Army of Shadows was the third film Jean-Pierre Melville made
about life in France under Nazi occupation, but it feels more of a piece with
his later gangster films than it does with Le Silence de la mer or Léon Morin,
Priest. The film was made in the middle of a series of crime films – preceded
by Le Deuxième Souffle and Le Samouraï, and followed by Le Cercle rouge and Un
flic – and the characters in Army of Shadows could have walked into any of
those pictures. They are men who stalk the streets in a watchful and furtive
manner, and whose alliances are built on practical needs and a shaky sense of
trust. They are men united by an ever-present fatalism, knowing that this game
they play will likely end in death. They are men who live in the shadows.
It's safe to say that Army of Shadows would have been a very
different film if Melville had made it just after he first read Joseph Kessel's
novel in 1943 rather than 25 years later. The director needed to hone his style
before attempting this most personal of films, and in many ways he used the
filming of Le Deuxième Souffle in 1966 as a dry run for scenes in this picture.
Ultimately, the cool, detached directorial approach that Melville had developed
by the late '60s was perfectly suited to a world in which careless talk cost
lives. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is certainly a man who remains
tight-lipped unless speaking is absolutely necessary. He prefers to observe a
situation before making a decisive act, and in this respect he is the perfect
Melville hero.
Gerbier is the leader of a small group of underground
fighters trying to blow holes in the Nazi war machine and evade capture. The
film opens with Gerbier being transported to a concentration camp, but Melville
quickly establishes his protagonist's cunning nature, as he evaluates his
campmates and keeps his eyes open for an opening that might lead to escape. The
manner in which Melville shoots Gerbier's daring flight for freedom is
indicative of the measured approach he takes throughout the film. The act of
escape itself takes place in just a few moments and a handful of shots, but the
build-up, in which Gerbier surveys the situation and settles on the best way to
play his hand, and the aftermath are where the real action lies. As he runs
from the Nazi headquarters, Gerbier ducks into a barbershop for sanctuary, and
he has to spend an uncomfortable period wondering if the man holding a razor to
his throat is a friend or a foe.
In this world, the risk of betrayal is ever-present, and
Melville utilises that as a constant source of tension. When a traitor is
discovered in their midst, Gerbier and his cohorts must deal with him in the
way that traitors had to be dealt with, and Melville makes this scene into the
film's agonising centrepiece. It is a masterpiece of staging and editing, as
the men must first deal with the unexpected complication of a family living next
to their safe house, meaning that a quick death by gunshot is off the cards. As
his captors search for an alternative means of disposal, the young turncoat
stands rigidly against a back wall, consumed with fear, awaiting his fate.
Melville's characters are defined by their actions rather
than their psychological makeup. He presents them to us with little fanfare and
gives the actors room to inhabit their roles, and to come to life for us as we
watch them go perform their functions in the Resistance effort. The great Simone
Signoret plays Mathilde, one of the many women who played a key part in the
Resistance thanks to their ability to evade suspicion at checkpoints (we see Jean-Pierre
Cassel avoiding a Nazi search a train station by picking up a woman with young
children on the platform). The central characters in Army of Shadows are stoic,
determined and honourable, and on more than one occasion they refuse to yield
information under torture, but Melville doesn't overplay their heroism. Pierre
Lhomme's cinematography is stark and dispassionate, with scenes seemingly
drained of all colour except for a pallid grey that reinforces the sense of
foreboding and futility that hangs over much of the action.
Army of Shadows was released in 1969 and instantly fell
victim to disastrously poor timing. In post-1968 France the film was seen as a
hopeless Gaullist throwback, with the now unpopular President being
depicted in the film's strange (and, in truth, unnecessary) London-set
interlude. It flopped at the box office and failed to find international
distribution for many years. In fact, the film wasn't seen on American shores
until 2006, when it was hailed as a masterpiece and collected the Best Foreign
Language Film prize from the New York Critics' Circle. This validation came too
late for Melville, who completed two more films before dying at the young age
of 55 in 1973. He never saw his most personal film receiving the adulation it
deserved, but one hopes he died knowing that he had made a great film, and one
that honoured the courage of the men and women who fought for French freedom.