Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969, France, 143 mins, subtitles
Cast: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, Jean-Pierre Cassel
Review by Angus Macdonald
Based on Joseph (Belle de Jour) Kessel’s novel about the French Resistance in Paris during World War II, Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Army in the Shadows was criticised upon release for incorporating the director’s well-known pre-occupation with 1930s American gangster films. Here WWII Paris is not just full of German soldiers, but shadowy figures lurking in alleyways wearing long coats and fedoras, carrying pistols, and escaping in snazzy black Citroens. While the criticism is unfair, as the film carries an authenticity to the period, to the details in Kessel’s novel, and to the Melville’s own experiences as a member of the resistance, The Army in the Shadows sits very comfortably with the director’s previous gangster films Bob Le Flambeur (1955), Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), and Le Samouraï (1967).
The film opens with a truly astonishing and almost dream-like shot of a procession of German soldiers marching down the Champs D’Elysees. From this almost documentary representation of Nazi-occupied Paris, the film clutches tightly at the viewer from the beginning and barely lets its stranglehold go until after the end credits.
Melville regular plays Philippe Gerbier (played by Melville regular, Ventura), a seemingly easy-going civil engineer, as he escapes from Gestapo headquarters and reunites with his fellow resistance fighters, one of whom he knows to be an informer. In a painful and uncomfortably realistic scene, which exemplifies the cold objective restraint but harrowing brutality of the films atmosphere, Gerbier and his crew agree that a gunshot will attract unwanted attention and decide to execute the traitor by strangling him with a towel. There are no heroics or obvious delineations between good guys and bad guys here, this act of murder is simply a necessity performed with a melancholic painful sense of duty.
After travelling to London to receive a medal from De Gaulle, Gerbier hears about the arrest of Felix (Crauchet), another of his companions. Returning to Paris the crew try to formulate a plan to free the prisoner and Mathilde (the magnificent Signoret, as stunning as ever) concocts the idea to disguise themselves as German ambulance drivers. Mathilde, however, has to make some difficult choices when she discovers that the Gestapo has captured her daughter.
Shot in Melville’s trademark style of meticulously arranged and understated compositions, Pierre Lhomme and Walter Wottitz’s uses of muted tones (all damp greens, blues and greys) gives the film a cold, doom-fated sense of tension. Although Melville follows the resistance group’s obsessive attention to details and necessity of planning, the sombre and almost melancholic atmosphere adds an extra note of suspense to the idea that capture, mistrust and death are around any and every corner. The film is filled with long silences and furtive glances as if trust, communication, and emotions are as dangerous as any weapons. The tension and the suspense almost reaches fever pitch at times and the carrying out of Mathilde’s rescue plans are as thrilling and invigorating as any of the crime heists in Melville’s gangster films.
While films such as Le Samouraï and Le Circle Rouge have typically been hailed as Melville’s masterpieces, this film has regrettably fallen into a state of almost anonymity (it was never released in the States for reasons unknown). Hopefully this revival and re-release will help to bring The Army in the Shadows into the light as one of the director’s greatest achievements and to its rightful place as one of the best French films of the 60s.
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