It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

I gave this movie 2 stars because I didn't want to be as cruel as the people who released it were on an innocent public. I don't know that I have ever seen so much talent so completely wasted.Fortunately - I guess - for me, I just read a new and very detailed book on the Liberation of Paris last week, Robert Neiberg's The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944, which I strongly recommend to anyone who actually wants to know the whole, very complicated story of those days. I can't imagine what I would have gotten out of this movie had I not read that book first. This movie does not do a good job of making clear what is going on, especially the infighting between the FFI, de Gaulle's forces, and the Parisians who were fighting for their freedom.But that's just the start of it. The real culprit in this movie is the script, which tries to cram too much into one movie. There are far too many unexplained little incidents, and not enough explanation of the important issues.There are also a lot of great actors in this movie, but the script gives none of them any chance to act, to develop a character. Orson Welles makes Swedish Ambassador Nordling come off like a loony. He was anything but that. The portrayal of the German commandant in Paris isn't much better.Having Yves Montand pop out of a tank for two minutes and then get shot in the back was perhaps the most ridiculous waste of talent in this movie.The movie lasts almost three hours, but you'd swear it went on much longer than that. There is no sense of drive, pacing, tension, etc.And the music, by Maurice Jarre, does nothing to help a bad situation.In short, this movie was a colossal waste of time and money. It's long and boring and not very informative. Read Neiberg's book if you actually want to know what happened. If you want to be entertained, find some other movie. This one will neither entertain nor enlighten you.

It's a fact that Hitler actually wanted to blow up Paris and gave orders of it, as the ultimate confirmation of himself as the worst of losers. The circumstances around this were carefully investigated by the journalists Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins, which resulted in their first major book, with this title. It's a very panoramic documentary which unfortunately gets muddled in its vast conglomeration of facts and episodes, and the film suffers from the same dispersion. There is no real structure and unity, but episodes, characters, events and intrigues are just heaped upon each other like on a junk tower of Babel. Nevertheless, it is well worth seeing and read, and like in "The Longest Day" four years earlier all the world's best actors are participating and showing off as well as they can, although here they are almost only French (apart from Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Perkins, Glenn Ford, Robert Stack and a few others) while you sadly miss the almost architectural overview and epic unity of the D-day epic.What spoils the show furthermore is the almost parodic martial music by Maurice Jarre. It's exaggeratedly noisy, and if it's made like this to ridicule the Germans and their militarism it misses its purpose, since the Germans don't get much of a say. Only towards the end the music becomes more natural, as with the fall of Paris it transforms into more French agreeability. The dominating march making so much noise through two thirds of the film is like a mixture of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony and Berlioz at his worst, as if all the war noise of guns, cannons and bazookas was not enough but had to be underlined.The director is René Clement, who a few years earlier had made the best Ripley film "Plein soleil" with Alain Delon, who is also prominent here with Jean-Paul Belmondo. Jean-Pierre Cassel and Gerd Froebe are here again counterparts like in "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" just before. But the main asset of the film is the authentic documentary material, which serves to underline the great liberation of Paris, which is reconstructed as a constantly accelerating party, which it probably was in reality, wonderfully accentuated by the introduction of typically French waltz music as the liberation reaches the center with the final humiliation of the Germans. Gerd Froebe makes a very interesting portrayal of the German general in charge who apparently was one of the few realists in the German army, recognizing defeat before everybody else and admitting to Hitler being insane in a moment of sad resignation, thinking of his family first as he surrenders to the allies.Orson Welles as the Swedish consul who does what he can to save prisoners and Paris is convincingly Swedish in his quiet persistence, while the strongest impression is made by Kirk Douglas as Patton. His moment is brief but monumentally eloquent in Spartan soldier's code.The film should actually be called "The Feast of Paris", because that's what it is all about: Paris is being celebrated as never before or after, which the final sequence in colour underscores in triumphant final liberation.

I made my first trip to Paris this past year. There are remembrances of World War Two on nearly every street corner, plaques with the names of resistance fighters who died during the war and during the Liberation. And France's military history is also on display, from monuments to Louis XIII, to Napoleon, and to their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. As Americans we forget sometimes that the French army lost millions during World War One, and struggled with how to fight the Second World War. Losing Paris was a humiliating defeat that the Free French army needed desperately to avenge. This film does a pretty engaging job of telling the story from a French point of view. Like many war films from the time it's a little too long, some celebrity cameos are miscast, and some facts and events are abridged. But unlike some other films from the period, it has some humor, and some great pathos. There's also great footage of the real liberation intercut with the narrative. If you've ever been to Paris, it's a beautiful travelogue of all the famous public spaces, seen through eyes from 1945 and 1966. I can only imagine seeing it in widescreen, and I hope to get a non-dubbed version soon.

