Following the invasion of France by Germany in May 1940 they were forced to flee to the Vichy zone, remaining in hiding for over a year before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain in order to travel to the United States, arriving there in December 1941.
[3] When the family returned to Paris in 1950 Marcel became an assistant to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, and worked on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's Lola Montès (1955).
Although he enjoyed making entertaining films, Ophuls became identified as a documentarian, using a characteristically sober interview style to resolve disparate experiences into a persuasive argument.
A Sense of Loss (1972) looked at Northern Ireland, and The Memory of Justice (1973) was an ambitious comparison of US policy in Vietnam and the atrocities of the Nazis.
His feature documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) won an Academy Award; since then he has made an interview film with two senior East German Communists, November Days (1992) and a ruminative look at how journalists cover war, The Trouble We've Seen (1994).