Marcel Ophüls Movies
German director Marcel Ophuls, the son of famed director Max Ophuls, has continued his father's legacy of films centering on oppression and prejudice. Recognized for his hard-hitting documentaries, Ophuls is best known for his internationally-acclaimed, award-winning film The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), a provocative French film that chronicled events in Nazi occupied France. It also examined the ways in which some locals in the town of Clemont-Ferrand collaborated with the Germans at that time, which led it to be banned from French TV until 1981, as it was considered too disturbing. The German born Ophuls came to the U.S. with his exiled father where he attended high school in Hollywood. He then went on to study at Occidental College, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1951, while still in France, he became an assistant for filmmakers Julien Duvivier, John Huston, and Anatole Litvak. He also began working in German and French television. In 1962, he made an unremarkable directorial debut with the anthology film, Love at Twenty. Following the success of The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls continued to produce historical documentaries on a wide variety of social issues. Beyond directing, he also acted and wrote magazine articles for periodicals such as American Film. In addition, he served on the board of the French Filmmakers Society. He has also lectured at American universities. In 1988 he made Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, which won that year's Oscar for best documentary and the International Critics Prize at Cannes. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide- 1994
This highly intellectual European documentary examines the benefits and moral basis for war reporting in the 20th century. It is done in two separate films that are part of a three-part project. The acclaimed documentarian Max Ophüls is featured in both films. Included is archival footage, movie clips, interviews, and the reminiscence of Ophüls as he depicts the attempts of journalists to find the truth about the various 20th century wars. The truth is often very difficult to find. Most of the documentaries focus upon the current war in Sarajevo. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcel Ophüls, Philippe Noiret, (more)
- 1993
- NR
In homage to one of France's great directors, this highly personal documentary features those that knew him best, including his daughter Ewa and fellow filmmaker Claude Chabrol as they offer their comments and analysis of his career and his fascinating life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gérard Depardieu, Claude Chabrol, (more)
- 1992
In this documentary, begun just as travel restrictions between East and West Germany were being eased, the filmmaker tries to track down the cause of the progressive weakening of the formerly powerful East German goverment's hold onto power. Was it some convoluted plot by the Russians? Was it a result of deliberate acts by that country's political leadership? Stupidity? Capitulation to the West? Conducting the interviews himself, the noted anti-Nazi documentarian continually peppers his subjects with rude and probing questions, provoking in at least one case an outraged outburst against him. Despite one reviewer's cheers at this point, it becomes clear that East Germany's squirming leaders were at least as clueless as anyone else about the phenomena which were leading to the dissipation of their power. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1988
Documentarian Marcel Ophüls (The Sorrow and the Pity) directed this brilliant 267-minute examination of Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Nazi Butcher of Lyons." Barbie was the Gestapo chief responsible for the death of most of Lyons' population, including women and children, during the Nazi occupation of France. After WWII, he cooperated with American intelligence agents, who helped him settle in Bolivia in 1951, conveniently ignoring his numerous atrocities. Finally, Barbie was extradited to France and put on trial in 1987, where he received a sentence of life in prison. Avoiding the usual atrocity footage, Ophüls instead comprises his film of interviews with those who knew Barbie, suffered because of him, or stood by and did nothing while he got away with murder. The accumulated details and appallingly self-serving answers to Ophüls' probing questions point an accusatory finger not only at Barbie, but at France, the United States, South America, and ultimately most of humankind. A stunning and powerful achievement, the film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1988. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Klaus Barbie
- 1981
The strange life of Austrian painter Egon Schiele, one of the fathers of expressionism, is chronicled in this dramatic biography. He began his career during his stint as a soldier in WWI. He gained notoriety for his pornographic nudes and was eventually arrested for creating them. At the same time, his first love dies, and his next lover dumps him. His paintings finally become popular at the war's end. Unfortunately, he dies of a strange disease before he can enjoy his success. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mathieu Carrière, Jane Birkin, (more)
- 1976
This exceptional, disturbing and thought-provoking documentary compares the atrocities committed by the Nazis as revealed during the Nuremberg trials to those committed by the French in Algeria and those done by the Americans in Vietnam. The four hour epic questions the right of any country to pass self-righteous moral judgements upon the actions of another country. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1972
Marcel Ophuls and Perry Wolfe talk about political films. Features clips from The Sorrow and the Pity. ~ All Movie Guide
