[Le Caporal Epinglé], Renoir's Grande Illusion of World War Two, is the wickedly and tenderly witty chronicle of a prisoner-of-war's persistent attempts to escape from a German prison camp after the fall of France in 1940, against odds as unbendingly hostile as any Buster Keaton ever had to face…. Every foot of the film is shot through with the endearing stamp of Renoir's personality, just as irreverent as the nouvelle vague, and a good deal more loving.

This is a very funny film, but also a very moving one, in which Renoir catwalks the tragi-comic line with delicate balance. The opening sequence, after establishing shots of the aerial bombardment of France and the signing of the armistice, beautifully sets the tone….

Comparison with La Grande Illusion is perhaps inevitable. Apart from the escape theme, the two films share many common elements: the idyll with a German girl, the comradeship of the prison, the fear that this comradeship will not persist outside, the final flight across open fields and the encounter with a peasant woman; even the theatrical reference (the camp concert in La Grande Illusion is paralleled in Ballochet's escape, while the female disguises of the concert find their echo in the prisoner disguised as a woman whom the corporal meets on his third escape. But as Renoir himself has pointed out, his preoccupations have changed. La Grande Illusion was "the problem of men of sharply differing social backgrounds, education and character when forced together in war … Le Caporal Epinglé, on the other hand, is a picture of the solidarity that binds men flung into the melting pot of despair, facing a situation together."

Moreover, instead of that gently upbeat talk of returning to fight again of the earlier film, at the end of Le Caporal Epinglé the corporal and his doggily faithful friend, Pater, stand together on one of the Paris bridges, looking down the river; Pater is timid, hesitant, until his face lights up with joy when the corporal gently insists, "But we will meet again, Pater." Here escape is an interior necessity, a thing complete in itself when fully shared. (p. 92)

[Le Caporal Epinglé] gives a strong impression of sun and light, open air, streets and fields, showing the prisoners arriving at a camp in the pouring rain and mud of an open field, gratefully drying themselves in the sun the following morning, working on a farm or among the trees of a forest, marching along the open roads, even sensuously experiencing a visit to a dentist's waiting-room. To Renoir, the physical world is one of man's greatest blessings (c.f. his work, passim, particularly Boudu, Madame Bovary, Les Bas Fonds, La Règle du Jeu, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe), and this film constantly hammers home that war and imprisonment mean the withdrawal from man of his privilege to enjoy this world, and his own humanity, in freedom. "I love a man who refuses to be enslaved," says the gentle German girl to the corporal, and this, at its simplest level, sums up the film. (p. 93)