Army of Shadows

Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville’s film “Army of Shadows” is about French Resistance members who continue even when they’re hopeless. Few movies have ever shown the place in the heart where hope cohabits with fatalism as well as this one does. It doesn’t deal with daring raids and exploding trains, but with cold, hungry, desperate men and women moving invisibly through the Nazi occupation in France. Their army is an army of shadows; they use false names, possess no addresses and can be betrayed at any moment by a traitor or an accident; they know that they will most likely die.

It’s not a war movie it’s a stasis movie. During World War I hero Petain’s Vichy government France officially collaborated with the Nazis. Most Frenchmen took it as a protection racket: You let us off from being occupied by German armies; we’ll do what you want.

DeGaulle runs the Free French movement from London but he’s only heard on a radio; he has no troops except those in civilian clothes who listen to him on radios hidden under their pillows. They lead two lives, spy on the Germans, supply information to the Allies and sometimes carry out guerrilla raids against them.

Lots of movies show these actions. Melville, who was himself in the Resistance (his real name was Grumbach), isn’t interested in action here action lets tension out of its box and makes it external. He means his film to be about the war inside resistance fighters’ heads: living under permanent fear, persisting when pointless, accepting comrades’ deaths without expectation of reward apart from knowing it’s right because many die under false names so their sacrifices are never known; two brothers never find out each other is in it so one dies unknown.

With each discovery of another lost film Melville moves up among greatest directors like Hawks or Ford whom nobody much liked beforehand for reasons nobody much remembers afterwards: “Bob le Flambeur” (1955), his gangster film, is now known to be an early New Wave work before Godard, Truffaut, Malle. He used real locations, dolly shots with a camera clamped to a bicycle, unknown actors and un-rehearsed street scenes or everyday incidents rather than heightened melodrama.

“Le Samourai” (1967) reduced the existence of a professional assassin (Alain Delon) to ritual and solitude and simplicity and understatement at a time when movie hit men were bigger than life. And in “Le Cercle Rouge” (1970) he showed police and gangsters who know how another man must win the respect of those few others who understand the code; all shot for beauty.

Now we have the American premiere of perhaps his best film (I haven’t seen them all but I will). When it was released in 1969 “Army of Shadows” was condemned by left-wing Parisian critics as “Gaullist,” because it had a scene involving DeGaulle and because the Resistance supports him; by then DeGaulle was considered a reactionary relic. It wasn’t seen very much at any time. This restored 35mm print is 37 years old but still the best foreign film this year.

It is set in Lyons and Paris, where a small group of Resistance fighters operate. For example, Francois (Jean-Pierre Cassel), Le Masque (Claude Mann) and Felix (Paul Crauchet). Philosopher Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse) leads them, although most have never met him. Their immediate superior, Philippe Gerbier has a hawk nose and physical bulk; he can also be introspective as well as implacably determined: to overact for Ventura would be an embarrassment.

Mathilde (Simone Signoret), plays the role of the mistress of disguise who one day is asked “Does your husband know of your activities?” She replies, “Certainly not. And neither does my child.” She can be a dowdy fishwife or a bold whore or even a German nurse who with two comrades drives an ambulance into a Nazi prison and says she has orders to transport Felix to Paris.

Her greatness of deception does not come when she impersonates the German speaking nurse but when she is told Felix is too ill to be moved. She instantly accepts that, nods curtly, says “I’ll report that,” and leaves. To offer the slightest quarrel would betray them.

The safe houses are sometimes in the countryside. When they determine they have a traitor among them, they take him to a rented house, only to learn that new neighbors have moved in. They would hear either a gunshot or knife? There is no knife.

“There’s a towel in the kitchen,” Gerbier says.

We see him strangled.

And rarely has an onscreen death seemed more straightforward or final.

To protect the security of the Resistance it becomes necessary not only to kill traitors but those who have been compromised; late in the film there is such a death which comes as wound; we accept that it is necessary but we do not believe it will happen; for this death of one of the bravest of the group, leader Luc Jardie insists on coming out of hiding because victim “must see me in the car”; that much is owed respect, acknowledgement and then oblivion.

Airplanes fly from England to a landing field on the grounds of a Baron (Jean-Marie Robain) to exchange personnel and bring in supplies and instructions. Gerbier and Jardie are taken to London for a brief ceremony with DeGaulle. They see “Gone With the Wind.” Then they go back to France.

Yes there are moments of excitement but they hinge on decisions not actions: Gerbier at one point is taken prisoner; he is sentenced to be executed; The Nazis march their prisoners to a long indoor parade ground; machine guns are set up at one end; the prisoners are told to start running; anyone who reaches the far wall without being hit will be spared to die another day. Gerbier argues with himself about whether he should choose to run: that’s existentialism in extremis.

Knowing (and basing his work on Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel) that life in the Resistance wasn’t trench coats and romantic scenes, but ambiguous encounters ending in death, Melville knew what it meant to be a fighter.

After escaping from Gestapo headquarters, Gerbier walks into a barber shop to have his mustache removed. The barber has a poster of Petain on his wall. They don’t say anything to each other. But when a sweating man at night wants his mustache removed, and even more so pays for it himself and readies to leave the shop he is a suspect. So all the barber does is hand him an overcoat of another color.

This moment feels real because maybe it was real; “I had no intention of making a film about the Resistance,” Melville told Rui Nogueira. “So with one exception the German occupation. I excluded all realism.” His heroes’ exploits are not intended as reflections of events so much as they are meant to evoke states of mind which might accompany such events; or states of mind which he hoped would accompnay them.

And there aren’t many big German scenes: just one, really, which is the first shot, where German troops march down the Champs-Elysees. It is one of the shots he is proudest of, if not the shot he is proudest of; and he had to get an exemption from a law against wearing German uniforms on the boulevard in order to make it.

How did they feel? What were their rewards? In 1940 there were only six hundred Resisters altogether; according to Melville they didn’t number more than that throughout all France till very late in ’43 at earliest; by which time many had already died under torture. Including Jean Moulin. Kessel: “Since he was no longer able to speak, one of the Gestapo chiefs, Klaus Barbie, handed him a piece of paper on which he had written, ‘Are you Jean Moulins?’ Jean Moulin’s only reply was to take the pencil from Colonel Barbie and cross out the ‘s’.”

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