The Elusive Corporal

From Jean Renoir we expected more. In his 1938 masterpiece, The Grand Illusion, Renoir established the pattern for future prison escape movies. The Elusive Corporal, set in a World War II camp, certainly should not be the trite and unamusing bundle of cliches that it turned out to be. The intervening twenty-five years seem to have detracted from the man's skill at story-telling instead of sharpening it, a sad inversion of the usual relationship between time and talent.

Grand Illusion evoked nostalgia for the comfortable 1914 world that charmed the audiences of the thirties and continues to charm viewers today. Renoir's screenplay innovations (like the famous "Marseillaise" Scene that Micheal Curtiz lifted for Casablanca) were well supported by three superb performances from Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin, and Erich von Stroheim.

The newer offering lacks both originality in screenplay and inspiration in performance. One might think that Elusive Corporal evokes nothing and essentially tells nothing because it is an adaptation from a novel instead of an original Renoir creation. But the theft of ideas from other films is unforgivable and infuriating. Remember that hilarious scene in Stalag 17 when Harry and Animal paint a white line down the middle of the road to the Russian women's compound? Renoir turned his team of escapers into road measurers instead of painters. Escape from Colditz, A British film of the early fifties, had a scene in which two escapees stowed away on a dump truck only to be dumped later in the middle of their prison compound. You'll find that one in Elusive Corporal, too. Renoir even lifts a character from Grand Illusion--the affectionate German peasant woman.

Whereas the exchanges between Fresnay and von Stroheim are classics in character portrayal as well as landmarks in cimema history, Jean-Pierre Cassel finds the role of the Corporal rather tough going. He never manages to convince the audience that the man really wants to escape, much less arouse our sympathy. Ballochet, the stock bespectacled "intellectual" who worships the Corporal, is abysmally parodied by Claude Rich, who marches forth to death like those two poor souls in the opening of Stalag 17. Claude Brasseur's part as another crony is never clearly defined in the script, and the actor avails himself of the consequent opportunity to draw pay for doing nothing.

A good film in the escape genre is the frankly commercial Great Escape, now making the rounds. Never promising much more than a western with swastikas, it maintains excitement and enjoyment throughout, and offers one or two decent acting jobs in addition. The Elusive Corporal, by contrast, is a distressing failure.