This film was a notorious turkey in 1966, but thanks to the recent DVD release it can be re-evaluated. It still doesn't come anywhere near classic status, but now we can see it in a format at least a little closer to how it should have been seen in the first place.First, the dubbing -- the original theatrical release, which is the version released on VHS, is the single greatest case for subtitles in the history of film. It was execrable. On DVD, in French with English subtitles, the rhythms of the language are preserved and the distraction of having lip movement and the soundtrack so totally at odds with each other is gone. Unfortunately, the French track runs through the sequences featuring American stars, and that's a little disconcerting (though the French actor who dubbed Orson Welles does a very good Orson Welles impression). The solution of switching language tracks is inelegant, but useful. And there is no German track for the sequences featuring Gert Frobe. A better solution would have been to go the route of THE LONGEST DAY and run each sequence in the appropriate language with appropriate subtitles, but this film did not have a Darryl F. Zanuck producing it, willing to make those hard choices.Second -- the screen format. Again, the VHS release was not letterboxed, and many of the shots and sequences demand the 2.35:1 ratio, particularly in the shots when the Resistance raises the French flag over the Prefecture of Police and Notre Dame. The VHS version is like going to Paris and looking at everything you see through a cardboard toilet paper tube.What they couldn't do anything about in the DVD release was the "all-star" American actor casting. Kirk Douglas looks nothing like George Patton, and they made no effort to even try. Glenn Ford could have looked more like Omar Bradley with a little more attention to makeup, but when you're only in a couple of shots, and maybe working a couple of days, hey, why bother, right? At least with Orson Welles as Nordling and Robert Stack as Sibert we don't have the baggage of comparing a historic image to the image of the actor.The biggest complaint about this movie was that it was confusing -- well, yes, but they were confusing times, which this movie brings out very well. But to the French a lot of the characters like Colonel Rol and General Leclerc are legendary. No real explanation of who they were and what they did is needed, like Patton would be to an American audience. So you really do have to know some of the background already. But for an American audience it is a lot easier if you don't try to keep straight who's who among the Resistance as long as you get the point, which IS clear, that there were several groups at odds with each other in the days before the Liberation and finally they were able to force the hand of the Allied generals and get them to change their strategy.This film is basically a victim of American ethnocentrism. As an illustration: a while back I was visiting England not long after the film version of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN had been released, and it was shown on the flight over. At one point while I was there I was discussing the film with our English hosts, and they made the telling point that they never could understand what all the fuss about Watergate was about anyway. In Great Britain, a simple vote of no confidence would have been put to Parliament and the government would have been turned out in a Knightsbridge minute. In IS PARIS BURNING?, Americans have no idea of what Nordling (Orson Welles) is talking about when he asks the German General Choltitz (Gert Frobe) if he is prepared to take the responsibility for destroying a thousand years of culture, and mentions Notre Dame and Sainte-Chappelle. We all know Notre Dame (or think we do, hunchbacks and all that), but Sainte-Chappelle? Ay, there's the rub. Most Americans don't know that Sainte-Chappelle is the absolute jewel of High Gothic (13th century) architecture. Where Notre Dame is imposing and overwhelming, Sainte-Chappelle is elegant and delicate. And most Americans are not aware that Choltitz is one of the most interesting figures of the war. He had a reputation for being a very efficient destroyer of cities, which is why Hitler gave him the job in the first place -- Rotterdam is not mentioned in the film, though Stalingrad is -- but his face-to-face interview with Hitler when he was given the assignment for Paris convinced him that Hitler had completely lost his mind. His disobedience of the Fuhrer's order meant he was shunned by Wehrmacht veterans after the war, but he saved Paris.But if you forget the "hey-there" stunt casting ("Hey there, it's Kirk Douglas! Hey there, it's Orson Welles!") and forget trying to identify every single character in every single plot thread, and instead view Paris itself as the central character around which everything else revolves, then IS PARIS BURNING? can be a very rewarding film.Paul Wilson, Theatre Department, Methodist College, Fayetteville, NC