Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Army of Shadows’

The French director and writer Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) is mostly known for gangster movies: Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge, Un Flic, movies inspired by American film noir, so much so that sometimes the characters have American-sounding names (Bob, Jef, Corey), and in the case of Un Flic (A Cop), even an American lead actor (Richard Crenna). But these films are also French to the bone, and unique; they lack the easy sentimentality and moralism of so many American noirs and the acting is stripped down, monotone, laconic, and classic. If you haven’t seen them, go rent them. Melville adored American films above all others, and it occurs to me that just as Melville made the quintessential American noirs, except they were French, so many of the best American noirs or crime movies were made by transplanted Europeans: Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder, Out of the Past by Jacques Tourneur, The Big Heat by Fritz Lang, Night and the City by Jules Dassin, Detective Story by William Wyler (like Melville, an Alsatian Jew).
Melville’s L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), from 1969, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, has just come out in a superb Criterion two-disc edition. Its subject is the French Resistance in World War II. Now American war movies tend to be about nobility and heroism, and they have a tendency to hit you over the head with the nobility and heroism just in case you’re not getting it. I don’t want to slam on Steven Spielberg, but I’ll give two examples from his work: Liam Neeson as Schindler breaking down in uncontrollable tears in his last scene in Schindler’s List; Tom Hanks giving his “I’m a schoolteacher†speech in Saving Private Ryan. These scenes are made to bring the tears to your eyes and it’s pretty hard not to have the tears spring to your eyes when you watch them, especially for the first time, but they’re not really true. They’re over the top and they’re telling the audience what to feel. There are no scenes even remotely like these in Army of Shadows. Melville, who served in the Resistance and in the Free French army, keeps the emotions of his great actors behind and inside their eyes, not boiling out all over the scenery. They speak quietly, and they speak rarely. He holds the camera on silences, on faces, he doesn’t tell you what to feel, he makes you feel. The actors in this film are among the best: Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Jean-Pierre Cassel (father of the equally talented Vincent Cassel), Paul Meurisse. The DVD special features tell us that Ventura and Melville didn’t get along, and that the star and director didn’t speak to each other throughout the filming. This doesn’t matter; Ventura gives a brilliant performance, but not a Hollywood-style bravura performance; he says the unsayable, with his slow stolid body, with very few and quiet words, with his face, and with his eyes.
I was lucky enough to watch this movie without having read any of the usual recount-the-plot reviews, and I’d like you to have the same experience. I’m not going to talk about the plot or specific scenes because I want you to take in this movie cold. And that’s all I’ll say now.
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June 14, 2007 at 8:49 pm
[...] Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Army of Shadows’ - Dan Leo recalls a classic film about the French Resistance in World War ...