Truth and Consequences

THE SORROW AND THE PITY

Directed by MARCEL OPHULS Screenplay by MARCEL OPHULS and ANDRE HARRIS

This epic newsreel and marathon talk show about the fall of France lasts four and one-half hours. Not one second of it is boring. There are moments, though, when a viewer wonders just where it may all be heading.

"I never saw the Germans," says one Frenchman. Says another: "I saw too many." Former Premier Pierre Mendes-France flashes on-screen recalling, in 1969, that during the 1939 "phony war," Paris ladies actually raised money for planting rose bushes along the Maginot Line--to reduce the ennui of the poilus stationed there. German newsreel footage switches from scenes of fresh, blond Wehrmacht soldiers swinging through France in 1940 to captured black French colonial troops, as a Nazi propaganda sound track mockingly quotes Neville Chamberlain: "We and our allies are the guardians of civilization against barbarism." What was your profoundest concern? a voice inquires of a now middle-aged French pharmacist who lived through the Occupation. Instead of Resistance rhetoric, the reply comes back "Eating! Eating!"

There are other rawly juxtaposed scenes: smiling French stars like Danielle Darrieux heading for Berlin to make films for the conquerors; an SS general being cordially greeted in Paris. Such things reveal one edge of Director Marcel Ophuls' purpose: anti-heroics. He tries to puncture the bourgeois myth--or protectively askew memory--that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans. The Sorrow and the Pity does that with a vengeance, but the bare facts of such an expose are hardly news. Happily, Ophuls, the son of noted Director Max Ophuls, also has broader, less partisan aims.

Clermont-Ferrand, a middle-size Auvergnat city not far from Vichy, gradually emerges as Ophuls' microcosm for Occupied France. The film never stops shifting from then to now, with dramatic scenes often commented upon retrospectively by generals and statesmen who took part. But the camera returns again and again to a cast of Clermont-Ferrand residents, presenting their painful, fragmented, cumulative remembrance of things past. Mendes-France was imprisoned in the city before escaping to join De Gaulle. He discusses the convulsions of Anglophobic, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic feeling that after the debacle helped Frenchmen blame everyone but themselves for defeat. He also tells of his charade of a trial by Petainist judges, before which he announced: "I am a Jew. I am a Freemason, but I am not a deserter; now let the trial begin."

Persecution. Like Mendes, Anthony Eden appears several times. Silver-haired, almost ethereal now, exuding infinite regret, he fills in details about Britain's efforts to keep its ally from collapse. Still, he can say: "No one who has not lived through an occupation by Germany can possibly judge."

Ophuls, clearly, does not agree. Neither will the exhausted audience when the film is through, especially as regards the wholesale persecution of Jews by the Vichy government, and the brutal reprisals against "collaborators" and private enemies after the liberation. It is hard to watch the film, though, without wondering how one would have behaved in such fearful circumstances. Like a novelist, Ophuls so persistently catches human particulars that a viewer identifies with the trimmers and villains as well as with the few heroes who appear.

Ophuls' interviewers use extraordinary tact and intelligence. With ordinary people--the shopkeepers, former spies, pharmacists, German soldiers, lawyers, biologists, hairdressers--they steadily expose those jagged, apparently inconsequent motivations that can lead a man either way in a private crisis. One Resistance hero is proudest not of his deeds but of the fact that in the underground he lived for the first time in a classless society. Another remembers that he was pricked toward action because the Germans got all the steak in Clermont-Ferrand restaurants.

Black Sheep. Perhaps the most remarkable character interviewed is Christian de la Maziere, an aristocrat who, like many another young idealist, loathed the sordid confusion of French politics. He swallowed revolutionary ideology whole, and of the two forms possible to him in 1940--Communism or the Germans' national socialism-- he chose the latter. This film follows De la Maziere all the way to the Eastern front where, in the uniform of the Waffen SS as part of the infamous Charlemagne division, he fought against the Russians. Rueful, logical, charming, ready to regret but not to grovel, French to his fingertips, De la Maziere, despite what he did, finally seems a sympathetic and even scrupulous man whose experience adds a small human dimension to a chilling chapter of history.

The Sorrow and the Pity was both a success and a scandal in France. The national television network refused to show it, but the film became a hit in moviehouses. It can be argued that Ophuls is somewhat unfair to the Resistance (there probably were more fighters than the film suggests), and to the majority of Frenchmen, who gave the underground more informal help elsewhere in France than they did in the vicinity of Vichy. But Sorrow's subliminal message seems unexceptionable: in crisis, men tend to be self-protective, self-delusive, brave, cowardly, cruel, confused and dangerous; organized hatred and apocalyptic ideology are to be avoided at all costs.

U.S. audiences are more likely to appreciate Sorrow's artistic and intellectual triumph now than might have been the case a decade ago. We have lately lived through a period when the question of individual moral choice became a national anguish. Here, as in Occupied France, those who were comfortably fixed often took refuge in inertia and the hope that the whole thing would somehow go away. In 1972 Americans may find haunting the ravaged face and words of Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, a black-sheep aristocrat who helped found the liberation movement. "I think," he admits at one point, "that you joined the Resistance only if you were in some way maladjusted." Then he adds, "But of course if you always adjust to everything you are not a very attractive person."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.