L’Armée des ombres (1969)

L’Armée des ombres is a French war film first released in 1969, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.  The film is based on a novel by Joseph Kessel and stars Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret and Claude Mann.  It has also been released under the title: Army in the Shadows.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


October, 1942.  During the Nazi occupation of France, Philippe Gerbier, a civil engineer, heads a small network in the French Resistance.   Betrayed by one of his colleagues, he is arrested by the French police and sent to a prison camp.  Shortly after being transferred to Gestapo headquarters, Gerbier escapes and immediately sets about looking for the man who betrayed him.  The traitor is soon found and executed by his fellow Resistance members.  Whilst Gerbier is in London, to persuade the British military to supply the Resistance with essential equipment, his right-hand man, Félix Lepercq, is captured by the Gestapo.   Fearing that Félix may talk under torture, Gerbier arranges a daring plan to snatch him from the secure prison where he is being held.  The plan fails and, a short time later, Gerbier is himself arrested...

Jean-Pierre Melville waited 25 years to make L’Armée des ombres (a.k.a. Army of Shadows), his big budget adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s celebrated 1943 novel, which he embellished with his own experiences as an active participant in the French Resistance.  Prior to this, Melville had made two excellent films set at the time of the Nazi occupation of France: Le Silence de la Mer (1949) and Léon Morin, prêtre (1961).  As great as these two films are, neither has the sense of deep personal involvement that is so evident in L’Armée des ombres, Melville’s most personal film and perhaps the one which best illustrates his flawless mastery of the art of cinema.

L’Armée des ombres combines Melville’s interest in the Occupation with a deep fascination for the dark and solitary world of the gangster.  The director had by this stage delivered four superlative gangster films - Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1962), Le Deuxième souffle (1966) and Le Samouraï (1967) - each offering a bleak and darkly melancholic portrait of gangsterism that differed markedly from the familiar (utterly shallow) Hollywood portrayal.  It is no accident that Melville employs a similar visual style on L’Armée des ombres to that which he had previously used on his gangster films.  The gangster and the committed resistance fighter have much in common.  Both live on a knife-edge, reliant on the loyalty of others in whom they place their trust; both adhere to a sacred code of honour which, if breached, invites a swift retribution; and both find themselves excommunicated from our world, condemned to live in an obscure shadow land, existing on borrowed time with few of the comforts we take for granted.  This is the world which Melville himself inhabited as a lone maverick filmmaker, a solitary world of dogged self-reliance and meticulous self-sufficient endeavour.

Perhaps what is most surprising about L’Armée des ombres is that the resistance members it presents us with are virtually indistinguishable from the underworld operatives we see in Melville’s gangster films.  Rather than glorifying their exploits and depicting them as out-and-out heroes, Melville confers on them something of the moral ambiguity of his gangster protagonists.  They are not heroes such as we tend to find in conventional war films, but ordinary human beings who have, for good or for ill, committed themselves to a cause from which there is no turning back.  Were it not for the historical context, the certainty that the Resistance was on the side of the angels, working to destroy one of the most evil regimes in history, it is doubtful that we would have much sympathy for the résistants in Melville’s film.  What is there to like about individuals who appear to have next to no regard for their own lives and who cold-bloodily execute their own kind if the need arises?  If we engage with the film’s protagonists it is in spite of, rather than because of, what they do.  We recognise their humanity and admire their perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds.  We are moved by how they overcome fear and somehow find the courage to continue with what must seem to be a futile preoccupation.  These are not cold killing machines, but ordinary men and women who have taken on an extraordinary burden, to fight and die so that the world might be rid of Fascism.

Here Melville adopts a cinematic style that is both striking in its cold, austere beauty and perfectly aligned with its subject.  The whole film appears to have been shot through a blue filter, giving it an oppressive, dreamlike texture with its restricted palette of greys and muddy browns.  As a result of this limited tonal variation, there is an unremitting sense of tension which is only periodically relived in sudden, short bursts of activity.  For the most part, the spectator is held in a state of nervous anticipation, awaiting the cruel twists of fate that must surely come.  Yet it is often in these quiet lulls that the film is at its most eloquent and shocking.  The sequence in which Gerbier and his cohorts have to execute a traitor is underplayed to such an extent that it is a torture to watch it.  There is no music, no attempt to build up the drama.  Just a slow, matter-of-fact crawl towards the inevitable, the only sounds being those made by the executioners as they go about their vile business.   The film’s ending is played in a similar understated manner, and is just as effective, more brutally so as it dispatches, with cruel detachment, one of the most sympathetic characters in the film.

For his most ambitious film, Melville is justified in assembling a cast of exceptional calibre.  The top-notch cast includes some very big name actors - Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Simone Signoret - who each turns in a performance of rare quality.  Ventura is particularly well chosen for the part of the Resistance chief Gerbier and gives a far more nuanced performance than is evident in his other tough guy roles.  Far from being the implacable man of steel, as he was too often cast in his career, Ventura gives a far more subtle and convincing portrayal of hard man heroism.  You sense that Gerbier is a reluctant warrior, a man of intellect and compassion who inwardly despises what he has to do, who has no desire for personal glory, and who is motivated only by the impossible dream of liberating his country from an evil scourge.  Although they play a comparatively smaller role in the drama, Meurisse, Cassel and Signoret (an honourable roll call to which we should add Paul Crauchet, Claude Mann and Christian Barbier) are no less impressive and offer similarly moving portrayals of courage and endurance driven by bitter necessity.

When L’Armée des ombres was first released in 1969, it was ill-received in France by both the critics and the cinema-going public.  The influential reviewers on the Cahiers du cinéma allowed political bias to cloud their artistic judgement and they wrote the film off as Gaullist propaganda.  At the time, such a reaction would have been the kiss of death for any film.  De Gaulle’s presidency had recently ended in humiliating defeat in the wake of national strikes and public demonstrations against his increasingly out-of-touch government.  The film was also unpopular because it dealt with a period of French history which was still, 25 years after the Liberation, pretty well a taboo subject.  There had recently been a few films made in France set during the Occupation - Gérard Oury’s La Grande vadrouille (1966) and René Clément’s Paris brûle-t-il? (1966), both notable box office successes.  However, these films (along with Clément’s supposedly authentic resistance piece La Bataille du rail (1946)) tended to sidestep the grim reality of the Occupation and stuck to the De Gaulle fiction that France had been a defiant nation of résistants during the Second World War.  (The truth was that was the number of active Resistance members was more likely to be in the hundreds rather than tens of thousands.)

L’Armée des ombres was one of the first French films that dared to lift the thick veil that had for so long obscured the truth, so it was perhaps inevitable that it would be widely reviled.  What the film did do, however, was to fracture the long-standing taboo and pave the way for many more films about the Occupation, including several which depicted France’s shameful treatment of her Jewish citizens, in such films as Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein (1976).  Following its restoration and re-release in 2006, L’Armée des ombres was received in a far more favourable light than on its initial release.  Today, it is widely considered to be one of Melville’s greatest films (if not his greatest) and it deserves to be regarded as one of the most important films on the activities of the French Resistance.  Whilst its depiction of physical violence is quite tame for a wartime drama (certainly by today’s standards), there is a depth and gravity to L’Armée des ombres that makes it the most harrowing example of French film noir, and possibly the most compelling.

© James Travers 2011

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