From: bigmongo1963@biteme.com   
      
   https://variety.com/2025/film/news/marcel-ophuls-dead-the-sorrow-and-the-   
   pity-1236410230/   
      
   Marcel Ophuls, Director of ‘The Sorrow and the Pity,’ Dies at 97   
      
      
   By Richard Natale   
      
   Marcel Ophuls, the renowned, Oscar-winning documentarian whose   
   controversial and epic “The Sorrow and the Pity” was a worldwide success,   
   has died. He was 97.   
      
   His death was reported to the New York Times by his grandson, Andreas-   
   Benjamin Seyfert, who provided no details concerning the circumstances of   
   the death.   
      
   Ophuls, the son of famed German and Hollywood film director Max Ophuls,   
   often claimed that he was a prisoner of his success in the documentary   
   field when what he really wanted was to make lighthearted musicals and   
   romances. But his exhaustive “The Sorrow and the Pity,” about French   
   complicity with their Nazi occupiers during WWII, elevated the film   
   documentary in the public eye. His further explorations of the war in   
   Northern Ireland (“A Sense of Loss”), the Nuremberg war crime trials   
   (“The   
   Memory of Justice”) and the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie   
   (“Hotel Terminus”) added immeasurably to the documentary field. Ophuls   
   mixed period footage and incisive, often exhaustive interviews, adding to   
   the public’s understanding of the complex issues his films tackled.   
      
   “Hotel Terminus” won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1988.   
      
   Born in Frankfurt am Main, Ophuls (original family name, Oppenheimer) was   
   raised in Frankfurt and Berlin until 1933, when Hitler came to power.   
   Ophuls moved to France and, in 1940, escaped to the U.S. via Spain and   
   Portugal. While his father was directing such films as “Letter From an   
   Unknown Woman,” Ophuls attended Hollywood High School, feeling distinctly   
   out of place. He appeared as a Nazi youth in Frank Capra’s wartime   
   propaganda documentary “Prelude to War” and was drafted into service in   
   the Army in 1945, serving in the entertainment unit stationed in Japan.   
      
   When he returned to the U.S., Ophuls entered Occidental College and later   
   UC Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris. Because he was multilingual and   
   with his father’s help, he was brought on as an assistant on various films   
   by such directors as Julien Duvivier, John Huston and Anatole Litvak.   
   After working for Huston on “Moulin Rouge” in 1952, he helped his father   
   (and appeared briefly) in “Lola Montes,” considered by some critics as the   
   apex of the elder Ophuls’ career.   
      
   He then worked for German television, and a documentary on Henri Matisse   
   caught the eye of Francois Truffaut, who assigned him a segment of the   
   multipart “Love at Twenty.” Through his friendship with Truffaut, he was   
   able to interest Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau to appear in his   
   1963 adventure comedy “Banana Peel,” which was a success. His second   
   fiction film, 1965’s “Fire at Will,” starring Eddie Constantine, failed   
   to   
   appeal to critics or audiences, however.   
      
   In need of a job, Ophuls was hired by the French government-run TV network   
   ORTF and worked on the TV newsmagazine “Zoom!” After “Munich or Peace in   
   Our Time,” his three-hour 1967 documentary about the 1938 Munich   
   agreement, Ophuls began planning a film about the French Occupation. In   
   the meantime, he made a film sympathetic to the 1968 Parisian student   
   riots and, after the re-establishment of pro de Gaulle forces in the   
   French government, he was fired for his radical position.   
      
   Ophuls then returned to German TV and, with the help of the Swiss, raised   
   the money to complete “The Sorrow and the Pity” by 1969. The sprawling but   
   penetrating 4½ hour documentary about French complicity with its Nazi   
   captors during the war exploded the myth that the French resisted their   
   occupiers. It was shown on German television; the French rejected it for   
   both theatrical and television distribution, but after numerous private   
   screenings, “The Sorrow and the Pity” was finally released in Paris to   
   critical acclaim and played for several months. In 1971, it was   
   distributed throughout France, but the documentary didn’t appear on French   
   television until a decade later.   
      
   “Sorrow” was greeted with similar approbation in the U.S. Ophuls’ next   
   film, “A Sense of Loss” (1972), dealt with the ongoing battle in Northern   
   Ireland. Comparisons with the earlier film were inevitable and the issue   
   much more complex than any film could encompass.   
      
   “The Memory of Justice” (1976), based on the book “Nuremeberg and   
   Vietnam:   
   An American Tragedy” and also ran a punishing 4½ hours, drew parallels   
   between atrocities committed in Nazi Germany, Vietnam and Algeria. The   
   film dealt with selective memory and the Germans’ desire to forget their   
   former pro-Nazi stance.   
      
   Ophuls did not return to the bigscreen until 1988 with another WWII   
   documentary, “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,” about   
   the notorious Nazi Butcher of Lyon. The film again struck a nerve, and   
   Ophuls was awarded an Oscar and the International Critics Prize at Cannes   
   for his efforts.   
      
   His 1991 docu “November Days” was a portrait of the weakening political   
   leadership of East Germany.   
      
   Ophuls frequently wrote about film, lectured at universities and served on   
   the board of the French Filmmakers Society. After receiving a MacArthur   
   Foundation Fellowship in 1991, Ophuls swore that he was going to return to   
   feature filmmaking, but instead turned out “Veillees d’armes,” a film   
   about the history of wartime journalists. That proved to be his last   
   directing effort until 2012’s “Un Voyageur” (2012), a self-portrait in   
   which he offered his remembrances and summed up his experience but which   
   was released in the U.S. under the absurd title “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”   
      
   He was married to Regine Ophuls, by whom he had three daughters.   
      
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