Views of Good and Evil

...On Screen VIEWS OF GOOD AND EVIL BY JOHN SIMON IT IS not often that I get to write about a great film, and I wish the typography or the color of the printer's ink—or at least my style?could change to mark the solemnity of the occasion There being little hope for the first two, I shall have to try to make my words convey to you the splendor and the importance of The Sorrow and the Pity Marcel Ophuls' previous full-length film, Banana Peel, left me cold, and certainly did not prepare me for the magnificence of this 260-minute documentary about France under the German Occupation With this film the son of the overrated Max Ophuls becomes a director of note The Sorrow and the Pity tackles its immense subject with conspicuous intelligence It picks Clermont-Ferrand, a typical provincial capital in the heart of France, and limits itself, by and large, to reconstructing what happened there The birthplace of Pascal and the locale of Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, Clermont-Ferrand is Hicksville to the French In the farces of Feydeau, it is where the oafish cousin invariably comes from, or where an inconvenient husband is packed off to on maneuvers Ophuls and his associates interviewed a cross-section of Clermon-tois and foreigners brought to the town by the War Germans who occupied it, English fliers who were shot down over it, intelligence agents who infiltrated it Some of the natives were heroes of the Resistance, others were collaborators or accused of collaboration, many were neither the apothecary who stayed as neutral as possible for the sake of his large family, the lawyer who defended patriots during the Occupation and collaborators after the Liberation, the schoolteachers who watched non-Aryan colleagues being dismissed and did nothing about it One of the sons of Clermont-Ferrand was Pierre Mendes-France, unjustly imprisoned in his home town, he escaped to join de Gaulle He tells about his wartime experiences calmly, wittily, cogently This humane Jewish statesman becomes the good conscience of France and the film, its bad consciences, in towns not far from Clermont-Ferrand, are Marshal Petam and his Prime Minister...

...Pierre Laval The film extends to them and to other high-echelon people Georges Bidault, Jacques Duclos, Anthonv Eden, Albert Speer, General Warlimont of the Wehrmacht, the British Major General Sir Edward Spears, the Resistance organizer Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigene, and several others in high positions on various sides Interviews that shed absorbing new light on the War years are interspersed with generous newsreel clips—French, German, British?that shed absorbing, often untruthful, old light on the same events The identical incident is seen through the eyes of a German field officer, a high-ranking German staff officer, and a mere German soldier, as well as from various French and English vantage pomts The matters raised shimmer before our eyes and keep changing as they are discussed by successive speakers We see people as they are now and also, in news-reels and old snapshots, as they were then We even see a representative German propaganda film (the scandalous Jud Suss), and hear about the varying reactions of contemporary French audiences War and its ambiguous events become, by turns, a detective story to be pieced together from numerous yet still insufficient clues, a set of curious ironies—of fate, of character, of changing historical climate, a Proustian gallery of characters who are good in their own and their friends' eyes, horrible in the eyes of their enemies, something midway to our gaze Finally, the whole becomes a mirror for ourselves What would we have done m these people's shoes...

