Army of Shadows — a French film noir about resistance to the Nazi occupation –The Resistance. What could be better? Brave silent men coming out of the shadows to slit Nazi throats, blow up bridges, derail trains. Isn’t that how it happens? Not according to one who was there and lived to make a film about it.
Jean Pierre Melville, if he is known at all in the U.S. is likely known for his gangster films. Even if France he is called the father of the French gangster film. Bob le Flambeur, 1955, Le Samouraï, 1967 and Le Cercle rouge, 1970, are regularly cited as innovative and perfect examples of his distant, observational noir style, his meticulous attention to detail, often in natural –not studio– settings, with plenty of dark shadows, wet streets, resounding footsteps, and grim, matter-of-fact dialogue. His main characters are often small-time crooks and his interest is that they exist and in the details of how a caper is pulled off. Is there agreement or disagreement? Does everything go as planned? How do they dress and how do they speak? Above all: how is loyalty and betrayal played out? He is not much interested in making sentimental or moral points. Life is life.
What aren’t as equally well known are his films of war-time.
He made three, —Le Silence de la mer (The silence of the Sea [1949]), Léon Morin, prêtre (Leon Morin, Priest [1961]) and L’Armée des ombres (The Army of Shadows [1969].) The earlier two are concerned with close relationships of two or three people living in a war time situation. The Army of Shadows is about war and the French resistance itself. It’s interesting both for the anti-heroic viewpoint Melville takes, and that it is the only such film he made as he had been part of the Resistance during his young, formative years.
His original name was Grumbach, from his Hungarian Jewish French emigre family. He took the name Melville from his American writing hero during his years in the Resistance. The skeleton of the film was taken from a book of the same name written by another resistance fighter Joseph Kessel (who also wrote the novel which became the ground-breaking mainstream erotic movie, Belle du Jour with Catherine Deneuve .)
Filmed in color but almost all in Melville’s preferred blue and brown pallete suggesting the dark, fatalistic cast of Melville’s sensibility, it is the story of 5 resistance fighters in Paris, Marseilles, Lyon and occasionally London. But we see nothing of the successful bridge demolitions or daring clever assaults on the German occupation forces or the Vichy collaborators. Instead, Melville is interested in the tension fraught daily life of those living under cover, with deadly blows against the enemy as their goal but built on the base of chance, choice, personality and fate — where one can never know who is true and who will be false or what the circumstances will demand.
After beginning with a strutting German parade in front of the Arc de Triomphe, the camera, below the introductory titles, trains on a dark country scene of continuous heavy rain. And so we enter Melville’s world.
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