Is Paris Burning?
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Movie Reviews of Is Paris Burning?
Movie Review: 2 Best War Movies: Is Paris Burning and the Longest Day
Summary: 5 Stars
I just got the DVD last Friday, I can't believe last time I saw this movie was almost 25 years ago in Hong Kong.
If you have THe Longest Day, you should definitely get this movie, feels like they are attached to each other.
Well, I can also say that most of the good war movies are back in the 60s. Nowadays, we just see explosive and bloody scenes.
Movie Review: Is Paris Burning?
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent WWII movie. A bit lengthy but interesting enough so you do not notice it much.Movie Review: A city on the edge of destruction
Summary: 4 Stars
If the tagline for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was `Everyone whose ever been funny is in it,' then Rene Clement's epic could almost lay claim that `Anyone who's ever been French is in it,' assembling Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Claude Rich and others (Paul Crauchet, Bernard Fresson, Michel Lonsdale, Patrick Dewaere and Albert Remy can also be spotted if you look hard enough) in a spectacular retelling of the Liberation of Paris. While the French producers intended a great patriotic celebration of the deliverance of the capitol under the threat of total destruction after Hitler ordered nothing be left of the city but ruins, Paramount, who picked up the bulk of the tab, saw it as another Longest Day and padded out the American roles with largely blink-and-you'll-miss-`em cameos by Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Anthony Perkins and Robert Stack. Of the non-French top-liners it's only Orson Welles as the Swedish consul Nordling, frantically trying to avoid unnecessary bloodshed through negotiation, and Gert Frobe as General Von Choltitz, the general tasked with defending or destroying the city, who play a major role in the film. Their scenes easily the best in the somewhat disjointed picture, never lapsing into simple stereotyping and giving a credible face to history.
To be fair, most of the heavyweight French cast are not much more than slightly larger cameos, with the bulk of the film falling on lesser-billed Bruno Cremer and Peter Vaneck's shoulders, although both characters do bring to light the fact that somewhere along the way the film got somewhat depoliticised from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's superb book - both Colonel Rol-Tanguy and Major Gallois/Cocteau were key figures in the communist resistance, though you'd never know it from the film. Although the involvement of communists in the Liberation of the city is briefly acknowledged and the De Gaullist figures often identified as such, the left don't fare so well: ironic considering one of the strengths of the book was in showing the political infighting and jockeying for position between the De Gaullists and the communist resistance, with the armed rising a consequence of each side ignoring the Allies' strategy so that they could claim they led the Liberation in an escalating game of oneupmanship. Collaboration barely gets a mention either: this is predominantly triumphalist in tone, and as such its often very effective, with several sections carrying a real surge of jubilation as the people take their city back. (However, the involvement of black troops and resistance fighters on the French side is very briefly acknowledged.)
Although primarily credited to Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, the script was the result of several writers - alongside Marcel Moussy and Beate von Molo, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost and Claude Brulé also contributed - and there are a few somewhat jarring shifts in style as a result. Despite the political dilution that one suspects was a consequence of getting both the essential co-operation from de Gaulle's government and the equally essential dollars from Paramount, it does a good job of making the constantly shifting strategies and increasingly chaotic events accessible while keeping the momentum up, but as with most spot-the-star WW2 epics, it's the vignettes that stick most firmly in the mind: a German soldier, his uniform still smouldering, staggering away from a blown-up truck only to be ignored by a businessman blithely going to work as if nothing were happening; a female resistance worker delivering instructions for the uprising being offered a lift by an unsuspecting German officer after her bike gets a puncture; French soldiers picking off Germans from an apartment whole the little old lady who lives there excitedly watches while drinking her tea; Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marie Versini crawling across a road with their bikes to avoid snipers while a gay man walking his dog watches, before going on to liberate the seat of government without a shot being fired because the civil servants there habitually do what they're told by anyone in authority; an armoured unit getting a dozen different directions to their destination by Parisians; SS men casually looking through Von Choltitz's papers out of force of habit; and the general suddenly finding himself alone in a restaurant as the bells of Paris ring out for the first time in four years to proclaim the Allies' arrival.
The Americans don't fare as well, all-too obviously being there simply for marquee value (the prominently billed George Chakhiris is in it for less than 30 seconds!), although Anthony Perkins' soldier acting more like a tourist is at least memorable, while most of the German regulars - Gunther Meisner, Karl-Otto Alberty, Wolfgang Preiss, Hannes Messemer - are pretty much stuck in their usual bad/good German roles from every other war movie they ever made (that said, it's a surprise Anton Diffring didn't get an invite as well!). In many ways the two real stars of the film are the city of Paris and Maurice Jarre's excellent score, the film's only real constant factors as the stars come and go and events move forward. For the most part the film avoids the tourist shots with a great use of locations, giving a sense of a place where people actually live and die, while Jarre's score manages to counterpoint a militant piano-led theme for the Nazi Occupation with an increasingly stirring resistance theme that constantly runs underneath it, gradually working its way out of hiding and constantly gaining ascendancy before finally flowering into a vivid and triumphant waltz for the Liberation.
