Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie ***** (1988, director Marcel Ophuls) – Classic Movie Review 13,538

Marcel Ophuls’s searing 1988 documentary film Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie explores the life of the Nazi war criminal who worked in Vichy France during World War Two. It won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Hotel Terminus is a searing and revealing 1988 Oscar-winning documentary film by director Marcel Ophuls, maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, looking into (as the subtitle says) The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo war criminal, who worked in Vichy France during World War Two. The film won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and the FIPRESCI Award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.

The film is packed with telling interviews and pegged round footage of Barbie’s trial in France after his expulsion from Bolivia. The film’s length at 267 minutes is daunting, but there is still an urgency behind this important project, exploring the nature of evil and the attribution of responsibility.

Klaus Barbie became known as the Butcher of Lyon, after personally torturing Jewish and French Resistance prisoners as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon. US intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia after the war. In 1983, he was arrested there and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. He died of cancer in 1991 in his Lyon prison, aged 77.

Marcel Ophuls (1 November 1927 – 24 May 2025)

German-born Academy Award-winning film-maker Marcel Ophuls died of natural causes at his home in southwest France on 24 May 2025, aged 97. After he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his landmark 1969 documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity, he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), his searing portrait of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

He was the son of legendary film-maker Max Ophuls.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,538

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com