In La Grande Illusion (1937), Jean Gabin played Lieutenant Maréchal, a working-class French officer captured by the Germans during the First World War, who, with his fellow prisoners, plans an escape from a prison camp. Directed by Jean Renoir, the film is a humane masterpiece about class, nationality and friendship, and Gabin’s Maréchal is its warm, unpretentious heart.
Maréchal is a mechanic in civilian life, and Gabin plays him as a man who respects his aristocratic fellow officer, played by Pierre Fresnay, without ever losing his own identity. The film was one of the first to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in a foreign language, and it remains a defining Gabin role: a man of the people, brave, loyal and entirely without pretension.