April 18 movie: Grand Illusion. This was billed as a legendary antiwar movie by Jean Renoir, but it seemed to me to have at least as much to do with class as with war. It's about French airmen held in a German prison camp during WWI. The ranking officer of the prisoners (Pierre Fresnay) is an aristocrat who has more in common with the German camp commander (Erich von Stroheim) than with his fellow prisoners. Both recognize that they are of a dying breed, that the war marks the end of their era, and the future belongs to common men like Jean Gabin (another French prisoner). Religious conflict also surfaces: a Jewish prisoner's well-off family support all the prisoners with lavish care packages, but anti-Semitic sentiments appear when things get tough later on in the movie.
I enjoyed this a lot, and I think it belies the old saw that it's impossible to make an antiwar film. By never showing any battle scenes Renoir manages to avoid the trap of glorifying the violence that is ostensibly being condemned. Even the escape sequence is fairly restrained.
Trivia note: Roger Ebert claims that the tunnel digging and sandbags-in-the-trousers dispersal method from The Great Escape were inspired by Grand Illusion. But in fact, the sand dispersal techniques in The Great Escape were drawn directly from the real life incident the movie was based on. I guess the idea of escaping prisoners hiding bags of soil in their clothes wasn't a new one. Ebert also claims that the defiant singing of "La Marseillaise" from Casablanca comes from Grand Illusion, and I have no idea whether that's true.
Have you seen All Quiet on the Western Front? I think it manages to be completely anti-war-- there's no battle scene in it which is even remotely inspirational, just a long pathetic series of horrible acts.
Oh, and Blackadder Goes Forth.