Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

You know, for example, that this jolly appliance salesman was the famed Colonel Gaspar, hero of the Resistance. That a local public relations man was so impressed by the Third Reich that he signed up with a company of French volunteers and went off to wear the German uniform and fight the Russians. And that a weathered old farmer who fought for the underground knows which of his neighbors turned him in to the Nazis, but doesn’t much care. “What can be done about it at this late date?” he says, sighing, sitting at his kitchen table surrounded by his family, his friends, and several bottles of the excellent regional wine. His remark is one of the most haunting in the whole four-and-a-half-hour length of this remarkable documentary, because he seems to be speaking for so many of the survivors of the Nazi occupation of France, on both sides. Their passions were high and their loyalties were fierce, and many of them were killed, tortured, or imprisoned. And yet, thirty years later, they seem to share a kind of intellectual exhaustion on the subject.