"...in the end, Renoir hints that there could be another, a second world war." -Claude Lelouch "You never convince anyone."-Renoir "I don't believe in much any more, but in friendship," says Marcel Dalio toward the end of 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). Not the least of Grand Illusion's many ironies is its 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 before it, and Rules of the Game which followed. The brilliant casting of von Stroheim in the role of the emotional, even delicate Prussian behind the uniform must have brought a knowing smile to the faces of the Surrealists, who saw a man in pain of love behind The Man You Love to Hate. Repeated Tuesday, December 13.