Excellent but underrated film

The acting in this movie is really good.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is a French documentary about the sadistic Gestapo commander in Lyon, who captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, during WWII, and tortured and deported a load of other people along the way. Fascinating premise, too bad the result is as exciting as reading a phone-book. Seriously, all you get here is an uninterrupted strain of random people talking in the most monotone and grammatically convoluted way, with no context and no emotion whatsoever. Every single person interviewed, but particularly the director, M. Ophuls, are such boring self-indulgent drags. They seem to enjoy just listening to themselves instead of trying to engage the audience by conveying something other than an exaggerated love for their own mother tongue. Take for instance this question posed to Moulin's former secretary by Ophuls while the camera focuses on himself: "But isn't it incredibly arrogant to try to form an opinion to presume to judge the fragility of the behavior of people who were submitted to torture, or who have... who have, been submitted to torture or, or who have been threatened to be tortured?" Of course in French this takes almost twice the time to spell out. And then it cuts away to him (Ophuls) posing another question to another guy, always in that same overstretched, convoluted and elliptic fashion. The first 30 minutes are spent contrasting the testimonies of different people who disagree as to who was the whistle-blower for Moulin's arrest. But it's so horribly BORING. They might as well be neighbors arguing over who let the garbage bin open for stray dogs to make the sidewalk dirty, when in fact they are discussing matters of life and death. Very, very poor result for such a fascinating premise. I had high expectations for this documentary and was completely disappointed.

A devastating, monumental work by Marcel Ophuls. Tracing the life of Klaus Barbie, the infamous "butcher of Lyon," Ophuls dissects the facts that led up to this Nazi's nearly forty years as a free man through interviews with citizens of Lyon, French resistance leaders, politicians, ex-CIC (CIA) operatives as well as with several of Barbie's victims. The film addresses not only Barbie's horrendous war crimes, but questions both French and American collusion during and after WWII (and the onset of the cold war). From France to Washington DC to South America, Ophuls travels the globe peeling back the mysteries of what allowed Barbie to live on for so many years after the war. It's a sad, sometimes horrifying account. Monumental, but NEVER slow. There are appearances by Lucie & Raymond Aubrac as well as famed "Nazi Hunter" Beate Klarsfeld. Ophuls also gets insight from writer Günter Grass, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, and many, many others. In French, German, English and Spanish.

As an affectionado of WWII movies, I was excited to discover this documentary at our local library. However, the problem I had with it was that I needed help understanding the background of this part of WWII. I know a lot about this period, but not about occupied France. For the length of this movie, you would have thought they could have spend a few minutes getting us all up to speed. What's the prerequisite for this course?

The film is very good but sags in the third hour. However, you must stay with it. Take a break, have some coffee, and come back. I saw this film a good five years ago, but the final few sentences were so moving I remember them still, word for word. It must be seen. We're talking hot tears and goosebumps.