La Grande Illusion

I saw La Grande Illusion on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and I recorded it, and so far have watched it twice. It was made in 1934 (or thereabouts) by Jean Renoir. Jean Gabin was a lead in it. It seems to have been Jean Gabin day at TMC. Pretty good stuff.
It is a very good film about war, and if you watch it, you will readily pick out scenes which were bodily lifted into other films, like Casablanca and The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

What caught my interest was the fact that Captain Boeldieu, a member of the aristocracy, was pessimistic about the place of his class in the future. He apprehended that after this bloodletting, things would change, and the privileged class would sort of waste away.
The film was set in World War I, and was a creation of the mentality of those who lived through that time.

I mentioned that I had been reading Mary Roberts Rinehart's murder mystery, The Yellow Room, which was published in 1945, and was a World War II creation. Similarly, the rich and privileged were sensed to be passing away after the present bloodletting. Carol Spencer, the main character, muses on how different things will be after the war, when the privileges her dowager mother is used to will continue their erosion, which had been started by the rationing and shortages of war.

Now once again we face a privileged class: the 5% of the population wherein most of the wealth is concentrated. Shall we once again face some cataclysm and general bloodletting? Will it be war, civil war, or oppression?
I do not know, but it seems that our Capitalistic way of life is cycling through similar scenarios every generation, and there are plenty of warnings, but I guess the overall message is that we are too stupid to see them, for it may well be that concentration of Wealth and Power in the hands of the Few may not merely be injustice and rapacity, but instead may be a symptom of a cancerous disease rampant through the fabric of the Body Social!

The dynamics of history are not Capitalism nor Socialism. The driving force is nothing we have been able to put our finger on. But the stories are there in front of us: Pride goes before the Fall. And all the violence and bloodletting are just the murderous implements that are used by a people who know no other way to conduct themselves when their lives are out of joint.

Over and over, the bitter ironies play out, because we cannot grasp the need to avoid being put in the position where a sudden reversal will wreck our lives.
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