The Passerby (1982 film)

At the Paraguayan embassy in Paris, Max Baumstein, respected chairman of an international human rights organisation, shoots the ambassador dead in cold blood. Arrested and charged with murder, he tries to explains to his agonised wife Lina what led him to this act.

As a child in Berlin in 1933, his father was shot dead in front of him by Nazi thugs and he was beaten, leaving him lame for life. Michel and Elsa, a couple in a neighbouring apartment, took care of the traumatised boy. When Michel's business was vandalised by Nazis, he put Elsa and Max on a train to Paris and later sent them money via a friendly French salesman, Maurice. Michel was sentenced to five years in a concentration camp for anti-Nazi activity, leaving Elsa and the boy free but stranded. Elsa tried to get work singing in a club but ended up as a “hostess”. Fond of both her and Max, Maurice took care of the boy. At the club Elsa caught the eye of von Legaart, a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris, who agreed to get Michel released in return for a night with her. When Elsa met Michel at the railway station, von Legaart had both murdered.

At his trial, Max relates how Maurice took him to safety in Switzerland, from where he has devoted the rest of his life to fighting the evils that led to the death of everybody he loved. When his organisation discovered that the Paraguayan ambassador was von Legaart under an assumed name, he only saw one way to achieve justice. The court sentences him to five years suspended and he walks free with Lina, to abuse and threats from neo-Nazis. An end title notes that six months later he and Lina were murdered by unknown assassins.

• Annette Insdorf. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

• cinemovies.fr
• La Passante du Sans-Souci at IMDb
• The Passerby at Rotten Tomatoes