The Sorrow and the Pity [Le Chagrin et La Pitié] ***** (1969, Pierre Mendès-France, Christian de la Mazière) – Classic Movie Review 4,500

Marcel Ophuls’s landmark 1969 documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity shatters the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis in World War Two. It was was banned from French TV and nominated for a 1971 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Co-writer/ director Marcel Ophuls’s celebrated 1969 landmark two-part documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity is an overwhelming experience both emotionally and intellectually. It examines the collaboration between the French Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War Two, shattering the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War Two.

It was banned from French TV for more than a decade as too provocative and divisive, with TV bosses claiming it ‘destroyed the myths the French still need.’ It finally aired on air French national TV in 1981.

It investigates with masterly command and the utmost integrity France under the Nazi Occupation through a shrewd blend of new 1969 interviews, including with a German officer, collaborators and resistance fighters, and archive footage of wartime contemporary newsreels.

Running an epic 251 minutes, it is masterfully made with the greatest and most scrupulous care, imagination, sorrow and pity by director Ophuls.

Part One The Collapse has an extended interview with Pierre Mendès-France, jailed for anti-Vichy actions and later French Prime Minister. Part Two The Choice has an extended interview with Christian de la Mazière, one of 7,000 French young men who fought in German uniforms on the Eastern front.

André Harris is Ophuls’s co-writer, and André Gazut and Jürgen Thieme are the photographers.

On a trivial note, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton wait in line to see this 251-minute film in Annie Hall but Allen refuses to go in to the cinema because they are two minutes late.

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 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 2016 Classic Movie Review 4,500

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