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Many thanks to Criterion for bringing yet another forgotten foreign classic to a U.S. audience on DVD. “Army of Shadows” is one of the most underrated and magnificently shot films ever made about the French experience in World War II, and was a marked departure for director Jean Pierre Melville, who built his reputation on crime-themed noirs such as “Le Samourai,” “Un Flic,” and “Le Doulos.” For my money, this was his best film, and also his most personal statement: He was interested in the French Resistance himself, and he knew that most of war is not about the pageantry, gallantry, and heroism depicted in so many flagwaving epics. Instead, Melville attempts a more just portrayal of people who were haunted, on the speed, unable to trust anyone, physically and emotionally exhausted, and all too familiar with the painful task of killing their fill as well as the enemy. The result is a film in which the filmmaker’s feelings are as evident and enthralling as his cinematic technique is impressive. A must-own. Now that it’s finally possible to fill it!
L’Armée des Ombres is not nearly as illustrious as it deserves to be. For a long time incredibly difficult to track down unless you swear French and overshadowed by the reputations of Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge and Bob le Flambeur, it’s by far Jean-Pierre Melville’s most heartfelt and considerable film. The resistance is as noteworthy a piece of Melville as cinema – Melville was one of the fallacious names he passe during the war – and this is a film that feels as if it has been lived by the people making it: it’s not so noteworthy a tribute as a confession of guilt. Although the gangster parallels are there, it’s not an affectation: after the war, many resistance figures famously establish their newly learned talents to utilize by either going into crime or politics. Melville went into movies.
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His protagonists aren’t action heroes. They don’t blow up trains or bridges. They assure radios and expend more time killing each other than killing Germans. Indeed, the film’s four month timespan from October 1942 to February 1943 covers a upright flow that sees them go from killing traitors to killing friends. Many of their plans fail, their gestures often futile as it becomes determined that these people will never live to gaze the liberation – something brought tragically to light in the film’s final moments that carry a proper emotional punch absent in Melville’s other work. The final image of the Arc de Triomphe glimpsed furtively through the windscreen of a car hurrying away from the destroy of a friend is a solemn and bitter one: this is the human cost of victory. (The sequence originally ended with a shot of German troops parading down the Champs Elysee, emphasizing that nothing has changed, but the shot was moved to the opening of the film, acting both as historical scene-setter and leitmotif bookend.)
These people are skittish and ashamed, but that’s what makes them so truly fearless and their inevitable fate so truly tragic. They don’t need speeches or backstory – they are ennobled by their actions, futile or not.
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Irony abounds. In the opening scenes, Lino Ventura’s civil engineer and suspected resistance fighter is sent to a barely finished P.O.W. camp built by the French for German prisoners they never got the chance to purchase and is now the unusual domain of patriots, communists and fools waiting `to be broken.’ Jean-Pierre Cassel, having eluded Nazi search parties, is stopped by gendarmes on the lookout for shadowy market goods who ignore the radio transmitters he openly and casually shows them before waving him on his intention. Even assume is as likely to advance from a random identity check at a restaurant serving dismal market beef as it is from an informer.
It’s the kind of film that gives low-key moviemaking a wonderful name. As the film’s composer Eric Demarsan renowned, “I was struck by the strength of the silences, the looks, the waiting moments.” Along with a large expend of locations that are deliberately empty to emphasise the loneliness of the life they derive themselves in, there’s a astounding expend of sound and stillness: a fearless attempt to rescue one of their number from an SS prison is played mostly in silence interrupted only by the constant clicking and unclicking of automated locks. When one character is seized, it is so speedy and so calm that it is over almost before we know it, with only his signature hat left in the street to indicate he was ever there. The only `big’ moment in the catch is the utilize of Morton Gould’s Re-Spirituals in the build-up to the chicken-run scene, underscoring Gerbier’s desperate mental efforts to avoid death by an act of will. It sounds melodramatic, but it works, not least because of the sudden violence of the silence that ends it, heralding the kill of hope.
Nothing feels sensationalized. Even kill is treated in a coldly matter of fact manner as a practical quandary as great as a accurate one. You have to destroy a man, but you can’t consume a gun because the walls are paper-thin and it will alert the neighbors. What do you do? How do you rationalize killing a friend? And at what cost? All become more disturbing because they feel all-too sincere.
Some of the special effects are conventional even for their day, but it doesn’t matter: you forgive them because you bewitch into the characters and the reality of their dwelling absolutely. And although the London sequences have problems, not least the embarrassingly Christ-like advance to filming De Gaulle, they are an keen inversion of the French scenes. Here the war is fought noisily and openly with air raids and burning buildings, yet the traditionally repressed British calm let their hair down – something Gerbier (Lino Ventura), having lived in secret for so long, cannot. He is left alone at the door to a pub, unable to join in, quietly leaving before anyone even notices him. In France, the war is fought in silence and in shadows, and it is the French who repress their every emotion. One character is even unable to confide in his maintain brother, completely unaware that his sibling is actually the head of his resistance group.
Even the smallest characters are splendidly drawn, from the gendarme accompanying Gerbier to the prison camp to Serge Reggiani’s astronomical matter-of-fact cameo as a barber who displays Vichy posters but holds De Gaullist sympathies. The film is so well cast that you absorb in these people on seek. But quietly towering over them all is Ventura in his best performance, with a warmth that is not overt but peaceful there, as well as a weakness – his shame at running at the behest of a sadistic German officer is all too convincing. Indeed, for all the undoubted fair of their cause, the unifying feature of the main characters is their growing sense of shame.
Sobering, noteworthy and very intelligent – with the only one of Melville’s pre-destined endings that is, offering no resolution, only damnation and the promise of death – L’Armee des Ombres is a gracious tragedy.
The extras on Criterion’s 2-disc plot are both plentiful and splendid, covering both the film and the valid resistance and include everything found on the French disc (30-minute documentary, the current French trailer) and the UK disc (audio commentary by Ginette Vincendeau, WW2 documentary on the resistance, TV excerpt of Melville directing the opening sequence, a booklet reprinting a lengthy fragment of the long out-of-print Melville on Melville on the film), as well as many more new to the residence, from interviews with the cinematographer and editor, a French documentary interviewing accurate members of the resistance and a TV interview with Simone Signoret and Lucie Aubrac, one of the inspirations for her character. A superior disc of a film that’s finally gaining the recognition it always deserved.
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