Bearding The Butcher of Lyons HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE by Marcel Ophuls

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

This is not, Marcel Ophuls insists, a biography of the notorious "Butcher of Lyons," convicted by a French court in 1987 of crimes against humanity as chief of the Gestapo unit stationed in that city during World War II. The film is, Ophuls says, a study of people's responses -- the complicity, the indifference, the willed ignorance -- to the face of evil presented to them by Klaus Barbie.

His strategy is sound. For Barbie is that familiar archetype, the sadist whose dark impulses might have remained impotent had they not been licensed by a police bureaucracy demanding results, and no questions asked. This pathology is beyond comprehension by conventional reportage, beyond control by conventional moral opprobrium. Confronting him, the decent individual can only defend his own integrity. The painful cost of that integrity is shown by the survivors of Barbie's interrogations, the witnesses to his depredations, in the interviews that form the film's redemptive center.

These gallant few provide the standard by which everyone else is judged: Nazis and their collaborators and, most important to Ophuls, the people who sheltered Barbie for almost 40 years. These include American counterintelligence officers who used him as an anti-Communist agent, Vatican contacts who spirited him to South America and the corrupt establishments of Bolivia and Peru that helped him earn an enviable livelihood.

When a film aims to awaken moral awareness, it may seem ungrateful to inquire how it discharges its obligations to art. But there are long passages in Hotel Terminus (the title refers to the hostelry where Barbie had his headquarters) in which the picture's failure to select and shape its materials seriously vitiates its power to grip and instruct our consciences. Worse, there are deeply disquieting moments when Ophuls abandons the documentarian's traditionally modest on-screen role as a reporter in search of a story and presents himself instead as an egotist in search of a platform.

These flaws were present in his earlier four-hour-plus documentaries on the Nazis, The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) and The Memory of Justice (1976). But The Sorrow and the Pity was, like a great realistic novel, dependent for its force on the patient, even repetitive, accretion of detail. By now, length and weight have become an end in itself for Ophuls, a way of enforcing the audience's commitment to his work. Anything that demands this much of us cannot be casually dismissed. Too much, though, is streaked with irrelevancies: digressions and dubious stock footage; interviews with people who have no significant knowledge of Barbie's activities or are full of mind- numbing details about them; pointless sequences of Ophuls braving the anger of reluctant subjects or horseplaying with his crew.

These are indulgences and impositions. And they subtly debase the courage in truly dire circumstances of the men and women at the film's moral core. They also divert us from Ophuls' central frustration. He clearly wanted to show that Barbie was protected by Americans and other friends in high places, but he cannot prove it. Barbie owed his long freedom to his own international underclass of thugs, ideologues and opportunists. It is as a reminder of that group's influence -- and not as an inflated moral statement -- that Hotel Terminus has its considerable, unintended value.