A somewhat ill-fated production - producer Paul Graetz died of a heart attack during filming - it was a huge but much-criticized success in France but a conspicuous box-office failure everywhere else, with Paramount swearing off the epic genre for decades to come and Rene Clement's career never really recovering: his last major film, he wouldn't work again for another three years and only made four more films. Best remembered today for Plein Soleil/Purple Noon, Clement was a logical choice for the film, having had earlier had much success with previous WW2 films La Bataille du Rail, about the French resistance on the railway network, and the Oscar-winning Jeux Interdit/Forbidden Games, and his direction is for the most part superb, be it the control of a chillingly formal tracking shot along a railway platform casually revealing and passing a dead body or the edgy hand-held work during some of the makeshift street fights. Although the decision to film in black and white which would hurt the film so much at the box-office and on television was reputedly forced on the film by the French government's refusal to allow the film to fly red and black Nazi flags over the city (grey and black, however, were permitted), it works to the film's advantage, not only allowing it to incorporate genuine archive footage a little more skilfully than is the norm but also gives it a more verite feel thanks to Marcel Grignon's naturalistic photography. If at times this feels less like the classic it could have been and more like the best film that could be made under the political and financial circumstances, it's still an impressive and occasionally compelling recreation of a unique moment in history that deserves to be at least a little better known and better regarded than it is.
Unfortunately Paramount's DVD is a bit ill-starred itself. Although several behind the scenes documentaries and trailers exist, the fact that the DVD is extras-free is less problematic than the soundtrack. If you choose the English soundtrack, you have some highly variable dubbing of most of the French and German cast (although Frobe is well-dubbed here by Michael Collins, his `voice' from Goldfinger), but if you opt for the French soundtrack you have the equally variable dubbing of the German and American actors (though Georges Aminel does a strikingly good job of dubbing Welles on the French version). Just to add to the confusion, Hitler's dialogue is all in subtitled German, although in all the other scenes the Germans all speak English! Switching between the languages is a solution of sorts, but an irritating one. Still, at least the DVD preserves the widescreen format and the overture and intermission.
Movie Review: Paris is the star of this film, not the "stars"
Summary: 4 Stars
This film was a notorious turkey in 1966, but thanks to the DVD release it can be re-evaluated. It still doesn't come anywhere near classic status, but now we can see it in a format at least a little closer to how it should have been seen in the first place.
First, the dubbing -- the original theatrical release, which was the version released on VHS, is the single greatest case for subtitles in the history of film. It was execrable. On DVD, you can run it in French with English subtitles, so the rhythms of the language are preserved and the distraction of having lip movement and the soundtrack so totally at odds with each other is gone. Unfortunately, the French track runs through the sequences featuring American stars, and that's a little disconcerting (though the French actor who dubbed Orson Welles does a very good Orson Welles impression). The solution of switching language tracks is inelegant, but useful. And there is no German track for the sequences featuring Gert Frobe. A better solution would have been to go the route of THE LONGEST DAY and run each sequence in the appropriate language with appropriate subtitles, but this film did not have a Darryl F. Zanuck producing it, willing to make those hard choices.
Second -- the screen format. Again, the VHS release was not letterboxed, and many of the shots and sequences demand the 2.35:1 ratio, particularly in the shots when the Resistance raises the French flag over the Prefecture of Police and Notre Dame. The VHS version is like going to Paris and looking at everything you see through a cardboard toilet paper tube.
What they couldn't do anything about in the DVD release was the "all-star" American actor casting. Kirk Douglas looks nothing like George Patton, and they made no effort to even try. Glenn Ford could have looked more like Omar Bradley with a little more attention to makeup, but when you're only in a couple of shots, and maybe working a couple of days, hey, why bother, right? At least with Orson Welles as Nordling and Robert Stack as Sibert we don't have the baggage of comparing a historic image to the image of the actor (though Welles actually _does_ look something like Nordling).
The biggest complaint about this movie was that it was confusing -- well, yes, but they were confusing times, which this movie brings out very well. But to the French a lot of the characters like Colonel Rol and General Leclerc are legendary. No real explanation of who they were and what they did is needed, like Patton would be to an American audience. So you really do have to know some of the background already. But for an American audience it is a lot easier if you don't try to keep straight who's who among the Resistance as long as you get the point, which _is_ lear, that there were several different Resistance groups at odds with each other in the days before the Liberation and finally they were able to force the hand of the Allied generals and get them to change their strategy, which was originally to bypass Paris and leave it behind in the push to the Rhine.
