Marcel Ophüls’s epic documentary on Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal known as "The Butcher of Lyons," was gleaned from 120 hours of interviews with, among others, the Gestapo officer’s victims, his Nazi colleagues, French resistance members, local collaborators, indifferent neighbors in Bolivia (where he escaped after the war), American intelligence agents who employed him in anti-Communist espionage efforts during the Cold War, and an ideologue leftist lawyer who defends him at his ultimate trial in 1987 in Lyons. Ophüls’s investigation, which took place over the course of four years while waiting for the trial to commence, is anything but meditative: as he becomes increasingly frustrated with the reticence of his subjects to talk, the director becomes by turns angry, impatient, and sarcastic. The result is a spellbinding study of the vortex of terror and banality that surrounds this unreconciled chapter from the past.