"I don't believe in much any more, but in friendship," says Marcel Dalio toward the end of The Rules of the Game, after all other ideals have been shot through like so many squirming rabbits. He might have spoken the words two years earlier in Grand Illusion, a study of friendship amid the false constructs of state and the barbarism that results. Among a group of prisoners and their captors during World War I, two aristocrats-the Prussian commander (Erich von Stroheim) and his French prisoner (Pierre Fresnay)-cling to common memories of a world now lost forever in the violent upheaval of the war. Class also makes unlikely comrades out of the proletarian and Jewish prisoners (Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio). But "Grand Illusion is a film of multiple and exquisite ironies" (Andrew Sarris), not the least of which is its subtle observation that, even were the senseless divisions of nations to dissolve, those of class might indeed persist. This links Grand Illusion to La Vie est à nous which preceded it, and The Rules of the Game which followed. The brilliant casting of von Stroheim in the role of the emotional, even delicate Prussian hiding behind the uniform must have brought a knowing smile to the faces of certain Surrealists, who saw a man in pain of love behind The Man You Love to Hate.