MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Terminus’ as Historical Drama

There’s never been a Holocaust film quite like Marcel Ophuls’ “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” (Westside Pavilion). It’s every bit as devastating and monumental as Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” or Ophuls’ own “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “The Memory of Justice,” yet it dares the wholly unexpected: It’s entertaining .

That’s a description you’re almost afraid to use for fear of seeming frivolous or, worse yet, making the film seem frivolous. But it is engrossing all through its 4 1/2 hours because Ophuls, in his wide-ranging investigation of the sadistic Gestapo chief known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” is caught up in a real-life detective story in which he has cast himself as a modern-day Philip Marlowe, a shrewd and remorseless moralist.

To watch “Hotel Terminus” is like seeing a great novel come alive on the screen, for it is dense with characters, epic in scale, and it deals with the eternal conflict between good and evil.

To confront the monstrous deeds of Barbie is finally to contemplate human nature in all its contradictions and ambiguities. Once again Ophuls calls France to account for her sins during the German Occupation, and in the process lays bare the subsequent sorry roles played by the United States, Peru and Bolivia in the unconscionable decades-long delay in bringing Barbie to justice.

In getting down to business, Ophuls has created a great historical drama, and he has done it with the utmost simplicity. In essence, “Hotel Terminus” is a talking-heads documentary that is deftly accented by archival material. It has in Ophuls a superb interrogator, a master at cross-examination and a skilled film maker who knows how to cross-cut and make every sequence propel us into the next one with an unflagging drive and rigorous logic and economy.

The film’s structure is circular. It departs, as it were, from Lyon’s elegant Beaux Arts Hotel Terminus, which adjoins its railroad station and served as Gestapo headquarters during the war. It returns to Lyon with the captured Barbie and his eventual trial, which ended last year with him receiving a life sentence for crimes against humanity.

Barbie’s life--his German roots, his rise in the Third Reich and the postwar decades of his comfortable and prosperous South American exile--provides the outline for the film, yet Barbie is but a point of departure for Ophuls’ probing of the times and circumstances through which Barbie lived and what they reveal, finally, about ourselves.

Ophuls’ immediate task is to illuminate how France deals with the darkest, most uncomfortable period in its modern history, the Occupation. Ophuls makes it clear that most French people understandably want to forget it or, if forced to remember, to regard it in terms of the heroism of the Resistance.

At first, Ophuls seems to be digressing when he spends so much time dealing with Lyon’s martyred Resistance leader Jean Moulin and weighing whether or not he was betrayed to Barbie by one Rene Hardy. In time we realize that Ophuls’ poking around allows us to see how the French would rather not deal with the leading role Communists took in the underground.

The U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, which recruited Barbie as a Russian expert after World War II, refused to allow him to testify at Hardy’s first trial in 1947 because of what the French Secret Service, believed to be heavily infiltrated by Communists at that time, might learn from him. (The Americans who hired Barbie for the Counter Intelligence Corps admit that they did no background check and were unaware of the significance of Hardy’s trials in regard to their efficient ex-Gestapo agent.)

Clearly, anti-Communist paranoia, along with a pervasive, global and enduring anti-Semitism, worked to great advantage for Barbie, who in South America found his skills much in demand by a series of dictators.

No novelist, not even Dickens or Hugo, could improve on the vast and disparate number of individuals Ophuls encounters. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is Barbie’s controversial, mysterious attorney, the Eurasian Jacques Verges, a man of subtle wit and limitless ambiguity.

As for Barbie himself, we glimpse him only briefly during his trial and in a 1972 TV interview when he coolly denies his true identity.

For Ophuls, the trial tended to cover up as much as it revealed, and he carried on his own investigation of the case of 44 Jewish children, hidden in a school in the village of Izieu, who were betrayed to Barbie and sent to Auschwitz.

The single witness to the round-up, an elderly man, was never called to the witness stand, possibly because the chief prosecutor was under the impression that he had suffered a frontal lobotomy, when in fact his forehead was left creased by a falling tree limb. Yet Julien Favet, despite his long-ago injury, speaks movingly and articulately of the terrible event he witnessed so long ago.

“Hotel Terminus” presents us with a Marcel Ophuls who, at 61, finally seems reconciled to the calling for which he is so uniquely qualified. (He once said he’d really rather be making musicals than the documentaries he appears driven to make.) German-born, Los Angeles-reared, the trilingual Ophuls, who lives in Paris, is not about to let us forget Nazi evil and other instances of human suffering and injustice. Not for a second.