Of all the wars, the first world war seems the most emblematic, and the one which probably lends itself best to cinematic treatment. As no other war seemed as futile, it was easier to make convincing anti-war statements. Yet, paradoxically, great films on the subject have been few and far between since Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), a paradigm for all subsequent films on the subject. Only Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) can be mentioned in the same breath as the films of the 1920s and 1930s.

For the allies, the issues in the second world war could be reduced to a clear-cut, gargantuan struggle between good and evil. Even today, it is easier to accept propaganda films made in Hollywood and England during the second world war, in which the enemy was demonised and dehumanised, than the Great War or, indeed, Korea, Vietnam or Iraq.

However, the two most significant American films made in 1918 were propagandistic: DW Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918), which used documentary material and a studio reconstruction of a French village occupied by "beastly Huns" led by ruthless German officer Erich Von Stroheim; and Charlie Chaplin's Soldier Arms, set partly in the trenches. The latter was released only a few weeks before the Armistice, drawing howls of protest.

After the Armistice, war films all but ceased. One of the exceptions was Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919), described by the director as "a human cry against the bellicose din of armies". It begins with soldiers forming the letters of the title and ending with a split-screen sequence juxtaposing dead soldiers rising from their graves with a victory parade to the Arc de Triomphe. This lengthy pacifist statement, depicting death, delusion and insanity in the trenches, was actually shot during the war and showed real soldiers under fire.

Although the film that launched Rudolph Valentino as a great star, Rex Ingram's The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921), had a strong anti-war message, it was also so anti-German that some thought it incited hatred between the nations. As a result it was withdrawn from circulation for years.

War films were revived in the mid-1920s with King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925), Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory? (1926) and William Wellman's Wings (1929), the first film to win the best picture Oscar. The spectacular aerial sequences were all filmed without faking or process shots. This was done by mounting cameras on the front of the planes, the actors going aloft with a pilot who would duck down as they struck the right heroic postures.

With the birth of sound, cinemas were flooded with war films, and in 1930 alone there appeared Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol, Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels, James Whale's Journey's End, and Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, seen from the German perspective. Particularly effective in the latter were the tracking shots of soldiers attacking the enemy lines and the counter attacks with death on both sides. So realistic were these sequences that they have often been used in documentary films of the war. In the same year, in Germany itself, GW Pabst's Westfront 1918 depicted the horror of life in the trenches. But as the memories of the war and the mood of anti-militarism that marked these films began to fade, so the subject became less popular. Thus, although La Grande Illusion came out of a tradition of anti-war films, its release in 1937 was the first for some years and coincided with Germany and

Italy's glorification of their armed forces on screen. Jean Renoir's masterpiece is not only a moving anti-war statement but a rich exploration of class loyalties and transcending friendships. Yet Renoir shows nothing of "war-is-hell" fighting, neither does he resort to any rhetoric, inspirational speeches, or simple sentimental pleas for universal brotherhood.

At a time when Germany was threatening the world, Renoir said he made the film because he was a pacifist, as well as wanting to show French officers as he remembered them when he was in the army. Another reason Renoir had for making the film was that, with the exception of All Quiet On The Western Front, he felt no film he had seen had given a true picture of the men who did the fighting. "Either the drama never got out of the mud, which was an exaggeration, or else the war was made into a kind of operetta." Renoir had no time for noble patriotic sentiments, nor did his fellows-in-arms during the Great War.

La Grande Illusion was first shown in Paris in June 1937, the month that Léon Blum's government fell. Despite its ambiguities, the film was welcomed by the left who saw the sacrifice of the monocled aristocrat Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) to save the worker Marechal (Jean Gabin), as a symbol of the moribundity of the ruling classes. At his death, Boeldieu says to his captor and fellow nobleman Von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim): "For a common man it's terrible to die in war. For you and me, it's a good solution."

But there is another possible reading. Boeldieu sacrifices his life because he puts loyalty to his French comrades, though they be a Marechal or a Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), before loyalty to class. In the final scene, when the two POW escapees cross into Switzerland, the landscape on both sides is covered in snow, prompting Dalio to say "Frontiers are made by men. Nature doesn't give a damn".

In Germany, Goebbels labled Renoir "Cinematic Enemy Number One", and declared that "Stroheim's impersonation of a German officer is a caricature. No German officer is like that."

"Too bad for them," replied the French critic Jean Fayard. The film was promptly banned in Germany and the negative seized. In contrast, the film greatly appealed to Mussolini when he saw it at the 1937 Venice film festival. However, because of German pressure, it failed to win the Golden Lion. Nowadays, this masterful film should be required viewing worldwide, especially on Remembrance Day.

• Ronald Bergan is the author of Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise (Bloomsbury)
first published in:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/nov/11/grande-illusion-jean-renoir-first-world-war