This film is basically a victim of American ethnocentrism. As an illustration: a while back I was visiting England not long after the film version of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN had been released, and it was shown on the flight over. At one point while I was there I was discussing the film with our English hosts, and they made the telling point that they never could understand what all the fuss about Watergate was about anyway. In Great Britain, a simple vote of no confidence would have been put to Parliament and the government would have been turned out in an instant. In IS PARIS BURNING?, the general American audience has no idea of what Nordling (Orson Welles) is talking about when he asks the German General Choltitz (Gert Frobe) if he is prepared to take the responsibility for destroying a thousand years of culture, and mentions Notre Dame and Sainte-Chappelle. We all know Notre Dame (or think we do, hunchbacks and all that), but Sainte-Chappelle? Most Americans don't know that Sainte-Chappelle is an absolute jewel of High Gothic (13th century) architecture. Where Notre Dame is imposing and overwhelming, almost too much to absorb, Sainte-Chappelle is elegant and delicate. The significance of all these events is clouded by things like the post-9/11 anti-French backlash ("Freedom fries," "Liberty toast," etc.) and other longer-standing anti-French resentments. The significance of the events portrayed in IS PARIS BURNING? are simply not part of our cultural DNA, so we're as confused as my English hosts were about the Constitutional significance of Watergate.
A footnote: Collins and LaPierre, the authors of the book IS PARIS BURNING?, borrowed the title of Von Choltitz's own memoirs for their title (it was BRENNT PARIS? in the original German). Von Choltitz is portrayed in the film in a heroic light, but in the beginning he had a reputation for being a very efficient destroyer of cities, which is why Hitler gave him the job in Paris in the first place. His horrific carpet-bombing of Rotterdam is not mentioned in the film (though his part in Stalingrad is), but, according to his own version, it was his face-to-face interview with Hitler when he was given the assignment for Paris convinced him that Hitler had completely lost his mind. There is some controversy today about how willing he really was to follow Hitler's directives, how and when he decided to disobey them, and if he did more by just letting the Allies get too close than by anything overt. The fact remains, though, that most Wermacht veterans _did_ believe he had disobeyed a direct order from the Fuhrer, which meant he was shunned by them after the war. The French, however, sent official representatives to his funeral.
But, for the film, if you forget the "hey-there" stunt casting ("Hey there, it's Kirk Douglas! Hey there, it's Orson Welles!") and forget trying to identify every single character in every single plot thread, and instead view Paris itself as the central character around which everything else revolves, then IS PARIS BURNING? can be a very rewarding film.
Movie Review: A piece of little-known history
Summary: 4 Stars
Who would have thought that Paris would be saved by the German general that Hitler sent to burn it to the ground? This gem of a film from the 1960's tells the story.
The film was a colossal failure in its initial realease; it's often called a 'turkey'. I'd have to disagree pretty strongly with that assessment. It's biggest problem, at least for American audiences, is that it's--well, so French. Even though the screenplay was written by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, the cast is nearly all French--some of the biggest French stars of the 1960s. Americans are relegated to cameo roles.
Americans also disliked the film because it claims that the French, not the Americans, liberated Paris. That notion has never gone down well on this side of the pond. But if you read the book (and just about any other account of the incident), it's clear that the Americans and British wanted to bypass Paris. They had good reason for doing so--Patton argued that he would save enough gasoline to make the Rhine by the end of August and end the war by Christmas.
The Parisian insurrection in mid-August made those plans pretty questionable, but it was DeGaulle's threat to withdraw his forces and march on Paris, together with horror at the destruction of Warsaw (which Stalin was 'bypassing' at the same time), that changed things. Even so, the Allies let French Gen. LeClerc take the city, because they still had hopes of maintaining the momentum of their main thrust toward the Rhine.
If you are a Freedom-Fry lover, you probably won't like this film. If you are interested in this period of history, read the book first, but definitely watch the movie. Some reviews criticize this movie for dubbing it's French actors (many of whom dubbed their own lines into English). I certainly would have preferred the movie that way, and I dearly wish someone would restore it with French dialog. But, had that been done, about 85% of the movie would have been in French. That's a hard sell in America, whether the year is 1966 or 2006.
Finally the movie is in black and white, except, oddly enough, for the end credits. Many assume that's because of the amount of archive footage incorporated into the movie. But the real reason is that the French government refused to allow the Nazi flag to fly over any Parisian buildings for the exterior shots. A compromise was worked out where limited display of the swastika was permitted, but only on a gray flag (rather than a red one). During filming, one elderly Parisian stumbled across a couple of extras in German uniforms and ran off screaming "They're back!"
But in 1966. the era of black and white was over, and the use of B&W was the third strike against this film for American audiences. It's a shame, because this film really does a great job of showing how German Gen. Von Choltitz saved the city, at considerable risk to himself and, ultimately, his family. His reason? He concluded that Hitler was insane, and that the destruction of Paris would do nothing to improve the German military position. "If I thought that destroying Paris would aid our war effort," he said, "then I would not hesitate to burn it to the ground. But that is not the case."
Recommended for WW II buffs and those who love Paris.