Show Business: A Battle Over Justice

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Ophuls divided The Memory of Justice into two parts. The first,"Nuremberg and the Germans," explored the impact the trial has had on the German conscience. "Nuremberg and the Others" considered how the moral precepts established at the time may have been breached by the French in Algeria and, especially, by America in Viet Nam. The producers are dismayed that Ophuls failed to show any prominent U.S. Government officials. More important, they claim that Ophuls did not deliver the movie for which he contracted. "We bought a concept, with particular stress on the interviews," David Puttnam of V.P.S. explained to TIME'S Lawrence Malkin in London. "We got a long, rambling personal statement, which is commercial death for us." Ophuls' original intention had begun to change during filming, as he had warned might happen. He informed the producers of the change in a memo written the day before the first screening that he "was unable to crosscut, say, Auschwitz and Viet Nam . . . emotionally, I have found it wrong." Ophuls had produced a film about what he calls "the necessity of judgment, as opposed to the impossibility of judgment." It was after all the producers had got their first look at the film that the fury really began.

Bitter Charges. Puttnam urged Ophuls to be more aggressive in his approach, or, as he put it, "more fascist." Ever since, there have been bitter charges and recriminations. Ophuls believes that the producers wanted a bit of glib radical chic, like the current Hearts and Minds. The backers charge that Ophuls wanted the film to be six hours long (his contract dictated a maximum length of 4½ hours) and became intractable when this possibility was denied."Bunk," says the director, who proposed an "ideal" length of six hours but cut the film down to 4 hours 38 minutes. He was prepared to cut the last eight minutes when, after months of acrimony, he and the producers quarreled irrevocably. Puttnam and his partner, Sandy Lieberson, claim that Ophuls quit. Ophuls says he did not.

Blurred Copy. He returned to Princeton, where he has been teaching. V.P.S., with the support of the BBC, brought in Documentary Film Maker Lutz Becker (Swastika) to reshape Ophuls' original into something more to their liking. In March, a loyalist working on the production managed to get hold of a blurred work copy of the 4 hours 38 minutes of Ophuls' version and spirited it off to the U.S. Since then, Ophuls has screened the only existing copy of his film—"the version," he says, "I'll stand by"—for critics and friends, in an effort to drum up support.

The Memory of Justice is a remarkable film, mostly for the reasons the producers did not like it: it is personal, painstaking, and does not wag an accusing finger. Producer Puttnam's comment that the film was too "personal" is, as Ophuls wrote him, "worse than use less." It also led the director to question whether the people who had hired him had ever seen The Sorrow and the Pity or A Sense of Loss (about Northern Ire land), films that were neither detached nor dispassionate, and which employed the same scrupulous techniques.