that hired him, the network head "told a government committee that the film 'destroys myths that the people of France still need'". Frederick Busi suggests that this was because of how uncomfortable it is to face the reality of collaborationism. Writing of French conservative establishment groups' reactions to the film, "They, too, preferred that little be said about their role, and in some ways this reluctance is more significant than that of the extremists, since they represent so large a segment of society and mainly dominate contemporary politics." It is frequently assumed that the reason was French reluctance to admit the facts of French history. While this may have been a factor, the principal mover in the decision was Simone Veil, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz who became a minister and the first president of the European Parliament, on the grounds that the film presented too one-sided a view. The first DVD release of the film in France came in November 2011. In the UK, home media releases include a 2017 DVD and Blu-Ray from Arrow Academy which, among its extra content, features a lengthy 2004 interview with Ophuls by Ian Christie. Reception The candid approach of The Sorrow and the Pity shone a spotlight on antisemitism in France and disputed the idealized collective memory of the nation at large. In 2001, Richard Trank, a documentarian of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described it as "a film about morality that explores the role of ordinary people". In France, after its release, communists, socialists, and "independent groups" treated the film favorably; however, the far right disapproved on account of the director's background. Some French critics denounced the film as unpatriotic. The film has also been criticized for being too selective and that the director was "too close to the events portrayed to provide an objective study of the period." In the United States, Time magazine gave a positive review of the film, and wrote that Marcel Ophuls "tries to puncture the bourgeois myth—or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans." Critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and praised the depth and complexity of its human portraiture, which somehow still manages to avoid any abstraction of collaboration. Retrospectively, critical appraisals have become ever more lavish. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2000, US film critic Kenneth Turan