The Sorrow and the Pity alights in the town of Clermont-Ferrand, 20 miles from Vichy and a microcosm, one imagines, of occupied France in general. Employing a seamless blend of contemporary interviews, newsreel footage and propaganda films, it paints an engrossing portrait of a cowed and compromised nation, presided over by the Blimpish Marshal Pétain and serenaded by the honeyed tones of Maurice Chevalier.

The opening section is as apocalyptic as any sci-fi thriller. The Maginot Line breaks and France goes under. We see the roads clogged with lines of abandoned getaway cars while a triumphant Hitler plays tourist around a deserted Paris. Before long, collaboration has become the norm. A hairdresser casually shops her friend to the Gestapo. A Nazi aristocrat recalls the decadent nightlife. A shopkeeper named Klein takes out an ad in the local paper to assure his customers he's not Jewish. Interviewed three decades later, these people squirm and dissemble and justify their behaviour with airy hand gestures and nervous glances to the corner.

The Sorrow and the Pity was originally made for French television, except that the authorities refused to show it. You can see what they objected to. Ophuls' revisionist history lesson effectively exploded the myth of Vichy France as some hotbed of patriotic fervour, with De Gaullists camped out in every barn. In its place it revealed a country caught hopelessly off guard and then sold down the river by its own middle class.

"The workers always showed more resistance," explains one old-timer. "But the bourgeoisie were scared. They had more to lose." When asked for his abiding memory of the occupation, one silver-haired bourgeois recalls the splendid hunting season of 1942. The woods, he says, were absolutely teeming with game.

In the film's second half, the Resistance sparks into life around Clermont-Ferrand and heroes belatedly emerge from the rubble. When set against the context that Ophuls has established, their actions look all the more remarkable. We meet Gaspar, the bull-necked boss of the local Maquis, obviously still enraged by the compliance of his neighbours. We follow the fortunes of Pierre Mendès-France, a mercurial Jewish politician who broke out of his prison cell, and the wonderfully named Dennis Rake, a gay British operative determined to prove that he was as brave as any heterosexual.

Finally, waiting in the wings, are those faceless students from Clermont-Ferrand high school, who joined the Resistance and are no longer around to tell the tale. "Many of them have streets named after them now," boasts their proud former teacher - who stood by and did nothing.