IS PARIS BURNING? Movie Review

Paris Brule-t-il?

What a mess. This international super-production was designed to dramatize the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, and to detail the events that halted the German plan to burn the city to the ground before the Allies reached it. In the “style” of The Longest Day, an international cast of stars was assembled to impersonate actual historical figures as well as fictional composites. No characters are developed; instead, the filmmakers simply drop Orson Welles or Glen Ford or Jean-Paul Belmondo or Kirk Douglas into a scene, and then these actors proceed to speak their colorless, purely informational dialogue haltingly—an attempt, I suppose, to infuse their lines with some significance, or at least a little tension. It doesn't work. Amazingly, this script was written by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal, but I have a feeling that more than a little of it mutated in the transition from page to premiere. The director, René Clément, had years before made one of the greatest of all films on the subject of war, Forbidden Games. But here he's directing traffic, and it's torturously slow, bumper-to-bumper Parisian traffic at that. This movie isn't just a dinosaur stylistically; it was also one of the last films to assume that the vast majority of the French population was in the Resistance; four years later, Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity would shatter that illusion forever. Is Paris Burning?’s catchy score is by Maurice Jarre; we get to hear way too much of it.

NEXT STOP… The Sorrow and the Pity, Lacombe Lucien, The Accompanist

1966 173m/C FR Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Jean-Pierre Cassel, George Chakiris, Claude Dauphin, Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Gert Frobe, Daniel Gelin, E.G. Marshall, Yves Montand, Anthony Perkins, Claude Rich, Sitnone Signoret, Robert Stack, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Pierre Vaneck, Orson Welles, Bruno Cremer, Suzy Delair, Michael Lonsdale; D: Rene Clement; W: Gore Vidal, Francis Ford Coppola; C: Marcel Grignon; M: Maurice Jarre. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘66: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (B & W), Best Black and White Cinematography. VHS, Closed Caption PAR, FCT