Review for Le grand jeu: The Masters of Cinema Series

"Whatever your origins, nationality or religion might be, whatever your social or professional status might be, whether you are married or single, the French Foreign Legion offers you a chance to start a new life..."

French Foreign Legion

The Foreign Legion's delusory promise of new beginnings forms the thematic thread of Jacques Feyder's fatalistic Le Grand Jeu. When Parisian playboy Pierre Matel (Pierre Richard Willm) is caught in an embezzlement scandal, he is rejected by the fiancée more in love with his money (Marie Bell) and seeks oblivion as a legionnaire in the Moroccan deserts. But whilst on leave in a seedy desert town he becomes obsessed with goodtime girl Irma (Bell in a dual role) who bears more than a passing resemblance to the woman who abandoned him. An early example of France's poetic realism Feyder's story examines a man able to escape everything but himself and in Matel's angst ridden state there is little difference between Paris cool and the Moroccan heat (exemplified in a neat tracking shot of revellers crooning in a bar match cut against a row of soldiers singing to keep up moral).

The folly of Martel's (now calling himself Corporal Muller) attempted escape is given further credence by his retreat into a claustrophobic town of sin (mostly run by French ex-patriots). Lazare Meerson's expressionistic set design of narrow alleyways and neon strip clubs creates a purgatory where all attempts at rebirth are drowned in Matel's self absorption. Irma's devotion is soiled by his obsession over her physical similarity to his former love (prefiguring Hitchcock's Vertigo) and the matriarchal protectiveness of a world-weary landlady (played with downtrodden grace by the director's wife Françoise Rosay) is rejected in favour of abject desolation. In the end Feyder's protagonist is the solider of his own misfortune and the only hope of true escape isn't in the foreign legion but in something more final.

DVD Special Features include a new digital restored print from Pathé and a booklet including an essay from acclaimed French cinema scholar Ginette Vincendeu.