As a classic cinema fan, what image of the French Resistance in World War II clings to your imagination? Is it a poised man in an impeccable white suit sipping a champagne cocktail at a bar in Casablanca while provoking others to sing La Marseillaise louder, drowning out the German boors in the corner?  Or maybe we think of a slinky mademoiselle on a bicycle distracting an obtuse Nazi sentry from his duties, while her compatriots blow up a German train.

In any case, I was reminded this week that the French understanding of this painful period of their history is still evolving, as proved in 2006 when Rialto Pictures released Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des Ombres (1969) in the U.S.,  37 years after its production. Why so late on the distribution?  While receiving qualified acceptance by the French public at the time of its original release, Army of Shadows was apparently regarded as “out of step” by American distributors in the era.

Coming a year after the uprising of French youth in May, 1968,  when along with many of the young people of the rest of the world, they tried to wrest societies’ attention toward the urgent matters of the present and future; there was little patience for a look back at the past. Some, particularly Melville‘s intellectual enemies at the influential Cahiers du Cinema, considered this film too Gaullist,  while others felt it irrelevant, (though that same film journal reassessed their critiques of Melville in recent years, now recognizing him as an excellent filmmaker).

This quite brilliantly made movie, which is now available in a Criterion Collection DVD, unleashed the critical re-discovery of Army of Shadows at a time when Americans are once again grappling with the nature of their own patriotism and loyalty. It begins, (above), not with a blow being struck against the German occupiers of France during the war, but with the painful sight of a German band marching triumphantly toward (and over) the camera in front of the Arc de Triomphe in what is now Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Few of the casual myths of wartime glory are found here. Collaboration of the average French citizen is treated simply as a fact of life. Violence, when it occurs is largely off screen and the after effects shown are consequently more devastating.

Seeing this unsentimental, compelling film for the first time recently, all those Hollywood images of the Resistance melted away, and even such good, previously seen French films about the German occupation of France from 1940-1945, such as Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Marcel Ophuls’ documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974), Truffaut’s Le Dernier Metro (1980), and the recently deceased Claude Berri’s Lucie Aubrac (1997) were all dwarfed by the impact that this movie had on me.

It takes time to gain perspective, historical and personal. Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) once said that he’d had this film in mental preparation for 25 years, beginning during his own Resistance experience and after reading the book upon which this film is based while in London during the war. In his previous eleven films, Melville, working outside the mainstream of the French studios, created several beautifully crafted films, including two which touched on this subject in his debut, Le Silence de La Mer (1949) and Léon Morin, Prêtre (1961). Most of his other films are usually described as “deconstructions” of American gangster movies, though that hardly does them justice .

Perhaps best known for a trio of elegant, intensely observed crime films, Bob Le Flambeur (1956), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), director Melville (seen at the left), explores another, more personal underworld in riveting, minimalist detail and with no false bravado in Army of Shadows. The movie, based on a 1943 novel by the author who also provided the basis of Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, chronicles the fictionalized version of the real experiences that writer Joseph Kessel as well as Melville himself and others had while working in the French Resistance. As my fellow Morlock Keelsetter mentioned in his appreciation of Le Samouraï, found here , Melville, who had been drafted into the French army at 20,  was a part of the Resistance from 1942 on and as one of the soldiers of De Gaulle‘s London-based Free French, he saw action in North Africa, Italy and his native France as well.  Keenly interested in all things American, Melville changed his name from Grumbach in honor of the author of Moby Dick, drove around the streets of Paris in a trench coat, often while wearing a stetson behind the wheel of a convertible, and, according to most interviews, found making movies easier than writing. The fascinating quality of his films derives, I think, from the protagonists’ ability to participate in a given action while being simultaneously within and outside each succeeding tense situation a character experiences.

As in several of his noirish films, in Army of Shadows his largely male characters are tied, however tenuously, to one another and the world outside their often criminal activities by a deep sense of loyalty to one another and the careful playing out of the hand that life and the war has dealt them.  The depth of this kinship is particularly poignant since it is rarely openly acknowledged, even though in one instance, it causes a character played by Jean-Pierre Cassel (right) to make a sacrifice that no one knows about to try to save a comrade in Gestapo custody. Despite their travails and disappointments, the characters cling to a rigorous, often unarticulated but real code of their own ethics. They seem to have a capacity for coolly contemplating the physical and emotional world they are experiencing with a distinctly French philosophical perspective, which is reinforced by the director’s tendency toward an equally cool palette. In this film, a beautiful range of muted  blues, blacks and browns are emphasized. They are photographed with rapturous, spare restraint by Pierre Lhomme, (who also coordinated the film’s restoration) in the simplest of settings, a choice that seems to sharpen your eye as the film unfolds. This visual style is complemented by the simple, yet touching score by Éric Demarsan that underpins many scenes. Even though the events Army of Shadows dramatizes may seem long ago and far away, we might take something of value away from this spare movie–even if it is only a reminder that good storytelling doesn’t require elaborate pyrotechnics or feats of bravery.

