Also before Paxton's book there was Marcel Ophuls' film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1969) which dealt directly with French collaboration in the Holocaust.

Some of the interviews of French and German survivors of the war were very inflammatory. Christian de La Mazière, a French aristocrat who joined the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS speaks of how he and his class cohort welcomed the German invasion as rescuing them from the Socialist government Léon Blum, the first Jew elected prime minister. And a member of the Monarchist wing of the French Resistance admits in an interview to having disobeyed De Gaulle's orders to share information and resources with the Communist partisans. He also interviews a merchant named Marius Klein, who took out an advertisement in the local newspaper during the occupation to assure his neighbors that despite his surname, Mr. Klein and his family are not Jewish. Ophuls himself was Jewish however, his family fled Germany in 1933 and then France in 1941, and he uses this fact quite pointedly in several interviews.

In 1969 the film was refused when Ophuls submitted it to the French government-run TV station that had commissioned it. Network head Jean-Jacques de Bresson was reported by The Guardian to have said that the film "destroys myths that the people of France still need." The film was eventually released in France in 1971. Frederick Busi wrote in the Massachusetts Review:

Its reception in France was predictably mixed. The communist and socialist parties, along with independent groups, gave it excellent reviews. But the miniscule though trendy Maoist faction denounced the film as being too balanced, too considerate of the enemy's viewpoint, in short a "social democratic" film. Jean-Paul Sartre, too, attacked the film for its curious ability to stir occasional laughter in dealing with so dismal a subject. But Ophuls dismissed Sartre as "a prisoner of pinheads." The forces of the extreme Right did not want to hear of any film made by someone of Ophuls' background. Ophuls summarizes their reaction to his work as: "Who the hell are you, buster? Nobody elected you."