...The mirror refuses us easy answers about who was, or would have been, the fairest of all France itself is on the witness stand, or in the prisoner's dock France, the only country that stopped fighting, signed a treaty, collaborated with the Nazi enemy Yes there was a Resistance, but it was smaller and suffered more internal discord than official accounts would have it Yes, there were brave individuals, but what about the majority indifferent, callous, cowardly ready to indulge their anti-Semitism openly and legally, and avail themselves ol the Germans to eliminate —in the word's most terrible sense —their competitors9 Acts ot monstrous, Sadian cruelty were performed by Frenchmen on their fellow Frenchmen Hypocrisy had a field day Could the same have happened here9 Is there such a thing as a national character9 Why were the Danes and the Dutch, for example, so brave and noble, almost to a man7 Why were the French and Italians, by and large, so spineless and dishonorable9 And what about the Germans themselves9 Were these men we see obvious villains, or only dense, unimaginative individuals, unable to draw correct conclusions9 There are some hints, if not answers, m the maze Some elderly French teachers seem largely unaware of the persecutions that occurred among their colleagues and pupils, and take a memorial plaque in their school yard to be honoring the school's dead in World War I They are amazed when the interviewers point out to them that it concerns Woild War II One good citizen of Clermont-Ferrand denies ever having seen any Germans around This, after all, was the Free Zone A local hotelier did not in the least mmd billeting German military personnel, except insofar as it cut down on his tourist trade The oily international lawyer Count Rene de Chambrun, Laval's son-in-law, maintains that his late father-in-law was the canny savior of France, that he shrewdly yielded on some points to prevent worse disasteis Confronted with evidence to the contrary, the Count stares blankly and words fail him, but he concedes nothing A former German captain still proudly wears his Nazi medals—how are they different from any others, he asks And how can you call those beasts who ambushed and killed German soldiers partisans, he wonders, a real partisan should wear a white or yellow ribbon or cap to identify him as such People can be blind or stupid or both But the answer is not that simple A beautician who has suffered much and long at the hands of the "good" French after the War, but who may well have been innocent, bravely admits that she continues to believe in Petain's policies (none of the Germans actually makes such an admission) And we feel that tor a provincial, Catholic petty-bourgeois this was a possible behef We are not convinced, however, that a man like Georges Lami-rand, the Minister ot Youth, had a light to his hero worship of the Marshal from up close Curiously, we find ourselves sympathizing with Christian de la Ma-ziere, an aristocratic Frenchman, the son of a Rightist officer, who had gone so far as to join the Charlemagne Division Frenchmen in SS uniforms fighting on the Russian front Forthnghtly and courageously, this much chastened man analyzes lucidly how he came to do these things, and we cannot deny plausibility to his arguments A terrible relativity is seen to inhere in human concepts, actions, judgments N I ^ ot quite all of them, though Anthony Eden's refusal to judge the French is indisputably humane The behavior and words of two old farmers, the brothers Louis and Alexis Grave, are unshowily heroic and decent Their unwillingness to exact revenge from those who betrayed them to the Germans and Buchenwald emerges as the film's most luminous passage, along with the sharp but compassionate evaluations uttered by Mendes-France One is less at ease with Bidault's cynical wit, and still less so with Duclos' smug imperturbability Most of the Resistance men appear ambiguous brave but ambitious and factious, noble and petty at the same time We would like to know more about them than the film has time for Several issues may have been deliberately avoided The equivocal roles of Catholicism and Communism under the Occupation, for example, are barely if at all hinted at Some things may have been omitted through mere oversight Did that beautician have to serve the 15 years of jail she was condemned to9 Why does Major General Spears speak such absolutely immaculate French9 What is the true ancestry of the shopkeeper Manus Klein, who so ardently asserts his Catholicism9 But we do get some precious bits of information We learn, for instance, how men become heroes Emile Couladon was so indignant at not being served steak at a restaurant—it was reserved for the Germans—that he joined the Resistance and, under the nom de gueire Colonel Gaspard, became the intrepid, intransigent leader ot the Auvergne Maquis At War's end, he becomes a dealer in electronic equipment, for the sake of selling television sets, he prefers to forget who did what Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigene was the dissipated black sheep of an aristocratic family, a perennial failure The refusal ot the British to evacuate him, the hopelessness of his situation with his back against the Pyrenees, his fear about the future, inspire him to gather others like himself and start the Resistance At the end of hostilities, we see him m a newsreel clip fanatically demanding merciless justice for collaborators During an interview shortly before his death in 1969, he looks comfortable, benign and sly, and is all for forgiving and forgetting Is he wise or just back on opium9 The most moving figure of all is Dennis Rake, former member of the British underground in France, whose heroism, as we hear his ex-chief attest, was unsurpassed He is now a meek little old