This exceptionally quiet movie is concerned with life lived in plain sight of the enemy, forcing everyone involved to keep their guard up at all times–in a detention camp, during a planned escape, while executing a traitor that leaves the executioners without a piece of their soul, (but with too much self-knowledge for comfort), learning to respect a brave female member of the group, played brilliantly by the expressive Simone Signoret (left, below) and during a trip to London that underlines the alienation of the central character from anything that smacks of relaxation. Instead the film measures the cost and depth of patriotism that is paid by the spirit, as well as the bodies, and ultimately lives of the Resistance’s participants, who are portrayed as a watchful, tiny minority concerned not so much with feats of daring against the Nazis, but with the daily rituals ensuring survival, escaping detection, and, when necessary, protecting one another, and, gradually, as there is less and less opportunity for sharing these burdens, a continued adherence to a code of behavior that also robs each of them of their humanity.

Melville may sound like a somber movie stylist, yet each of his films, though not formally realistic, including Army of Shadows, are also full of unexpected and entertaining twists and turns that make a viewer say “Aha!” While this may serve to keep the audience with the flow of the story, it’s also used to convey the director’s dry, sly sense of humor that is present even in this, one of his most serious films. This becomes clear in the introductory sequence, when the central character is told that he is “lucky” to have landed in a better than average detention camp (and it’s all relatively new, since it was designed for German officers by the French before the war, when the blitzkrieg’s success made it unlikely to be used as originally intended).

In Army of Shadows, set in 1942-1943, we see the world largely through the eyes of an engineer, Philippe Gerbier, a Resistance fighter played by that great minotaur of an actor, Lino Ventura. Long a familiar face from French films beginning in the 1950s in such classics as Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954) with his mentor and friend, Jean Gabin, Ventura imbues his key figure in the Resistance group with a masculine grace, a controlled vigilance and a physical intensity that makes his wearing glasses seem like his attempt to keep his simmering rage and chronic, wearing vigilance under control. Playing a French engineer under arrest for suspected subversive activities, he communicates with another prisoner while waiting to be interrogated almost by telepathy. In another instant, a brief, ferocious act of violent action leads to both their escapes, though we never learn the fate of the other man. In typical Melville fashion, so much is suggested, but never explained. Ventura‘s craggy face records his concern for his compatriots, even if each succeeding experience makes his character become calmer and more withdrawn as the film goes on. In one scene set during a brief sojourn in London, he enters a party of soldiers, sailors and girls dancing and enjoying themselves  as a bombing raid continues outside. Observing the revelers with the detached fascination of a ghost or an anthropologist, he also reminded me a bit of the character of the otherworldly Angel played by Bruno Ganz in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). The feelings that other people know intrigue him, but he can’t share them since they are a luxury and he must guard against the simplest unconscious slip. His commitment to his work makes him wary of all feeling, but his growing inner turmoil–so well controlled–as he is well aware by the end of the film, is robbing him of his humanity. His reading matter when hiding out in one sequence consists of well reasoned philosophical treatises written by the Resistance leader (Paul Meurisse, familiar from Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques), a character Ventura, in a long, solitary sequence, expresses real affection for this character in the narration, (this figure is based on a real life hero of the Resistance, Jean Moulin) the narration.

Ventura‘s acting may have been enhanced by his dissonant relationship with the director after the actor was infuriated with Melville‘s manipulation of him during a previous shoot. The two rarely spoke directly to one another during this production, but communicated through an unlucky third party on the set. Perhaps this simmering resentment helped to magnify the actor’s exquisitely intense bearing?

Even in a brief scene in a car when Ventura escapes execution at the hands of the Gestapo, thanks to Signoret and friends, he cannot exult for a moment, and withdraws his hand when Signoret holds his for a brief spell in the car racing away from the German prison.  It is Signoret, who, despite warnings to the contrary by Ventura, who inadvertently delivers the coup de grace to any illusions still held by the group, simply by carrying a photo of her daughter with her for sentimental reasons.

The actress, whose beauty still shone through her battered looks, is, next to Ventura, a lesson in restrained yet sensitive expression of emotion. Signoret expressed a great deal of trepidation about her role, feeling that, as someone who lived through the years depicted, it was unjust that she should, as she put it, “make her living from someone else’s heroism.”  She need not have worried. Her character, a blend of many women who were resistance fighters, including the real Lucie Aubrac, honored them without oversimplifying the tightrope they walked. In typical Melville fashion, we are left to wonder about this character’s actions, and her lingering ties to a “normal life” at the cost of all of the group’s security.

The end, which reveals the Resistance group’s final, ruthless, yet logical abandonment of their moral equilibrium has an austere, emotionally powerful symmetry that is haunting.

Army of Shadows at The Criterion Collection

Jean-Pierre Melville at Senses of Cinema

A Brief History of the French Resistance