Marcel Ophuls obituary

The Guardian

26-05-2025

Although Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, became a film director like his prodigious father, Max, he managed to avoid comparisons by taking the route of documentaries rather than fiction.
Certainly, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), his documentary on the behaviour of the citizens of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand during the second world war, and the Oscar-winning Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), a detailed biography of the notorious Gestapo chief, put Ophuls on a level that made any reference to his father an irrelevance.
Yet the cosmopolitan Max, who made his exquisite films in Germany, France, Hollywood and Italy, had a great influence on the life and personality of his son, if not the films.
When Hans Marcel Oppenheimer was born in Frankfurt, his father was the creative director of the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna, and his mother, Hilde (Hildegard) Wall, was one of the leading players in the company. 'It was inevitable that I should follow them into show business. I was born under the shadow of genius,' said Marcel, who took on his father's pseudonym, later dropping the umlaut. (The Jewish Max had borrowed the name Ophüls from an aristocratic German family.)
In early 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the family fled to France, while Max's first big film success, Liebelei (Playing At Love), was showing in Berlin. Max continued to direct in France, while Marcel attended a local school, only for the family to go on the run again after the Germans occupied France in 1940.
The family finally arrived in Hollywood, where Marcel went to Hollywood high while his father was working for the studios during the 1940s. Some of the friends of his parents he remembered meeting were Preston Sturges, Bertolt Brecht (with whose daughter he went to school), Louis Jourdan, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. At the age of 19, Marcel volunteered to serve with the US occupying forces in Japan, after which he rejoined his parents, who had settled in Paris.
His first film job came as assistant to John Huston on Moulin Rouge (1952); he was given the task of making film tests of Zsa Zsa Gabor. He was then credited as assistant director ('essentially making the coffee') on films by Julien Duvivier (Marianne de Ma Jeunesse, 1955) and his father (Lola Montès, 1955), on which he used the name Marcel Wall to avoid accusations of nepotism.
After making a 20-minute black-and-white short, Matisse Ou le Talent de Bonheur (1960), Ophuls, on the suggestion of his friend François Truffaut, was offered the chance to direct and write his first fiction film, the German segment of the five-part portmanteau picture Love at Twenty (1962). The novice director's rather touching piece about a womanising business executive who falls in love with a woman after she has had his child stood comparison with the efforts of Renzo Rossellini, another son of a famous director father also making his debut, though the sketches by Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda and Shintarô Ishihara were more memorable.
Keen to follow his father as a director of fiction films, Ophuls made Banana Peel (1963), a lightweight comedy thriller with a nouvelle vague touch starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It caused a minor ripple at the box office, but his second feature, Faites Vos Jeux, Mesdames (Fire at Will, 1965), starring Eddie Constantine, sank completely. It was his last venture into fiction, except for a couple of plays for German television in 1970: Zwei Ganze Tage, an adaptation of Sacha Guitry's Faisons Un Rêve, and Goethe's Clavigo.
Ophuls then joined ORTF, the French national television station, where he made Munich, Ou la Paix pour Cent Ans (Munich, Or Peace in Our Time, 1967), a 172-minute documentary on the Munich crisis, juxtaposing newsreels, movie clips and interviews, a technique he continued throughout his subsequent work.
'Documentary is a sufficiently narrow form that was in a kind of corset. From my first reportage for ORTF, I tried to emancipate it. I realised that it was useless to prepare the questions in advance, even when you are going to shoot a difficult interview. The importance is to choose a first question that will stimulate the interlocutor. Without spontaneity, there is no point in making a documentary.'
In The Sorrow and the Pity, 251 minutes of footage and interviews with inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who lived through the war, Ophuls proved himself a probing, incisive and fluent interviewer, ruthlessly exposing the degree of collaboration among the French citizenry.
He also talked to members of the resistance and some of the Nazi occupiers, intercutting archive material of Adolf Hitler in Paris and famous figures of the day going about their business – for example, French film stars blithely setting off to tour Germany. The soundtrack of songs is a masterpiece in setting period and ironically counterpointing the realities of the subject. Commissioned by ORTF, who declined to show it, the film went on cinema release in France, where its ugly revelations courted both acclaim and bitter controversy. In finally uncovering the still unwelcome topic of collaboration, Ophuls opened the way for film-makers to re-examine the period of German occupation.
He then went to the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, for which he made The Harvest of My Lai (1970), a scathing inquiry into the massacre perpetrated by American troops in the Vietnamese village in March 1968, and its repercussions in the US.
The BBC rejected A Sense of Loss (1972), Ophuls's examination of the problems of Northern Ireland. Taking a firm partisan position – Catholics good, Protestants bad – the film failed to shed much light on the subject. Much more impressive and enlightening was the 278-minute The Memory of Justice (1976), which compares German war crimes with the French and American tactics in Algeria and Vietnam respectively. Using the Nuremberg trials as a starting point, Ophuls, through effective montage technique, intercutting newsreel footage and contemporary interviews, makes the film a personal search for truth.
This monumental film, of which Ophuls was most proud, was almost destroyed by the BBC, one of the producers. It balked at the pubic hair seen in a sauna sequence, among other things, and another director was brought in to recut the footage. Happily, the film was rescued by an intrepid production assistant, who stole a print and smuggled it to the US, where it was premiered in its intended form.
Hotel Terminus, Ophuls's investigation into the life of Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon', was, he claimed, structured along the lines of Columbo, with the interviewer as the TV detective in the old raincoat. Ophuls, who never feigned impartiality in his films, is still able to try to understand Nazis such as Barbie or Albert Speer, and expose what Hannah Arendt famously called 'the banality of evil'.
In November Days (1991), Ophuls was at his most Columbo-like, chipping away at East Germans' recollections of living in the GDR, and their reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and reunification. Veillées d'Arme (The Troubles We've Seen: The History of Journalism in Wartime, 1994) took Ophuls to Bosnia, where he begins an almost four-hour merciless inquiry into the relationship between war and the media, with multiple interviews, sometimes set against clips from films (including Lola Montès) for ironic effect.
In 2013, he summed up his life and career in a film memoir, Ain't Misbehavin' (Un Voyageur), in which he revisited many of the places and people of his past. He showed a particular delight at the scene in the film Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton queue to see The Sorrow and the Pity.
For some years before his death he worked on a documentary about Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, titled Des Vérités Désagréables (Unpleasant Truths).
In 1956 he married Regina Ackermann. She survives him, along with three daughters and three grandchildren.
Marcel Ophuls (Hans Marcel Oppenheimer), film-maker, born 1 November 1927; died 24 May 2025
This obituary has been revised since Ronald Bergan's death in 2020.