Is Paris Burning?

Is it any wonder that a film with writers from Aurenche and Bost to Francis Ford Coppola to Gore Vidal would be a bit rambling? Is it any surprise that a film featuring two dozen movie stars is a bit of a mess?

Full of dramatically unwieldy crosscutting between the Allies and Germans during the 1944 liberation, IS PARIS BURNING? is a fairly entertaining, action-packed film which seems continually in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own pageantry.

The plot basically deals with the Germans' attempts to torch Paris before having to pull out because they're losing the war. Frobe is the German general assigned to light the match; Caron is the wife of a...