man, surrounded by bibelots and petting a cat, he says he was a musical-comedy actor and frankly reveals that he is a homosexual, he adds that he wanted to prove to his skeptical friends that he was as much a man as they When he tells about a friend in the Resistance confiding in an aunt who turned him m and caused his doom, these bare tacts, coming trom such a gentle, brave man, assume particular horror But then Rake tells about a German officer who believed him to be a Belgian, took mm in, and became his lover—and of how he finally left this man because of what his fellow Germans would have done to him had they found him harboring an enemy agent Here the film becomes deeply touching This unusual relationship described in the most matter-of-fact terms suddenly makes us reahze how much greater love is than war, and how, nevertheless, it is defeated by war As Jacques Pre-vert said succmctly m one of his loveliest poems Oh Barbara I Quelle conneile la guerre Sagacious, ingeniously put-together, The Sorrow and the Pity allows us to hear the real voices of people —their exact words, tonalities, emphases that reveal or withhold so much The dubbing (by the BBC) is adroit It leaves the beginnings and ends of speeches uncovered by translation, so that your ears can judge for themselves In between, the original voice is turned down and a translation is spoken over it The English voices are fair approximations, but they are British rather than American and at times perhaps a little too emotional Moreover, these voices affect stage French and German accents on a discriminatory basis Upper-class speakers get the best BBC speech, and only lower-class ones are saddled with the phony gallicizing and teutomzmg But these are minor cavils The admirable thing about The Sorrow and the Pity is that, though it clearly has opinions of its own, it does not force them upon you A slight tendentiousness was, surely, unavoidable, but you are left amazingly free to make your own discoveries and evaluations And the film even manages to give you a few glimpses of that graciously rolling Auvergne landscape that inspired those haunting folk songs Cante-loube arranged into the "Songs of Auvergne " Finally, it leaves you with the feeling that, more than Fiance, mankind, some basic insufficiency in us, is at fault Near the end of this long film that feels, if anything, too short, we are again at the home ot the pharmacist Marcel Verdier, who was a neutral but did not lose his humanity, and who is now surrounded by his large, decent family Verdier, the film's homme moyen sensuel, tells how, when the German rout was already total, he got his one chance to shoot an elderly, pathetic, sniveling German soldier He refrained, because "It would have seemed more like killing a pig and that wouldn't have been very interesting" A curious choice of word, that "interesting" Could that be the ultimate human motivation the need to make boring lives more interesting'' Is that what finally makes us kill'' The movie does not issue pronouncements on human nature, but I think Ophuls would subscribe to these lines of the English poet, A S J Tessimond "How much simpler if men were not striped like tigers, patched like clowns,/ If alternate white and black were not further confused by greys and browns " I take the ultimate implication of this important, stirring film to be the difficulty of being either good or bad What a precarious, pitiful thing it is to be people 1 What a precarious, pitiful thing it is to be swine1 T he question of the relativity ot good and evil also underlies, fuzzily and dishonestly, The Godfather, a violent film raved about by many of the same reviewers who criticized the violence of Straw Dogs The difference is that The Godfather's is old-fashioned violence carefully prepared for, nicely spread across the entire film, and made to look palatable because all save one of the victims have been asking for it or aren't worth much to begin with Besides, it is a genre film It is, despite pretensions to newness and differentness, essentially an old gangster movie, skillfully manufactured except for one rather bad lacuna m the middle What does it say9 That organized crime is not really such an ignoble way of life immoral, yes, but exciting, heroic, and based (barring an occasional betrayal soon pumshed) on profound loyalties within the clan It is, after all, merely a transitional phase poor immigrants traverse on the way to becoming respectable American capitalists I cannot imagine why this film should have caused concern among Italo-American organizations or in the Mafia itself—even if all references to the Cosa Nostra had not been upon some pressure, obligingly removed by the film's producers The basic dishonesty of the film lies in showing the Mafia mostly in extremes of heroic violence or sweet family life Even the scenes of intimidation are grand and spectacular Missing is the banality of evil the cheap, ugly, petty racketeering that is the mainstay ot organized crime and that neither the script of Mario Puzo nor the direction of Francis Ford Coppola could have made glamorous or so much as palatable The acting is predominantly good, with the exception of the highly touted and critically acclaimed performance of Marlon Brando in the title part Brando has a weak, gray voice, a poor ear for accents, and an unrivaled capacity for hamming things up by sheer underacting—m particular by unconscionably drawn-out pauses His make-up is good, to be sure, but only when the character is near death does Brando's halting wheezing performance lumber into sense The rest of the time he is out-acted by Al Pacino, Richard Castel-!ano, Robert Duvall and so lowly a talent as James Caan's The Godfather is raking it in at five New York theaters, while The Sorrow and the Pity is struggling along in one...