Army of Shadows

The long delayed American release of Jean-Pierre Melville's haunting and brilliant Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres), restored and looking as fresh as it must have in the Sixties, could not have come at a better time for me personally. In the final throes of finishing off my own WWII script, and occasionally in need of a push like a broken TV needs a slap, viewing the film was the experience of 120 little epiphanies in a row.

A story of men and women working in the shadows for the French resistance during WWII has plenty of suspense, but Melville was less interested in building tension in the traditional rote Hollywood sense than he was in focusing on the characters own psychological torment and in building a mood of despair and paranoia. Long, dry, coolly detached, you can understand why the film wasn't embraced by American distributors in 1969. But there is an air of tension in every scene, and its heart of darkness is surrounded by an air of humanity further deepened by Melville's own wartime experiences.

The film is precisely crafted from the very beginning: the unforgettable opening shots of the German army marching in front of the Arc d'Triumph in Paris followed swiftly by our introduction to Gerbier, Lino Ventura's poker-faced behatted gent, as he's in the back of a van, being transported to a French concentration camp. From here we slowly learn his role in the resistance and the other players who join him in the cause - from Mathilde (Simone Signoret, absolutely empathetic), the mother of the group both literally and figuratively, to the imposing "Le Bison" (Christian Barbier), each leaving their own indelible impression. Ventura sharply featured face of a puglist (he was actually once a wrestler) alone could map out the pain and stoicism of the period's tragedy.

Army of Shadows is filled with unforgettable moments: Gerbier ducking into a barbershop for safety (not knowing on which side the barber's allegiances lie), Gerbier preparing to be executed in a German prison and the subsequent smokescreen, the painful-to-watch but utterly suspenseful strangulation scene, and so on, each scene it's own microcosm of precision filmmaking.

The odd thing about the film, too, is how it lingers in one's memory at random intervals long after the act of viewing is over. And even odder, or perhaps not: how I recall it in black and white, not the color it was actually filmed in. (The new restoration is beautifully done.)

Discussions on the auteurs of the French New Wave invariably included analysis of their homages to American genre films - certainly true - just as any discussion of American film noir has had to include the debt that owes to European films (not to mention many of their greatest filmmakers after they immigrated to the States). Melville's superb gangster films - Bob le Flambeur, Le Cercle Rouge, Le Samourai  - were deservedly a part of this conversation. But with those works and now even more with the unveiling here, at last, of his Army of Shadows, it seems Melville could be considered not only a sort of bridge between American and French film, and as a clear influence on a wealth of today's filmmakers, but just as importantly, as a superb filmmaker whose work stands alone, as a movement all its own.