After the commercial success of The Longest Day (1962), producer  Darryl F. Zanuck wanted to make a film about the liberation of Paris, but  he was beaten to the punch by Paul Graetz, the owner of Transcontinental Films, who managed to convince  Paramount to invest six million dollars in a story based on the bestseller by two journalists, Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins. Graetz proposed the film’s direction to René Clément, having already produced the director’s brilliant libertine comedy Lovers, Happy Lovers! (1954). But violent quarrels troubled the relationship between the director and producer (who died shortly before the film’s release) since Graetz gave little freedom to the filmmaker of The Day and the Hour.
Clément had already made three films depicting the French Resistance. As he himself recognized, Paris brûle-t-il? is not a historical film but a magnificent, epic mosaic, with a talented cast of French and American stars, depicting the stages of the French capital’s liberation from the moment Hitler entrusted its command to General von Choltitz (Gert Fröbe). The general allegedly disobeyed the order to destroy the city,  preferring to surrender to De Gaulle’s soldiers, who liberated the capital with the US army.
Historically inaccurate, the film, however, confirms Clément’s great technical skill in the fighting sequences, shot from high above and at eye level in 180 real places in a ghostly Paris. His touch can especially be seen in the execution scene at the Cascade du Bois de Boulogne of the 30 students, handed over to the SS by the traitor Serge (a diabolic Trintignant). Despite being one of the first films to depict a German general in a human light, Paris brûle-t-il? was bitterly criticized in Germany and accused of being the instrument of an anti-German campaign exactly as had happened with Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples.

Roberto Chiesi