Show Business: A Battle Over Justice

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It happens, in films, to the very best. Indeed, it happens especially to the very best, because they are the ones least willing to compromise. A director who dismisses the countless suggestions of his financial backers risks alteration—and frequently mutilation—of his work.

Twenty minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (TIME, April 14) were deleted before its American release. Currently, a new work by Marcel Ophuls is being re-edited and thoroughly reworked. The Memory of Justice, a meticulous and moving examination of the Nuremberg war trials, was made with the same stringent conscience and intellect that characterized The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls' monumental study of France during the Resistance. The Memory of Justice is an equally important film. Now it is being hacked by its producers into a routine documentary.

Mr. Deeds. The British Broadcasting Corporation, usually invoked as a standard of corporate liberalism by which American television is unfavorably judged, is deeply involved in the struggle over The Memory of Justice. After a screening of Ophuls' original version of the film, one BBC official offered that classic Hollywood criticism: "My ass hurt."

In 1973, Ophuls struck up an agreement with the BBC, Polytel International, a television packaging company, and a British production company, Visual Programme Systems Ltd., to make a film on the Nuremberg trials, and their application—or lack of it—to subsequent events, particularly the American participation in Viet Nam. Ophuls set out to explore the contested—some would say outrageous—theory that Nazi genocide and tragedies like My Lai are somehow comparable, an idea that had wide currency a few years ago. He had been inspired by U.S. Chief Counsel Telford Taylor's book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, which holds that American officials are accountable in the war but that there is no correlation between systematic obliteration and massacre in the field. Taylor was to play an important part in The Memory of Justice. "He was our Mr. Deeds," says Ophuls now.

Ophuls submitted an outline of his proposed film, along with a list of other "possible witnesses and interviewees." Albert Speer, Dr. Howard Levy and General Vo Nguyen Giap were on the list, as well as such prominent architects of American involvement as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Ophuls stressed, however, that the lineup of people to be interviewed would have to depend on the budget and on whom would be available. The similarities between Nazi Germany and America in Viet Nam were, for Ophuls, "an open question—but one that had to be explored." He also insisted that the final form could not be outlined because the film itself had to reflect his process of investigation. These conditions, appended to Ophuls' contract, do not appear to have caused any problems.