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 in  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] [review]), Léon Morin, prêtre (Leon Morin, Priest [1961] [review]) 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.

The main character Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), head of a regional Resistance network as we come to know, is being driven through the rain by two Vichy policemen, who stop to take advantage of some black-market foods. Already Melville has shown his hand. The prevailing French myth following the war was that there was no such black market and that all non Vichy officials were uncorruptible

Gerbier is held for some days in one of the many French concentration camps, along with Gypies, Spanish Republicans, Czechs, Algerian Arabs and others. He is soon transferred to Nazi headquarters for serious questioning. Here, with a dead-calm pretense of needing a cigarette from his German guard, he shows that beyond being a Civil Engineer he is a man to be reckoned with. He escapes with a long tracking shot in the dark, his feet beating against the sidewalk, his torso shadowed against the sporadically lighted windows. In a typical Melvillian move, the other man involved in the escape is never seen again, nor do we know whether the shots ringing out or his own fleetness and luck win out. Melville isn’t so much interested in showing the triumph of good over evil, as the lives of men as the days page by, fate turning the pages.

Back in Marseilles, Gerbier meets with his main men, who have found the young man who betrayed Gerbier. His is lifted and taken to a house, where because of the nearness of the neighbors they can not risk shooting him. After an urgent and painful debate as to whether any other means of killing him is the same, proper way, as a bullet to the head, one of the crew is selected to use the gavotte. Life in the Resistance is not as morally clear as other, celebratory, films would have it.

A new comrade, Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel,) is added to their ranks and is sent with a radio transmitter to Paris to pass to one of the lynch pins of their network, Mathilde (Simone Signoret,) who is working for the underground unbeknownst to her family, including her 17 year old daughter whose picture she foolishly carries in her wallet. Melville cranks up the tension as German soldiers search the baggage of passengers arriving on the train, and notes again the French Police, who even seeing the radio let him pass. Is it because they are on his side or because their job is only searching for black market food, as they suggest? Jardie makes a quick visit to his eccentric, wealthy brother who will turn out to be an important figure though a minor role in the film.

Gerbier has gone by secret submarine to Gibralter, along with downed allies returned to their homes by the Resistance, and from there to London. In an interesting scene he takes shelter from a German air-raid in a local canteen where soldiers and airmen continue to dance to Glenn Miller as dust falls from the shaken timbers. He then gets the news that his number one man, Lepercq, has been picked up by the Germans and will likely be tortured to get the names of the rest of the network. Gerbier returns by means of a solo night-drop by parachute into France in one of the less likely but more tension filled scenes in the film. He has never jumped before and he does so with minimal instruction from the crew, and the improbable stoic courage Melville favors in all him leading men.

Although a war film many of the scenes read just like the gangster films Melville is so famous for. The Resistance men appear in coats and ties and long trench coats, wide-brimmed snapped down, eyes in the shadows. The clothing is never soiled nor do the men seem to lack for showers, shaves and pressed pants. The careful shouldering on of the great coats, adjusting of the collars, buttoning the double breast and cinching the untwisted belt all seem to symbolize the care, and calm of the men carrying out their duties — whether a heist or a hit.

Mathilde (Signoret) comes to take center stage as the crew tries to get Leqpquerq out of Nazi hands. After sorting through a couple of options she chooses one which requires German costumes, a red-cross truck and the same kind of bravado Melville would appreciate for any of his bank-heists, which is almost how the scene plays out. It does not culminate in a grand success, however, again a mark of Melville’s fatalistic vision: we do these things; they are necessary; they sometimes fail; we go on. Heroism, courage and tension in the moment. From a slight distance, just movement on a chessboard played by unseen hands.

Gerbier is then captured and handed over to the Germans. In another improbable but tension wracked scene, he is pulled from his near certain death by Mathilde and several of his men. Wounded, he is taken to a remote farmhouse to hide-out for a month. It is here that the head of the Resistance — remember the eccentric, wealthy brother of earlier in the film?– come to tell him that Mathilde has now been captured. They are not worried that she will talk because of torture, but the Germans have followed the picture of her daughter to the girl herself and are threatening to send her as a whore to the eastern front, unless Mathilde talks.

Mathilde convinces her captors she would help them better by being outside, and so they allow it.

“What is she asking for?” asks Jardie, as the men argue again — as in the earlier assassination scene. “If you were in her position, what would you want?” They finally agree, and Mathilde is gunned down from their stolen car.

The text as the screen goes to black tells us how all of the others died, before Liberation could release them from their lives of resistance.

It is a harrowing end to a somber, and I think, realistic film. The theme throughout, as with his gangster films, is who can be trusted and who not? What does a man do when faced with inescapable decisions –do I shoot someone who has saved my life or leave her free to destroy what must be done? In a restatement of Sophie’s Choice they will take the choice from her. War is not romantic and Melville, who lived it, won’t pretend otherwise. The men who lead these lives are silent and matter of fact. Loyalty comes first, sentiment last. No matter what is sought after, no matter the sacrifice, nothing is guaranteed. Fate determines all. Knowing this men do what is expected and expect no more.

Melville claims he was in the French communist party of 1933-1936. In his later years he claimed, when pressed, to be a right wing anarchist (Max Stirner, Murray Rothbard.) It’s unlikely he was in any studied way — only that he insisted on going his own way. He didn’t want to be told what to do and wanted to make films as he saw them. That the communists criticized Army of the Shadows for not being heroic enough, that the French film establishment considered him an amateur, undoubtedly added fuel to his already irascible character and reaffirmed in him the rightness of the story he had to tell.

For more commentary of Melville, see Senses of Cinema, and Kamera.