Marcel Ophuls obituary: veteran documentary-maker behind the monumental The Sorrow and the Pity

To make a film that demolishes a national myth, radically shifting that nation’s view of itself away from glory and towards shame, takes a director of extraordinary courage and ruthless determination. Marcel Ophuls, who has died age 97, achieved that with his documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which told a history of France under Nazi rule that remains controversial to this day. That Ophuls became a great documentary feature filmmaker largely by happenstance and as a result of the political events of 1968, has an edge of irony to it that suited his mischievous, insatiably curious personality.    

Ophuls’ route to The Sorrow and the Pity and the magnificent investigations that succeeded it was the meandering one of many refugees. The son of the great film director Max Ophüls and actor Hildegard Wall, Marcel was born in Frankfurt. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the family left Germany for Paris. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, they went into hiding for a year in the unoccupied zone before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. 

Fourteen-year-old Marcel arrived in California in December 1941, his father having gravitated to Hollywood. After attending Hollywood High School and the Occidental College, and following a brief post-war spell in the US Army in Japan, Marcel finished his studies at Berkeley. But by 1950 his father’s briefly illustrious Hollywood career was on the wane, so the family moved back to France.

Marcel started working as a director’s assistant – or ‘coffee-carrier’ –  to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) and on his father’s last film Lola Montès (1955). François Truffaut gave him his first break, a section of the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (1962), which led to him directing Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the comedy hit Banana Peel (1963). That one success, however, was followed by an absolute flop, the Eddie Constantine vehicle Fire at Will (1965), which meant Marcel’s brief fiction feature career was done.

Instead, he went to work in news journalism for French television, eventually on contemporary history programmes. Alongside producers André Harris and Alain de Sedouy, Ophuls made his first documentary Munich, or Peace in Our Time (1967) about the 1938 appeasement of Hitler’s Germany by Britain and France. It proved such a success that plans to make the sequel that would become The Sorrow and the Pity were put in place, but the Paris événements of 1968 intervened. When Ophuls, Harris and Sedouy joined many colleagues in the national strikes, they were singled out as ringleaders and sacked. So Ophuls took the sequel idea to German and Swiss TV outlets, who agreed to fund it.

In the post-war period, the notion that the whole of France resisted the Nazis suited both the Gaullists and the Communists. Ophuls and Harris (who shared interview duties), through adroit choices of interviewees, picked away at that myth until it fell apart. The Sorrow and the Pity’s first part ‘The Collapse’ chronicles the defeat of 1940, the setting up of Marshall Petain’s Vichy government and the anti-semitic laws then introduced; part two, ‘The Choice’, zones in on the city of Clermont-Ferrand to show how meagre, fragile and scattered resistance to the Nazis was for a long time and with what alacrity Jewish businesses and property were stolen by French neighbours once their owners fled or were sent north, eventually to the death camps.

When French television refused to show the film, Truffaut got it put on at a cinema on the left bank, where – despite its pioneering four-hour-plus length – its success was such that it was moved to a bigger screen on the Champs-Élysées. So contentious was the film that François Mitterand’s socialist party made an election promise that it would be shown on French TV, as it eventually was, 12 years after it was made. 

Ophuls’ trenchant defences of the film made him a figure to be reckoned with. Although he claimed to be shy, he could turn on the kind of genially insistent charm that puts people who have much to answer for at their ease. Despite the seriousness of his subjects, Ophuls was always anxious to entertain. This personality aspect of his work enraged proponents of cinéma vérité, such as Richard Leacock, who was said to have a picture of Ophuls pasted next to his shaving mirror with a clown’s nose stuck on it.

A string of powerful films followed, many connected to the consequences of World War II, but for A Sense of Loss (1972) Ophuls spent two months in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, focusing mainly on the dead and the grieving on both sides. The BBC refused to show it because of its perceived pro-IRA bias. Any lack of open-mindedness, however, is outweighed by its powerfully poetic capture of those lethal times. 

War crimes provided the focus for Ophuls’ next film, The Memory of Justice (1976), inspired by Telford Taylor’s 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. Former Nazis Albert Speer and Karl Dönitz are among the interviewees, but the film ranges beyond WWII to the involvement of America in Vietnam and France in Algeria. Ophuls called it “the most personal and sincere work I’ve ever done”.

When seeing Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) on its release, I myself remember being constantly astonished. Gestapo head Klaus Barbie was known as the butcher of Lyon. Testimony from survivors who were interrogated and/or tortured by him sits next to the blithe sweeping comments of billiard players anxious to show their clean hands. Deft use of archive footage mocks the pomp of parades and rallies with inapposite music. We learn of Barbie’s post-war survival as an agent working for the American CIC during the Cold War until French public pressure led to him being sent back from South America for trial. 

Revelation comes from the relaxed situation interviewees are lulled into – Ophuls talked about waiting until they become themselves. Yet despite his doorstepping of aged fascists and probing of American intelligence agents, Ophuls rarely allows the viewer the smugness of righteous distance. Hôtel Terminus impels you to consider if you yourself might have been as flexibly self-interested under the occupation as many of the French were. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1989.

Commissioned to make a film about the fall of the Berlin Wall after the wall had all but disappeared, Ophuls interviewed figures high and low from the East German bureaucracy for November Days (1991) to discover how the edifice of state had collapsed and what the reunification of Germany might lead to. Sarajevo under siege was the setting for The Troubles We’ve Seen (1994), in which he chews over the ethical considerations that go into the making of news in the Holiday Inn hotel with veteran war correspondents from France, the USA, the UK and Bosnia. He also quizzes Serbian president Slobodan Milošević about press freedom to sardonic effect. After November Days, however, Ophuls’ career went into abeyance for a decade.

A final comeback came in 2013 with Ain’t Misbehavin’, a film of personal reminiscences. Its screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes led to a huge row because the 106 minute version shown was not the one Ophuls had made – the producers had cut 24 minutes. But it perhaps provided the typically rambunctious ending to his working life this great argumentative intellectual entertainer might relish in the afterlife, should there be such a thing.

• Marcel Ophuls, 1 November 1927 to 24 May 2025