Marcel Ophuls, the director of the seminal 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity that explored the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II, died at his home in in France over the weekend. He was 97.
His death was reported to The New York Times by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who declined to provide further details.
Born on November 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany – his father was film director Max Ophüls and his mother was actress Hildegard Wall, Ophuls was 11 when he and his parents fled France after the country was invaded by the Nazis. The family settled in Hollywood but returned to France in 1950.
Back in France, Ophuls found work in the city’s film industry, including assisting his director father, and on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952). Other credits during the ’60s include the hit comedy-detective film Banana Peel (1964) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau.
In 1967, Ophuls began work on the two-part four-hour-plus film that would become his signature endeavor. The Sorrow and the Pity was intended for television but the film was banned from airwaves after conservative politicians criticized the film for its depiction of France’s Vichy regime collaborating with Hitler’s Nazi regime. Released to theaters as a feature film in 1969, the film upturned France’s then-accepted self-image as overwhelmingly resistance.
Among his post-Sorrow credits, Ophuls directed the Oscar-winning 1988 documentarey Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. The film opened to acclaim, but would not replace The Sorrow and the Pity as Ophuls’ signature work. In 1977 Woody Allen paid tribute to the film with a classic comedy scene in Annie Hall: It was while in line to see Ophuls’ film that Allen’s character shames a loud-mouth know-nothing by presenting Marshall McLuhan to correct the man’s speechifying.
According to The Guardian, Ophuls, at the time of his death, was working on a documentary about Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
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