“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,” Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime tells Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins in The Third Man. Similarly, in France during the 1930s and the occupation there was the betrayal of Munich, the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, collaboration with the Germans and the murder of the French Jews. Directors working in French cinema, however, included Marcel Carné, Jean…