Echoes: Marcel Ophuls and Michael Roemer

Superficially at least, it would seem that the similarities end there. And yet echoes of the pain and loss inflicted on European Jews during the Second World War reverberate throughout both bodies of work—overtly in the case of Ophuls, whose 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity obliterated the myth that all of France resisted the Nazis, and far more subtly in Roemer’s films. “I grew up and watched some of the humiliations my father went through under the Nazis and what he had to endure,” Roemer told Gene Seymour when discussing Nothing but a Man (1964), the story of a struggling Black couple in Alabama. “You didn’t have to be a southern Black man to endure these things.”

Roemer was eleven when he was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport effort to rescue children from the Nazi-occupied zones on the continent. In 1945, he left for the U.S. to study at Harvard, where he met Robert M. Young, who would soon launch a career making educational films. In 1962, Roemer—who himself had made nearly a hundred nonfiction shorts by this point—teamed up with Young on Cortile Cascino, a documentary for NBC on the slums of Palermo. The network found it too bleak to air, so Roemer and Young decided to make a feature independently.

Nothing but a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, was directed by Roemer, shot by Young, and cowritten and coproduced by the two of them. When Gene Seymour first saw it in the mid-1970s, its “deceptively simple story of a Black man seeking love and self-worth in a society where the odds of finding both are heaped against him gave me a jolt of recognition to a degree I’d never before encountered in a big-screen depiction of working-class Black America.”

Young shot but Roemer wrote, directed, and produced The Plot Against Harry (1969), a very New York comedy about a numbers racketeer toying with the idea of going straight. “On one hand,” writes J. Hoberman, “Roemer’s film is a prolonged Jewish joke—the gangster as schlemiel. On the other, it’s a bunch of New York actors, many of them amateurs, having a subcultural field day.”

Brooke Adams stars in Vengeance Is Mine (1984) as a recently divorced woman returning to her home in New England. “The surfaces of Vengeance Is Mine are so modest that the film’s deep vein of emotional terror sneaks up on you,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. It’s “about as visually unadorned as movies come, and yet every shot is riveting. It has that in common with the director’s other films, all of them unshowy and astounding.”

All three of these features came and went without much fanfare in their day, but in recent years, interest in Roemer and his work has soared, thanks in no small part to Film Desk founder Jake Perlin, who has been the driving force behind the revivals of several films, including the 1976 documentary Dying and the 1982 feature Pilgrim, Farewell, starring Elizabeth Huddle as a cancer patient. “Dying is as sober and direct as its title suggests, chronicling three adults, of varying ages, in the final months of their lives,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. “When I first saw Pilgrim, Farewell more than ten years ago, I found its psychic volatility barely tolerable. But, as ever with Roemer’s work, the film was waiting for me to rediscover it.”

When Brandon Kaufman interviewed Roemer in 2023 for Notebook, Perlin told him that it was especially gratifying to know that Roemer had lived to see his work finally receive the appreciation that it deserved. By contrast, Ophuls would not have to wait for recognition or fame. In 1933, his father, the great director Max Ophuls, moved the family to France. After the Germans invaded in 1940, the family hid for a year before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. Then it was off to Hollywood.

In 1950, Max Ophuls brought the family back to France, where Marcel worked as an assistant director for Julien Duvivier, Anatole Litvak, and John Huston—as well as for his father, when the elder Ophuls made his final film, Lola Montès (1955). In his beautiful remembrance, filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler recalls that Marcel Ophuls told him that he always wanted more than anything to direct fiction, and for a while it looked like that path might be open to him.

François Truffaut invited Ophuls to direct a chapter in the omnibus film Love at Twenty (1962), “which led to him directing Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the comedy hit Banana Peel (1963),” notes Nick James for the BFI. “That one success, however, was followed by an absolute flop, the Eddie Constantine vehicle Fire at Will (1965), which meant Marcel’s brief fiction feature career was done.”

Ophuls turned to television. His first documentary, Munich, or Peace in Our Time (1967), takes its English title, slightly misquoted, from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamously misjudged announcement that the 1938 agreement struck between Germany, the UK, France, and Italy would put a stop to Hitler. A sequel was planned but then called off when Ophuls and his producers sided with strikers during the wave of protests that swept Paris in 1968. Ophuls found backers in Germany and Switzerland.

Over the course of four and a half hours, Ophuls first chronicles France’s fall to the Germans and then asks the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, a modestly sized city in the center of the country, about life during the Occupation. “The postwar, Gaullist myth of massive French resistance to fascism has long since been destroyed,” wrote Leslie Camhi in the Village Voice in 2000, “yet The Sorrow and the Pity retains its shattering power as an interrogation of memory, of the fragile, cinematic processes by which human beings shape the past into an image that accommodates their needs today. With its small faults and immense virtues, Marcel Ophuls’s masterpiece remains a triumph of humanist filmmaking.”

Ophuls turned out to be “an extraordinary listener,” wrote Camhi, “gifted with cunning, grace, humor, and compassion. His film’s unforgettable portraits bear witness to an elemental truth—that under the pressure of extreme circumstances, human beings will run the gamut of moral behavior.” NPR contributor Howie Movshovitz notes that sound recordist Judy Karp once recalled that Ophuls “would come in [to conduct interviews] as the person that he needed to be in order to get the story out of them and to get the information that he wanted. He was never false—but it’s like we never knew which Marcel was going to be there.”

Movshovitz also quotes the late Bertrand Tavernier, who recognized that Ophuls “knew that documentary sometimes has to be built as a fiction film. You have to have interesting characters. You have to have an interesting angle. You have to work on dramatization, progression. At the same time, he was never manipulating the audience.”

Among the documentaries that followed were A Sense of Loss (1972), which probed the causes and effects of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; The Memory of Justice (1976), which drew lines from the Nuremberg Trials to the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), an indictment not only of the war criminal but also of those who came to his aid after long after the war was over.

“It is easier when all of the Nazis are Germans, but harder when we cannot isolate the evil of Nazism in the historical past, and have to accept that several U.S. administrations and even the Vatican were willing to protect this man,” wrote Roger Ebert. “The Sorrow and the Pity was the film of a man who held his audience spellbound. Hotel Terminus is the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects. It is a stubborn, angry, nagging, sarcastic assault on good manners, and I am happy Ophuls was ill-tempered enough to make it.”