Nick Fraser, Storyville Series Editor, recalls watching The Sorrow and the Pity for first time, and why it still manages to fascinate him 25 years later.

I remember taking my French mother to a small Left Bank cinema in Paris sometime in the summer of 1969. Here was a four-and-a-half hour film about the occupation of France (which my mother had experienced herself) that we mustn't miss. I had never seen a documentary film, but I was hooked immediately. It began with Germans and French, at weddings or in the fields, anywhere, talking about a shared past to which they had never admitted. In the rueful words of a provincial bourgeois pharmacist, the theme was announced: "What I felt in those years was a sense of sorrow and pity". And then came Maurice Chevalier, performing for an audience of French prisoners of war in 1942. "They want one thing," he warbled to the soldiers as he cynically described a regiment of 'excellent Frenchmen': "qu'on leur foute une bonne fois la paix, - to be fucking left in peace".

So this is how the past can be told, I thought. This isn't just a history, it's film. However, even as I learnt the new language, I became aware of the audience. And I could hear, row after row, exclamations. When we emerged into the soft Paris night, I could see that many people had been crying.

Resistance myth
The Sorrow and the Pity appeared too controversial to be shown on government-controlled television. This was because in the 1960s, the old Gaullist heroic myth of the resistance prevailed, according to which Frenchmen, in a tight spot, had ultimately behaved well. Of course, we knew that it was a lie. But no-one had publicly exhibited the scale of mendacity. Perhaps the scale of debacle was known to us: but that was not the same as seeing it. We might be aware of the terrible things done to Jews in France, but not yet that these things had been done by French policemen acting on the orders of their own government. The figure of Phillippe Petain, war hero of World War I, brought back in near-dotage to preside over the puppet state based in the spa town of Vichy, was little known. Petain appeared a saviour in 1940, but, as the film showed, he was a vain bigot. His regime was a distillation of everything that was repellent about unregenerate vieille France. And France was alone among the defeated countries of Europe in having assisted both the suicide of its democracy, and the creation of the dictatorship that ensued.

Reassessments
I wrote my first published piece about The Sorrow and the Pity. Ophuls' film caught the zeitgeist, causing scab-scratching among French intellectuals. He ushered in the long moment of French fascination with Vichy. But from the outset, voices were raised against the film, and not just from the discredited Right. Recently I found a 1972 essay written by the Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann. While admiring the film, Hoffmann takes it to task for unfairness. He thinks that the vileness of 1940s France is over-stated. Yes, there were legions of the conniving or indifferent; but Hoffmann himself was hidden as a child by a schoolteacher, to whom he owed his life. I am in two minds about this 'balanced' view of the Occupation which is now commonplace. Look at Rwanda or Kosovo - perhaps France in the 1940s was the awful, humiliated thing that Ophuls describes. How will an Iraqi filmmaker choose to describe the 'benevolent' occupation of Baghdad in five years' time?

I'm glad to say that this is Woody Allen's favourite film, too. Myself, I haven't exhausted The Sorrow and the Pity. Be a good boy, I tell myself, and some day you may end up with something as good as this.

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