- 1972
For Marcel Ophuls, the auteur of the four-hour-plus The Sorrow and the Pity, the 135-minute Sense of Loss is practically a short subject. This time, Ophuls focuses his cameras on Protestant vs. Catholic violence in Belfast. It isn't hard to perceive Ophuls' personal sympathies. Throughout Sense of Loss, the Protestants are made to look slightly pompous and ridiculous, while the Catholics are depicted with more warmth and fairness. And as in all of his works, Marcel Ophuls is as much a "star" as his subjects, via his pointed comments during the interview sequences. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Made for French television, Marcel Ophüls' four-hour-plus documentary explores the average French citizen's memories of the Nazi occupation. Just how large and effective was the fabled resistance movement? Is cooperation the same thing as collaboration? And how did one's up-close-and-personal experiences with the occupation troops impact one's postwar life? These questions are probingly posed (but not all are answered) by Ophüls, who also acts as offscreen interviewer. The first half of the film is a mosaic of sights and sounds from the years 1940-1944: Maurice Chevalier singing for the German troops, clips of propagandistic newsreels, appalling vignettes from the scurrilous anti-Semitic film drama Jew Suss (1940), and the like. Ophüls' interpretation of history as the "process of recollection, in things like choice, selective memory, rationalization" is fully illustrated in the film's long second half, which is devoted almost entirely to interviews, in which the subjects display emotions ranging from mild embarrassment to abrupt rage. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1965
Warner (Eddie Constantine) is a private detective/secret agent hired to retrieve a youthful scientist who has invented a ring that makes people unconscious for hours after initial contact. Also on the trail of the young genius is a Russian secret agent accompanied by a bevy of beautiful but deadly women. By the time the scientist is recovered, he has fallen in love and lost his innate intellect as a result, in this typical vehicle for the phlegmatic Constantine. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Eddie Constantine, Laura Valenzuela, (more)
In this lightweight French comedy a pair of sharpers, Cathy (Jeanne Moreau) and her ex-husband Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) attempt to bilk a miserly millionaire out of his fortune during his visit to the French Riviera. Unfortunately for them, he is just as crafty as they are. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, (more)
- 1962
Several internationally known directors contributed to this generally adept and compelling series of five brief vignettes on love and its many ramifications. François Truffaut starts things off with a story of innocent love between a young man in his mid-teens and a slightly older woman. Renzo Rossellini continues in sketch two about a tough mistress who keeps her lover on a short tether. Shintaro Ishihara renders the only violent episode -- that of a disturbed young worker who becomes a real lady-killer. Marcel Ophüls (son of the late and great Max Ophüls) directs an upbeat tale about a journalist who accepts the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood when a brief fling with a woman ends in a pregnancy. The last vignette, directed by the well-known Polish helmer Andrzej Wajda, is about a brave act by a young soldier whose deed gains him the admiration of a woman, but the response from other men his age is something different. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marie-France Pisier, (more)
Max Ophuls' final film (and his only movie in color) is a cinematic tour-de-force masquerading as a biography, in this case a dazzling fictionalized life of the notorious 19th century dancer, actress, and courtesan. A still beautiful, but weary and disillusioned (and, as we later discover, ailing) Lola Montes (Martine Carol) is first seen as the featured attraction at a seedy American circus, appearing at the center of a series of various tableaux depicting the scandalous events for which she is known. With a strangely sincere yet sinister and manipulative ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) providing color commentary, some of it very ironic on two or more levels, the movie flows between these staged recreations in the circus and the events as recalled by the subject. In a series of dissolves, the film takes us through her girlhood with her mother, interrupted when her mother's lover (Ivan Desni) becomes attached to the daughter; her unhappy marriage and its aftermath; romances with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), abduction by a Russian general (in the arms of Cossacks, no less); her affairs across the landscape of Europe with men great and notable; her thwarted aspirations as a dancer; and her romance with King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook) of Bavaria, which led to her being made Countess of Landsfeld, and, later, to his abdication. The gracefulness of Ophuls' cyclical narrative, and the transitions between the recalled elegance of the locales, and the people with whom her romances and affairs took place, and the seediness of the circus -- where she is also compelled, in the course of performing, to perform as an aerialist -- were lost on viewers in 1955. And for many years the movie only existed in a version re-cut without the director's approval, in which the story was presented in linear fashion. It was only in the 1960's, long after Ophuls' death, that efforts were made to restore the original structure, and in 2008 the movie's original Technicolor luster was restored to its full depth and richness. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, (more)
