son of the other one’ Renoir in 1937, La Grande Illusion follows three French officers – moustachio’d aristocrat Captain de Boeldieu, rascally rabbit Maréchal and kindly banker Rosenthal – as they have a surprisingly nice time of being imprisoned at the hands of the Germans. After being transferred just before trying to escape, they end up in the castle of wounded German also-aristocrat Captain Von Rauffenstein. The two captains, united by their social standing, soon develop a close bond. But when, compelled by their duty to France, our three heroes attempt to escape, WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ALL THIS LOVELY FRIENDSHIP?

Watching La Grande Illusion in the 21st century is an unusual experience. At first, you’d be hard-pressed to work out what makes this particular oldie so enduring and significant, other than the genuinely gut-busting humour; between them, ‘Strictly forbidden!’ guy, Captain de Boeldieu arsing about with a flute and eight prisoners in drag singing the Marseillaise provide more laughs than Lee Evans’ entire stand-up career. The cinematography is gorgeous, the direction pretty exceptional, and the performances are all note-perfect. But.. until about halfway through, what we’re essentially watching is some cheeky Frenchmen arsing about in a PoW camp. Great for larks, but for biting social commentary?

Absolutely. First of all, check out that release date: 1937. You don’t have to have a degree in Modern European history (which I actually do, but whatever) to know that this was not an especially stellar year for German-Franco relations, and even less so for inter-racial getting-along. But at a time when each side saw the other as being comprised entirely of feral, maniacal baby-killers, La Grande Illusion dared to put everyone on an even plain. The prison guards are just regular men doing a job, and they recognize that their prisoners are the same. Jewish banker Rosenthal, though as flawed as the rest of the characters, is probably the most positive character here, openly sharing the food parcels he gets sent from home at a time when stuff like this adorned German walls. We even get a French fugitive and a German milkmaid engaging in some serious international co-operation, if you catch our drift. Race and religion are irrelevant here, and the only real prejudice exercised here – class – is acknowledged as arcane and moribund.

On hearing that French troops have been arrested after crashing behind German lines, Von Rauffenstein orders that any captured officers be invited to lunch with him. In many ways, he is just as trapped as they are; held in the castle, ordered to imprison men whom he’d normally call friends – he and Boeldieu actually have mutual acquaintances – all in the name of a war in which his interests are purely patriotic. And this is the crux of the point, the ‘Great Illusion’ of the title; far from a necessary evil, war gets in the way of some real progress, pitching man against man when together, they could actually get some shit DONE.

So, why the re-release now? Surely we’re past all that? As relevant social commentator Mel Gibson pointed out, the Jews are running Hollywood now, and inter-racial is now a full-on *ahem* film genre. But over the last decade we’ve seen first racial, then religious, and, this past year, class tension reach levels in this country that we thought we’d done away with in the 80′s. And war movies are STILL Us vs. Them, borderline jingoist chest beaters, just brave heroes overcoming faceless evil. It may seem like an obvious message, but La Grande Illusion‘s klaxon still needs to be heard: we’re all just PEOPLE, bro.