“Is Paris Burning?” (1966)
Having tackled the Resistance with his 1945 breakthrough “Battle Of The Rails” (one of the first French films to depict life during the Occupation), Rene Clement returned to the subject to show the retaking of the Gallic capital in 1944 to a more international audience, with a starry cast and a Hollywood budget. The nearly three-hour epic “Is Paris Burning?” (not to be confused with classic 1990 NYC ball culture doc “Paris Is Burning” ) was written by the unlikely A-list duo of Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, and shows General Dietrich von Choltitz (Gert Fröbe)’s attempts to stave off the Resistance as the Allies close in, and the assortment of brave men and women (including Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Leslie Caron and Jean-Pierre Cassel) attempting to win the city before the Germans can blow it up, as Hitler has ordered in case of defeat. Based on a bestselling book of the previous year, it’s expansive in scope (with Orson Welles as the Swedish Consul and Kirk Douglas as General Patton popping up), arguably too much so, and the Hollywood trappings and the docudrama feel don’t always gel. But nevertheless, it’s much more compelling than its reputation suggests, giving a good sense of the story of the reclamation of the city and rarely fails to be engaging.
“Female Agents” (2009)
With the passage of time since WWII, stories that were marginalized in the immediate aftermath have resurfaced, such as those of women who participated in resistance activities. Jean-Paul Salomé‘s antiseptically titled “Female Agents” (the French title translates to a much more evocative “Women of the Shadows”) initially feels like so much lady-spy-jinks as sniper Louise (Sophie Marceau), fetchingly clad in Resistance-chic beret and trenchcoat, flees to London after the botched raid that claims her husband’s life. There she discovers that her brother Pierre (Julien Boisselier) is working with Churchill’s Special Operations group, and together they hatch a plan to rescue a geologist crucial to the D-Day plans. They recruit three women: devout Catholic bomb-maker Gaelle (Déborah François), Jeanne (Julie Depardieu), a prostitute facing the death penalty for killing her pimp, and Suzy (Marie Gillain), who previously has a relationship with the Nazi officer who becomes their target (Moritz Bleibtreu). But Salomé’s film is more complex than these archetypes suggest, because it’s not some life-affirming portrait of female bonding in the face of Nazi evil. These women make mistakes and are often at odds, meaning their heroism, inspired by the true story of resistance fighter Lise de Baissac, feels all the more real.
“Rome Open City” (1945)
Now a cornerstone of the neo-realist movement, the grittiness of Roberto Rossellini‘s incredible film was actually a factor of lack of resources, as the sprawling story of a group of Italian resistors was shot in the exploded streets and tenements of Rome just months after the war ended. A gripping multi-character narrative that won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it is set in the Open City of Rome —a period when, in an effort to preserve its civilians, culture and infrastructure from further bombardment, all defenses had been abandoned, leaving the city open to supposedly peaceful occupation. But the Germans, against whom the tide of war had turned, became ever more vicious, so the story of resistance fighters Giorgio (Marcello Pagliero) and Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) unfolds in this simmering cauldron, as they flee capture, seek sanctuary and withstand torture and betrayal with the aid of Catholic priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi). Amid all the intrigue, the picture also contains perhaps the single most resonant image of resistance martyrdom, as Francesco’s pregnant fiancée Pina (Anna Magnani) runs madly toward the truck carrying off her lover. He is clawing at his captors, and she is screaming. Her hand is outstretched. And the shots come.
“Sophie Scholl — The Final Days” (2005)
Resistance takes many forms, but not all are necessarily violent. That’s a point that Marc Rothemund makes forcefully in his powerful film “Sophie Scholl — The Final Days,” which tells the story of a German resistance hero. Oscar-nominated for best Foreign Language Film, it stars “The Edukators” actress Julia Jentsch as the title character, a student in wartime Munich who as part of a movement called the White Rose, which also includes her brother (Fabian Hinrichs), helps distribute anti-Nazi literature, only to be pulled in by the Gestapo, tried and swiftly executed. It doesn’t sound like a terribly dramatically fulfilling story, but the quiet, cerebral, controlled approach that Rothemund takes here, drawing largely from transcripts and interviews and keeping the focus tightly on Scholl’s final act, arrest and trial, works beautifully. It’s almost a procedural, but a procedural of heroism, and of what it takes to stand up to evil and give your life for a cause. Sober and restrained even its final moments, some might find it chilly or unemotional, but the thoughtfulness and control it displays, best exemplified by Jentsch’s terrific performance, makes it linger much longer than a version going straight for the tear ducts might have done.
“The Sorrow and the Pity” (1969)
The antithesis of the glossy glamor of a film like “Allied,” Marcel Ophüls‘ two-part, four-hour-plus documentary is also the very opposite of disposable: as WWII passes from living memory, it is ever more valuable as a remarkable act of testimony. Timely upon release as a sobering rebuke to the romantic myth of the French Resistance that had taken hold in the decades since the war, it feels uncomfortably of the moment now, with far-right politics on the rise across the world. It is an investigation of memory and its unreliability, but despite the often profound contradictions Ophüls exposes, the editing of oppositional anecdotes against each other, or the process of threading through footage from quease-inducing propaganda films and archive newsreel footage, produces a collage that is quite possibly the final word on the act of collaboration. Featuring an extraordinarily broad sample of talking head interviews from across the spectrum —unrepentant German officers, salt-of-the-earth French Resistance fighters, stiff-upper-lipped British pilots, self-justifying collaborationist politicians and so on— the film presents an epic look at the massively complex stew of conflicting agendas that made up wartime France, where the motives of the “good guys” are shown to be as variegated and sometimes ignoble as those who supported Marechal Petain’s wrong-side-of-history Vichy government.
