Why Is Paris Burn­ing? remains one of the great anti-war epics

Direct­ed by Pur­ple Noon​’s René Clé­ment, writ­ten by Gore Vidal and Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, scored by Mau­rice Jarre and star­ring an inter­na­tion­al cast of super­stars, Is Paris Burn­ing? looks like a home run on paper. The syn­op­sis sug­gests Bat­tle of Britain or Tora! Tora! Tora!, a crowd-pleas­ing World War Two ensem­ble epic typ­i­cal of ​’60s and ​’70s Hol­ly­wood. But upon its release 50 years ago, this big bud­get take on the lib­er­a­tion of Paris was such a crit­i­cal and box office fail­ure that it for­ev­er tar­nished the career of its dou­ble Cannes-win­ning creator.

To some extent, Clé­ment ably match­es oth­er star­ry World War Two epics of the peri­od. Is Paris Burn­ing? fea­tures a rous­ing score, explo­sive action and an impres­sive ros­ter of famous faces: Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do and Alain Delon appear as resis­tance fight­ers; Antho­ny Perkins and Kirk Dou­glas star as US mil­i­tary men tak­ing a detour on their Euro­pean inva­sion to boot the Reich out of Paris; Orson Welles pops up as a mag­nan­i­mous Swedish con­sul seek­ing to bro­ker a peace deal between the Ger­man high com­mand and a frac­tured French Resis­tance; and Gert Frobe – play­ing it sub­tle and sym­pa­thet­ic two years after eat­ing up the screen in Goldfin­ger – is the Ger­man gen­er­al con­flict­ed about his order to lev­el the French cap­i­tal, torn between fol­low­ing com­mands and a grow­ing belief that the Führer has lost both his mind and his war.

Such star pow­er under­stand­ably led to inflat­ed expec­ta­tions, but Is Paris Burn­ing? has long been regard­ed as an expen­sive exper­i­ment in mash­ing togeth­er Amer­i­can and Euro­pean cin­e­mat­ic styles for an alto­geth­er more down­beat dra­ma. The Hol­ly­wood trap­pings are sober­ing­ly tem­pered by almost docu-style direc­to­r­i­al choic­es: real loca­tions, stark black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy, heaps of archive footage mixed with authen­tic recre­ations. Clément’s approach was to desen­sa­tion­alise a tru­ly sen­sa­tion­al sto­ry. Per­for­mances are under­stat­ed (even Welles under­plays it). Most char­ac­ters are not iden­ti­fi­ably good or bad; a Ger­man sol­dier, Frobe’s Gen­er­al von Choltitz, is the clos­est this Resis­tance tale gets to a hero.

Audi­ences at the time respond­ed neg­a­tive­ly to what today read like per­fect­ly rea­son­able choic­es. The film was heav­i­ly crit­i­cised for not being excit­ing enough – Mad mag­a­zine dubbed it ​‘Is Paris Bor­ing?’ – but just how excit­ing should a film about the painful end of Nazi occu­pa­tion be? In the first half of the movie, we see resis­tance fight­ers uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly slaugh­tered. In the sec­ond, infantry are killed on both sides, in a war which every­one involved knows is already wrap­ping up. The film doesn’t always set out to raise puls­es – but in depict­ing a war like this, maybe it shouldn’t.

In Clément’s film, com­bat­ants die with­out fan­fare, their deaths ignored in the vast chaos of war. More gung-ho films might por­tray the death of the sol­dier as a gal­lant and nec­es­sary sac­ri­fice. Is Paris Burn­ing? pro­vides a solemn con­trast. Teenage wannabe resis­tance fight­ers are machine-gunned and left to die in the mid­dle of nowhere, just days before their city’s lib­er­a­tion. A Parisian tank com­man­der is intro­duced explain­ing how he hasn’t seen home since the inva­sion began four years ago. In the next scene, his tank rolls into Paris and is duly oblit­er­at­ed by a Ger­man bazooka, leav­ing just his pack of Camel cig­a­rettes smoul­der­ing on the tar­mac. The Allied war machine rolls on.

Is Paris Burn­ing? is not, unlike World War Two dra­mas such as The Longest Day, Bat­tle of the Bulge and A Bridge Too Far, a stir­ring doc­u­ment of a great, cost­ly bat­tle. It is about preser­va­tion, not anni­hi­la­tion. It cel­e­brates a bright spot in a war filled with hor­ror. Pre­fer­ring not to make an action extrav­a­gan­za out of a mas­sacre like D‑Day or Oper­a­tion Mar­ket Gar­den, Clé­ment instead high­lights a moment of san­i­ty in a time of mad­ness: French, Amer­i­cans and Ger­mans alike look­ing upon the majesty of a great city and choos­ing to fight not to kill, but so some­thing might live.