Word: sorrowful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chain of Events. The two-hour, 40-minute documentary inevitably evokes comparison with The Sorrow and the Pity (TIME, March 27), an equally graphic chronicle of French life under Nazi occupation during World War II. La Guerre is the work of Yves Courrière, 36, a French journalist who quit his job with Radio Luxembourg to write a history of the Algerian war and later decided to make a film on the subject. "Very few people on either side really knew what was happening, even if they personally witnessed some of the events," says Courrière, who served...
...early days read like a bad Theodore Dreiser novel in their unequal mating of ambition to mediocrity. In high school he rated run of the mill as a student. The caption under his yearbook picture read: "An ounce of wit is worth a pound of sorrow." Witcover reports: "Classmates still scratch their heads over what that might mean...
...conquerors; an SS general being cordially greeted in Paris. Such things reveal one edge of Director Marcel Ophuls' purpose: anti-heroics. He tries to puncture the bourgeois myth-or protectively askew memory-that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans. The Sorrow and the Pity does that with a vengeance, but the bare facts of such an expose are hardly news. Happily, Ophuls, the son of noted Director Max Ophuls, also has broader, less partisan aims...
...Sorrow and the Pity was both a success and a scandal in France. The national television network refused to show it, but the film became a hit in moviehouses. It can be argued that Ophuls is somewhat unfair to the Resistance (there probably were more fighters than the film suggests), and to the majority of Frenchmen, who gave the underground more informal help elsewhere in France than they did in the vicinity of Vichy. But Sorrow's subliminal message seems unexceptionable: in crisis, men tend to be self-protective, self-delusive, brave, cowardly, cruel, confused and dangerous; organized hatred...
...audiences are more likely to appreciate Sorrow's artistic and intellectual triumph now than might have been the case a decade ago. We have lately lived through a period when the question of individual moral choice became a national anguish. Here, as in Occupied France, those who were comfortably fixed often took refuge in inertia and the hope that the whole thing would somehow go away. In 1972 Americans may find haunting the ravaged face and words of Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, a black-sheep aristocrat who helped found the liberation movement. "I think," he admits...