Tactful Tragedy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BLACK THURSDAY

Directed by MICHEL MITRIANI

Screenplay by ALBERT COSSERY and MICHEL MITRIANI

Black Thursday is another, but better, French film of the Holocaust years. On July 16, 1942, the Paris police, acting under orders of the German occupying army, began a mostly polite roundup of some 13,000 Jews. Reassured by the manner of the gendarmes, by ignorance of what was going on elsewhere in Europe, and by a belief that the worst could not happen in France, the 13,000 who were to die offered no resistance as they were herded into familiar city buses to begin a journey that ended in the extermination camps.

Black Thursday is the deceptively simple story of what one man and one woman did on that day. The man (Christian Rist) is a Gentile and a leftist, a student who has been tipped off about the full implications of the raid and who is determined to try to save a few people, at least. The woman (Christine Pascal) is the only person he encounters who finally believes him. Everyone else is convinced that he is crazy, or a provocateur, or a pervert who has concocted an elaborate story to aid him in abducting women.

Belief, however, resolves nothing.

For now the shy and childlike woman must come to grips with the unhinging knowledge that the only community, the only life she has ever known, has been quietly removed, wiped out in hours, and that despite this trauma (or perhaps be cause of it), she seems to be falling in love with her savior. Director Milliard's film is not an angry attempt to stir his countrymen to excesses of posthumous guilt. In the world he recreates, many approve of the German outrage, or try to turn it to their economic advantage.

In some it awakens compassion and a desire, aborted by fear, to help the victims. In only a few does courage combine with moral outrage to produce action. In short, the French behaved like all humanity, neither better nor worse than others confronted by a crisis of conscience. One might wish for a better match-up between the ideal and the real, but it is a mark of mature, psychologically acute art to recognize and accept this state of affairs as one of the tragedies of existence. Black Thursday represents such work; and it explores that tragedy with delicacy, tact and an abiding sympathy.

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