A Battle Over Justice

By JAY COCKS

It happens, in films, to the very best. Indeed, it happens especially to the very best, because they are the ones least willing to compromise. A director who dismisses the countless suggestions of his financial backers risks alteration--and frequently mutilation--of his work.

Twenty minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (TIME, April 14) were deleted before its American release. Currently, a new work by Marcel Ophuls is being re-edited and thoroughly reworked. The Memory of Justice, a meticulous and moving examination of the Nuremberg war trials, was made with the same stringent conscience and intellect that characterized The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls' monumental study of France during the Resistance. The Memory of Justice is an equally important film. Now it is being hacked by its producers into a routine documentary.

Mr. Deeds. The British Broadcasting Corporation, usually invoked as a standard of corporate liberalism by which American television is unfavorably judged, is deeply involved in the struggle over The Memory of Justice. After a screening of Ophuls' original version of the film, one BBC official offered that classic Hollywood criticism: "My ass hurt."

In 1973, Ophuls struck up an agreement with the BBC, Polytel International, a television packaging company, and a British production company, Visual Programme Systems Ltd., to make a film on the Nuremberg trials, and their application--or lack of it--to subsequent events, particularly the American participation in Viet Nam. Ophuls set out to explore the contested--some would say outrageous--theory that Nazi genocide and tragedies like My Lai are somehow comparable, an idea that had wide currency a few years ago. He had been inspired by U.S. Chief Counsel Telford Taylor's book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, which holds that American officials are accountable in the war but that there is no correlation between systematic obliteration and massacre in the field. Taylor was to play an important part in The Memory of Justice. "He was our Mr. Deeds," says Ophuls now.

Ophuls submitted an outline of his proposed film, along with a list of other "possible witnesses and interviewees." Albert Speer, Dr. Howard Levy and General Vo Nguyen Giap were on the list, as well as such prominent architects of American involvement as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Ophuls stressed, however, that the lineup of people to be interviewed would have to depend on the budget and on whom would be available. The similarities between Nazi Germany and America in Viet Nam were, for Ophuls, "an open question--but one that had to be explored." He also insisted that the final form could not be outlined because the film itself had to reflect his process of investigation. These conditions, appended to Ophuls' contract, do not appear to have caused any problems.

Ophuls divided The Memory of Justice into two parts. The first,"Nuremberg and the Germans," explored the impact the trial has had on the German conscience. "Nuremberg and the Others" considered how the moral precepts established at the time may have been breached by the French in Algeria and, especially, by America in Viet Nam. The producers are dismayed that Ophuls failed to show any prominent U.S. Government officials. More important, they claim that Ophuls did not deliver the movie for which he contracted. "We bought a concept, with particular stress on the interviews," David Puttnam of V.P.S. explained to TIME'S Lawrence Malkin in London. "We got a long, rambling personal statement, which is commercial death for us." Ophuls' original intention had begun to change during filming, as he had warned might happen. He informed the producers of the change in a memo written the day before the first screening that he "was unable to crosscut, say, Auschwitz and Viet Nam . . . emotionally, I have found it wrong." Ophuls had produced a film about what he calls "the necessity of judgment, as opposed to the impossibility of judgment." It was after all the producers had got their first look at the film that the fury really began.

Bitter Charges. Puttnam urged Ophuls to be more aggressive in his approach, or, as he put it, "more fascist." Ever since, there have been bitter charges and recriminations. Ophuls believes that the producers wanted a bit of glib radical chic, like the current Hearts and Minds. The backers charge that Ophuls wanted the film to be six hours long (his contract dictated a maximum length of 4 1/2 hours) and became intractable when this possibility was denied."Bunk," says the director, who proposed an "ideal" length of six hours but cut the film down to 4 hours 38 minutes. He was prepared to cut the last eight minutes when, after months of acrimony, he and the producers quarreled irrevocably. Puttnam and his partner, Sandy Lieberson, claim that Ophuls quit. Ophuls says he did not.

Blurred Copy. He returned to Princeton, where he has been teaching. V.P.S., with the support of the BBC, brought in Documentary Film Maker Lutz Becker (Swastika) to reshape Ophuls' original into something more to their liking. In March, a loyalist working on the production managed to get hold of a blurred work copy of the 4 hours 38 minutes of Ophuls' version and spirited it off to the U.S. Since then, Ophuls has screened the only existing copy of his film--"the version," he says, "I'll stand by"--for critics and friends, in an effort to drum up support.

The Memory of Justice is a remarkable film, mostly for the reasons the producers did not like it: it is personal, painstaking, and does not wag an accusing finger. Producer Puttnam's comment that the film was too "personal" is, as Ophuls wrote him, "worse than use less." It also led the director to question whether the people who had hired him had ever seen The Sorrow and the Pity or A Sense of Loss (about Northern Ire land), films that were neither detached nor dispassionate, and which employed the same scrupulous techniques.

The controversy that Ophuls has managed to stir up has rattled the producers. Lieberson told the London Times two weeks ago, "We never tried to impose our philosophical ideas on the movie." In fact, the film, which is now approximately 3 1/2 hours long, severely alters Ophuls' intention. Many of his interview questions have been cut, along with footage of his family (his wife was a member of Hitler Youth) and of Germany during the Weimar Republic and later in the painful process of denazification. Also excised was a scene of middle-aged Germans, nude in a mixed sauna, discussing their feelings toward Jews. The BBC had particularly objected to the sequence on the ground that pubic hair had no place in a political film.

High Figure. What Becker has added is flashy combat footage from Viet Nam. Ophuls wrote in a memorandum to the producers that "theatrical equations (Auschwitz-Napalm or Hitler-Nixon) . . . could only lead to the reinforcement of cynicism and hopelessness.

My position on this issue is closer, finally, to Telford Taylor than to Daniel Ellsberg." Becker's version comes down strongly on the Ellsberg side, seeming to countenance his assertion that American policymakers were "guilty in the same way that German officials were guilty."

The result of all this anger and obfuscation is that audiences are likely to see a major film--perhaps a great one--only in truncated form. The BBC and Polytel have already approved the Becker version. David Puttnam says V.P.S. will sell the Ophuls version for "any serious offer in the region of 112,000 pounds sterling" ($263,200), a forbid dingly high figure for a documentary based on V.P.S. 's accounting of the film's cost. It is also an estimate heatedly contested by Ophuls, who says that he has not been shown the budget since last July, despite the fact that he was the nominal producer of the film.

In any case, if V.P.S. gets no takers, the negative of the film will "soon" be cut to conform with Becker's recasting.

Ophuls has notified Puttnam and Lieberson that he wants "no credit at all" on the aborted version of The Memory of Justice, and if they use his name he will "sue the pants off them." The backers --particularly the BBC -- still may use Ophuls' name, perhaps in some nebulous phrasing like "Conceived by Marcel Ophuls." No one who has seen any of Ophuls' previous work would ever believe it.

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