Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Winner of the 1988 Oscar for Best Documentary, Marcel Ophul's sprawling saga of the live and times of Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie spans three continents and four decades to tell an intriguing four hour-plus detective story. Beginning with a brief history of Barbie's youth, the film quickly zeroes in on his Gestapo reign of terror against the French in Lyons. Following the war, Barbie not only escaped justice, but he was hired (and given protection by) an American intelligence operation. The trail finally takes Ophuls and his cameras to South America, where Barbie, under the name of Klaus Altmann gave aid and assistance to petty dictators, before being extradited to France in 1983, and brought to trial in 1987. Boiled down from over 120 hours of interviews, Hotel Terminus is not for the weak of patience--nor does it waste time in delivering a history of WWII; Ophuls assumes the audience is familiar with the basic events of the war. The nice thing about video, however, is that viewers may rewind sections they didn't understand, or even stop the tape and look up something unfamiliar in an encyclopedia (options not available in a movie theater). A powerful visual document of the most barbaric period in modern history. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)