Movie question was: quickie: '88 Volnays

Exactly. Alas being over 50, Ken, you help support my point. No one under 50 (received at this site) identified the movie. Albeit, this is one of those "trifurcating" trivia questions (I know some others) where there are a number of responses, but mainly they fall in three groups, and many people will answer with the middle one, which is what happened.

In case anyone is interested, attached are relevant extracts from notes (which I wrote five or six years ago) on a couple of hundred clbuttic movies. (Posted a few others on amazon.com in the past.) All this from Mark's Marseillaise ...

Cheers -- Max

-------- Grand Illusion (1937, French). The true English translation of La Grand Illusion, used in English-speaking countries other than the US, is Great Illusion, but the mistranslation is so well known here that it is deliberately retained, as the supplements explain in the new 1999 Criterion-Collection DVD edition, ISBN 0780020707. This film, which is international in flavor anyway, was a big international hit, but arrived at a time of upheavals in Europe and was cut and censored so heavily for cynical ideological reasons that, after the second world war, no intact copy was known to exist until an early print appeared in Germany in 1958. Then more recently the original camera negative, in excellent condition, surfaced in Russia, received restoration for minor defects, and was digitally transferred for release in this new outstanding edition. I believe that the film's enduring popularity reflects roughly three dimensions. It is a fact-based adventure of POWs determined to escape imprisonment in the early part of the first world war. Secondly it is a commentary on the old aristocratic world order, when superpowers were ruled by hereditary monarchs in plumed hats, that shook and changed so much in the course of the Great War. This aristocracy, in Grand Illusion, disdains self-made individuals of humble origin for presuming to rise above their natural station. . . . Finally the film contains timeless observations about humanity, of the kind that writers of operas strive for. It possesses elements copied successfully in later popular films. For example, it is the original example of POWs in a German military camp "#17" digging an escape tunnel (a theme of two major Western films after the second world war, though based, it is true, on other history). Also, German soldiers far from home singing the venerated army hymn Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) and being answered by a French chorus with the Marseillaise, a scene imitated later in Casablanca. There are memorable details. Erich von Stroheim* as the old war-horse aristocratic officer, retired from the front lines because of his wounds and held together stiffly by prostheses (rather like Dr. Strangelove decades later). He feels more in common with his aristocratic French prisoner than with his German soldiers. (The German actor Stroheim, by the way, speaks his French in this French-made film with an American-English accent -- New York City, possibly -- suggesting that he learned English well before French.) The well-drilled German soldiers who leap to attention when their CO appears. The German war widow who points out her brothers from a family picture, end at this battle and that -- "our greatest victories." . . .

Casablanca (1942). The most famous of several Warner-Brothers moderate-budget clbuttics from the first half of the 1940s . . . It is appealing to think of this anti-fascist film being cast mainly with refugees from fascism; however, most of them left earlier, for the cash. There was a wholesale exodus of European film talent in response to Hollywood offers, in the 1920s and 30s. See also Grand Illusion on the Marseillaise vs. Wacht am Rhein.

*Actor-director Stroheim, even in his silent days (see the engaging Foolish Wives, 1922), was, like Conrad Veidt, very much at home playing worldly aristocratic Central Europeans. Stroheim looked incomplete when not sporting a monocle.