Paris brûle-t-il? (1966) - film review

August 1944.  With the invasion of Europe well underway and Germany in retreat, the Allied forces are poised to take the French capital.  General Von Choltitz receives a direct order from Hitler that if he cannot hold Paris he must destroy it, completely.  After a group of students serving in the French resistance are massacred, Colonel Tanguy incites the public to turn on the occupying Nazis.  Reluctantly, Von Choltitz gives the order for bombs to be placed at strategic points in the city, sufficient to decimate all its historical monuments and most of the population...

By the time he came to make Paris brûle-t-il?, René Clément was one of the most highly regarded film directors in France.  Two of his films had won Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category and a further three had won him awards at the Cannes Film Festival.  How better to crown these successes than by directing a blockbuster war film depicting the liberation of Paris with a cast of internationally renowned stars?  As it turned out, this was to be the film that would virtually destroy Clément’s reputation as a cinéaste and relegate him to the ranks of minor filmmakers.  How fickle is the hand of Fate.

On the face of it, it is hard to see why Paris brûle-t-il? should have been so ill-received by the public and critics when it was first released.  For one thing, it relates one of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War – an attempt by the German High Command to completely erase Paris from the face of the planet as part of their "if we can’t have it, neither can you" policy.  How close the Nazis came to achieving this objective is still a matter of some conjecture, but the very idea that Hitler ordered the total destruction of a major European capital is something that still sends a cold tingle down the spine. 

The film had a colossal budget – on a par with that of an equivalent Hollywood production.  It had a cast list that no other French film has surpassed – with names such as Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, Gert Fröbe and Anthony Perkins.  It had a screenplay by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola.  The French government even gave permission for the exteriors to be filmed in the centre of Paris, giving the green light for tanks to fire blank shells in the vicinity of historic monuments.  Just how could it all go so wrong?

The central problem with Paris brûle-t-il? is that it lacks characterisation, structure and momentum and consequently ends up being a rather vacuous spectacle, the cinematic equivalent of potpourri.  The pace is uneven, no time is allowed for characters to be developed, and the whole thing trundles along mechanically like a tank driven by someone with advanced myopia.   Another notable flaw is the attempt to integrate historic footage into the film.  To try to hide the obvious difference in picture quality, the film is processed in the sequences surrounding the inserts, but in a way that merely draws attention to the inserts.

Paris brûle-t-il? is a mess – in both visual and narrative terms.  This it is not to say that it is all bad – some of the sequences are stunningly realised and there are some scenes which are immensely poignant.  However, overall it just feels like a slavish attempt to mimic an American blockbuster war film.  There is very little structure, no real emotional depth, and with a runtime of three hours, it is quite an ordeal to sit through – unless you happen to enjoy the "name the famous actor" game (and even that gets tiresome after a while).  A very pale shadow of René Clément’s earlier WWII film La Bataille du rail (1946).

© James Travers 2008

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