Cease and Resist
Devastating little-seen thriller evokes the terror of occupied France
by Jim Ridley
A breathless man—a French resistance leader in World War II—lunges into a barbershop. Facing torture by the Gestapo, the man has just cut an officer’s throat and run blindly into the snowy night. The barber, all business, ushers him into a chair. The man looks up to see a boldly displayed poster of Marshal Petain, ruler of the Nazis’ puppet Vichy government. The barber reaches for his razor.
You can imagine the scene as Hitchcock might have staged it, tightening the screws with each scrape of skin. There is no playful release of tension in Army of Shadows, a 1969 thriller previously unreleased in the U.S. that ranks among the great cinematic rediscoveries of recent years. A gripping portrait of life during wartime, rendered with pangs of nostalgia by a former Resistance fighter, it doesn’t let up: the haggard man in the chair has nothing waiting outside but more Petain posters, more Gestapo.
The movie is the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, the flamboyant French director whose career has undergone a dramatic revival of interest. Best known for coolly fatalistic crime dramas like 1955’s Bob le Flambeur and 1967’s Le Samourai, he adopted Herman Melville’s surname as his handle during the Resistance and reinvented himself after the war as a Stetson-wearing cineaste with a jones for American muscle cars, gadgetry and genre movies. An episode of the 1971 TV series Cinéastes de notre temps shows him strolling gut first, hands thrust inside his trench coat like a gangster.
Yet his movies have an iciness and sophistication far beyond their reputation for fanboy cool. Essentially a series of increasingly tense vignettes, Army of Shadows was adapted by Melville from a 1943 novel by Joseph Kessel. The combination of Melville’s distant perpective and Kessel’s immediacy produces a striking effect—something like the feel of a flashback without the establishing framework.
Army of Shadows was made the same year as The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ great documentary about the Nazi occupation of France, and it evokes the terror and paranoia that the subjects of Ophuls’ film describe—the sense of never knowing who might turn you in. Stereotypical Aryans are nowhere to be seen: the heroes have the same Gallic features as their jailors, torturers and executioners. That kinship gives the movie a special horror, especially as Melville shows the torturers’ handiwork.
“You do what you can in these lousy times,” a Vichy guard jovially tells Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), chatting up the captured resistance leader en route to an internment camp. On the outside, Gerbier connects with other members of his resistance unit, including the sad-eyed enforcer Felix (Paul Crauchet), who enlists the cocky scofflaw Jean-François (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Essentially members of a cell, the members carry out their missions with grim single-mindedness, keeping their identities secret even from those closest to them.
From our vantage point—and Melville’s, in 1969—we can see that the men’s actions served the greater good. Melville allows them no such comfort. The characters never have a chance to ponder their nobility or the verdict of time: there is only the matter at hand. In a horrific early scene, the men capture a turncoat—a scared kid—and dispassionately discuss the logistics of killing him: whether a gun is too loud, which room has thickest walls, etc. The kid’s murder is a foregone conclusion, and one history will vindicate; in the moment, they must bear the look of his widening eyes, and the sensation of wringing the life out of him.
When the fighters do stop to worry about whether they’re doing the right thing—as with a fearless organizer (cat-eyed Simone Signoret, marvelous) who is undone by simple love—the humane course of action proves to be wrong, or worse for humanity. The casting of Ventura, a heavy-set, thick-waisted character actor with a perpetually weary expression, makes the weight of those awful decisions palpable. The world of Melville’s movie has had almost all the color leached out of it, and with it all of the moral certainty; the first glimpse of the Arc de Triomphe is off-center, as if the whole country had shifted out of whack.
“Bad memories, I welcome you anyway,” reads the aphorism that opens the movie; “you are my long-lost youth.” If Melville’s memories of the time went into Army of Shadows—he cast actual leaders and scrupulously recreated Resistance meeting points—so did his skill at constructing spare, nail-biting sequences of existential dread. The film builds to a devastating final coda that reveals the fates of Gerbier and his shadow soldiers—information that, like the verdict of history, is unknown to them, shown to us, and little comfort to either.
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