For many years, the original nitrate film negative of La Grande Illusion was thought to have been lost in an Allied air raid in 1942 that destroyed a leading laboratory outside Paris. Prints of the film were rediscovered in 1958 and restored and re-released during the early 1960s. Then, it was revealed that the original negative had been shipped back to Berlin (probably due to the efforts of Frank Hensel) to be stored in the Reichsfilmarchiv vaults. In the Allied occupation of Berlin in 1945, the Reichsfilmarchiv by chance was in the Russian zone and consequently shipped along with many other films back to be the basis of the Soviet Gosfilmofond film archive in Moscow. The negative was returned to France in the 1960s, but sat unidentified in storage in Toulouse Cinémathèque for over 30 years, as no one suspected it had survived. It was rediscovered in the early 1990s as the Cinémathèque's nitrate collection was slowly being transferred to the French Film Archives at Bois d'Arcy.[2][42]
In August 1999, Rialto Pictures re-released the film in the United States, based on the Cinémathèque negative found in Toulouse;[29] after watching the new print at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Janet Maslin called it "beautifully refurbished" and "especially lucid".[39] A transfer of this restored print was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 1999, but has been out of print since 2005.[43] Grand Illusion was intended to be Criterion's first release on the DVD format in 1998, but the discovery of the new negative delayed its release.[44]
In 2012, StudioCanal and Lionsgate released a 1080p Blu-ray version based on a new high-definition scan of the original negative.[45] According to Lee Kline, Technical Director of the Criterion Collection, this release was "night and day of what we did—because they had better film."[46]
