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Grand Illusion A film about war without a single scene of combat, Jean Renoir's 1937 masterpiece about French and German officers during World War I suggests that the true divisions of that conflict were of class rather than nationality.

Two of the best examples of the minefield that David Bellos calls the tu and vous debate in French are more than 250 years apart (Author, author, 17 September).

R The Raven Suffocatingly corrosive and misanthropic, this 1943 thriller was shot in occupied France by Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear), and its story of a small town terrorized by anonymous poison-pen letters so effectively...

The carefree Marius has little interest in taking over his father's waterfront bar, nor is he aware of Fanny (Orane Demazis), a childhood friend nursing a serious crush on him. The daughter of a local fisherman, Fanny begins flirting with an older man in a ploy to arouse Marius' jealousy. By this time, both cafe owner [Cesar] and Fanny's mother spend much of their time giving Fanny advice. In Marius' absence, the fiftysomething Mr. Panisse has reappeared and proposed to the young woman. With the scandal of illegitimacy looming and little hope of Marius' immediate return, Fanny agrees to marry the caring Panisse. Cesar is furious to learn of the engagement, hurling accusations at both Fanny and lifelong friend Panisse, but he respects the union upon learning of his new grandchild. Panisse loves the boy as if he was his own flesh and blood, so much so that when the oblivious Marius arrives for a visit, even his father agrees that Panisse has become the father.

The most celebrated and best-loved film made in France under the Nazi Occupation is Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis, that tale of passion, theatre and Parisian lowlife in the Romantic era. By contrast, the most notorious and reviled film from the Occupation era is [Henri-Georges Clouzot]'s Le Corbeau. Attacked at the time by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press and the Catholic Church, it was banned after the Liberation. Its two leading actors, Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc, were jailed for their dealings with the enemy, the cases against them exaggerated by their association with Le Corbeau. Clouzot himself and his screenwriter Louis Chavance were blacklisted, although Clouzot went on to achieve success during the Fifties with Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear) and Les Diaboliques (The Fiends). But for some years, even in France, Le Corbeau was a film maudit that could only be seen at screenings in cinema clubs. It has remained one of the great unseen classics of French cinema. In the Occupied zone, film production was in the hands of the German company Continental, under Alfred Greven. The dilemmas that this posed for French film-makers were explored in Bertrand Tavernier's recent film, Laissez-Passer (which refers, briefly, to Le Corbeau). Greven loved French cinema and was not a Nazi ideologue, and he knew Clouzot as a scriptwriter who had adapted a Simenon novel for Henri Decoin. In 1942, he encouraged Clouzot to direct his third feature-length film, L'Assassin Habite... au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21), starring Pierre Fresnay. Fresnay took a liking to Clouzot and did his best to advance the director's career. Greven, too, wanted to encourage new talent, and when Clouzot and Chavance came to him with the script of Le Corbeau, he accepted it, though others in Continental had doubts - after all, their boss, Joseph Goebbels, wanted French cinema to produce bland entertainment of poor quality that would not offer an artistic or economic challenge to Reich imports.

Grand Illusion'' is on everyone's list of all-time best movies, and neither the years nor the videocassette can dim its luster. [Jean Renoir]'s 1938 classic is more than an antiwar plea - though it assuredly is that. More significantly, it is Renoir's rumination on the coming apart of Europe's class structure in the wake of World War I.

Introduction (pg. 383-385). Art (pg. 385-391). Architecture (pg. 391-393). Opera (pg. 393-395). Ballet (pg. 395-396). Theatre (pg. 397-401). Cinema (pg. 401-405). Music (pg. 405-411). Broadcasting (pg. 411-412).