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...As with Barbie's attorney, Verges, Ophuls is sometimes strong where he should be meek, and vice-versa...

...What happened in the 1940s was bad enough...

...The latter part of the title suggests Ophuls's scope: Barbie's childhood, his career in the SS and cruelty in France, his recruitment by U.S...

...One wishes Ophuls would paste him with a moral pie in his face, but this is only a documentary...

...Ophuls wisely avoids a plodding, straightforward chronological approach: information about Barbie's deeds accrues slowly, a full retelling of his abuse of the Jewish children is postponed to the trial, and the most poignant scene-a description of a Gestapo raid by the one surviving member of a Jewish family-is saved for the final, touching sequence...

...He gets his subjects to talk, not always an easy task...

...As in Sorrow, Ophuls takes up some nasty aspects of the story-not just tales of grisly suffering by resistance members, but also of collaboration, even betrayal...

...One case which Ophuls partly explores is the death, probably at Barbie's hands, of Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's emissary in France during the war (Barbie was skilled at this sort of thing...

...Ophuls, who directed the documentary on France during the Second World War, The Sorrow and the Pity, knows how to make this kind of film...

...One described Barbie in 1946 as a " Nazi idealist''-a phrase which, he says, "I wish I could rewrite today.'' Ophuls adds, "Yes, especially right now...

...another chunk is coverage of the Barbie trial...

...SCREEN THE BUTCHER OF LYON OPHULS'S 'HOTEL TERMINUS' Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie is-like many other films about Nazi atrocities-long and sometimes tedious, but still reward-ing...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...In a good sense, the sum of the film's four-and-a-half hour parts is greater than the whole...

...The film could be shorter...

...Those who deny the Holocaust are beyond my understanding...

...The title reveals both range and specificity...

...Very little footage needs to be wasted on how nice this Nazi was as a child, what a good father or grandfather he was, how dogs loved him or how he played with cats-even before torture sessions...

...Verges is one of those crackerjack professionals who have memorized the letter of law but missed its entire spirit...

...Ophuls evokes tension not from anticipation of the conclusion, but the way all the segments of the sordid story fit together and his rapid-fire crosscutting among them...

...The pace weakens about two-thirds of the way through, but just in time Ophuls introduces a classy, new villain: Barbie's lawyer, Jacques Verges, a half-Arab attorney, who, as one interviewee notes, the Nazis would have considered as subhuman...

...intelligence in postwar Europe, his escape (certainly with the help of clergy) to South America, his comfortable and powerful relations with several dictators in Bolivia, and at last his deportation to France and the trial...

...The first part refers to the hotel by the Lyon train station where the local Gestapo was headquartered and from which Barbie sent young Jewish children to Auschwitz-the provable legal offense for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment...

...Ophuls sets the record straight, but-as with other films-Hotel Terminus may preach only to the converted...

...Ophuls should also have shown more restraint in interviewing some of his German subjects-many of whom try to run away once they realize his intent...

...The sequence is sanctimonious...

...confusion about it only adds insult to injury...

...But many people- even smart and sensitive ones-seem to be confused about key issues: the reasons to pursue those guilty of "crimes against humanity," the Holocaust's effect on the Jewish population above all others, and the distinction between judging Jewish suffering then and agreeing with policies of the Jewish state today...

...Ophuls pursues the story as far as possible, as well as the naive-or blind-aid given to Barbie by American army officers eager to use his espionage contacts in the Cold War...

...Despite strengths, there is a weakness in films like this: Shoah, BBC documentaries (the best work ever done on the Holocaust was in Laurence Olivier's series, The World at War), Sophie's Choice, and the mammoth American TV mini-series, The Holocaust, a decade ago...

...In Terminus he weaves strands of a complicated, fifty-year-long, transcontinental tale into a suspenseful plot, despite the fact that viewers already know the ending: Barbie was convicted last year for "crimes against humanity...

...The irony is predictable, and worn...

...Another kind of art-not documentary or melodramatic, but argumentative and histor-iographical-seems needed...

...Often Ophuls talks back in an engaged manner, deriving most of his power from the frequent white-hot exchanges...

...at times he slips into vulgar, "Sixty Minutes" let's-chase-the-culprits journalism...

...Much of the footage is newsreel about the past...

...He also treats a Luftwaffe veteran unfairly-one of the few who cooperated and whose only "crime" was to be recruited by American agents, like Barbie, after the war...

...But the bulk is interviews-with Barbie's associates or victims, innocent bystanders or accidental survivors of Nazi terror, famous Nazi hunters (like Serge and Beate Klarsfield) or anonymous but solid French peasants...