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Marcel Ophuls really would rather be making musicals. Honest. "People always laugh when I say that:' He routinely protests that he never craved the role of minicam-toting conscience; it became his by happenstance. After all, the pay is lousy, the hours infinite, and one never ever runs out of injustices or the multitudes of small complicities that enable those injustices to take root. Officially sanctioned injustice is his lifelong topic; exposing complicity in all its subtle forms is his metier. Ophuls aptly has been likened to TV's Columbo, a sly, perpetually rumpled detective who deftly manages, through deceptively simple queries, to pin his smug prey squirming to the nearest wall. No one can surpass him at peeling away the protective devices and dodges through which hideous behavior is rationalized by cheerful criminals, outright collaborators, and the cowed families who are only being "realistic" by adjusting to thuggish regimes. Dissecting the reasons why ordinary people shut their eyes to historical horrors, from the deportation of Jews in occupied France to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, might prod us to open ours.
Ophuls seems fated from birth to be cosmopolitan, a filmmaker, and incorrigibly a thorn in the side of all authorities. He was born in Germany in 1927, the only child of director Max Ophuls and his wife Hilde. In 1932, with the Nazis on the brink of attaining state power, his family fled to Paris. When France fell in 1940 they slipped into Switzerland; in 1941 they managed to emigrate to the United States. There Marcel attended Hollywood High, Occidental College, and the University of California at Berkeley. He served with the U.S. occupation forces in Japan and in 1950 became an American citizen. In 1951 he returned to Europe to work in a variety of directorial and writing capacities for French and German television. In the early Sixties he also directed two small films: an episode of Love at Twenty ('61) and an offbeat feature comedy, Banana Peel ('64).
But Ophuls's most striking works in that turbulent decade began as projects for the French state television network ORTF. In 1967 ORTF screened his caustic documentary of the diplomatic maneuvers behind the 1938 Munich agreement attempting to appease Hitler's appetite for lebensraum. A companion study of...