The Liberation Show
Thu engaging achievement of this you-are-there documentary is almost to convince the reader that no one was there. No paltry feat, for quite a lot of people were in Paris on liberation day, August 25, 1944, including German, French, American and British soldiers, and a fair number of Parisiennes. Moreover, the authors, with Prodigious industry, appear to have tracked down and grilled every last one. They dispatched 4,000 questionnaires to battle veterans, rounded up diaries and letters, .buttonholed Eisenhower, and tunnelled into mounds of official papers. All this is regurgitated in short, sharp up-chucks, filmic cuts from scene to scene. The result is about as realistic as Ship of Fools. The explanation may be the pressure-cooked style. To be sure, this was a dramatic enough Week, as de Gaulle, the Communist Resistance and the US commanders—still laughably known as the Allies—juggled with Paris for their indi- vidual political designs. Also, there was von k-:holtitz, Hitler's man in Paris, agonising through to the decision7to flout the Ftihrer's orders to leave the city 'a field of ruins.' Blow by blow, _gas 13 by gasp, this welter of events is recon- sructed—masterly journalistic engineering. But everything small 'human' tragedy, huge clash of arms, is pumped through the pipes at the
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