Out of the Darkness: Thoughts on the Rerelease of Melville's "Army in the Shadows"
29 March 2006
"Army in the Shadows" is Jean-Pierre Melville’s nod to his own experience. Melville was one of the great filmmakers to operate during the French New Wave, and while he was certainly part of that influential movement, he was also the filmmaker dabbling the most in "popular" genres: the action film, the master heist. He became most famous as a filmmaker for classic gangster flicks like "Bob the Gambler" (1955) or what may well be the greatest film noir ever, in terms of the evocation of bleak and dreary undertones, "Le Samourai" (1967). But before all of this, before he was even a bug on film’s windshield, young Melville was a member of the French Resistance; the name "Melville" was, in fact, the budding director’s war-time alias. "Army in the Shadows," rereleased this month in the UK and next month in the US, thus tracks, in almost subversive detail, members of the resistance as they confront Nazis throughout France in the first years of the second World War.
The film is not a heroic ode. In fact, it is anti-heroic, since it includes those French boys who dreamt of glory for their parts in a righteous overthrow and who only met with the constant brutality of the Nazis, as well as the brutality of their fellow resistors, no angels themselves. In an early scene, resistance leader Phillippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) brings a French traitor to an abandoned house to be executed. A new recruit, Claude Le Masque (Claude Mann), has set up the house for a shooting, has a chair ready, draws the curtains, seems obedient, devoted, and honest. In short, an innocent. But when the other men in the room decide the execution cannot be done with a gun since neighbors might hear the shot, the young Le Masque turns sour. His voice quickens. His stance moves forward onto his toes, moving aggressively as he follows Gerbier around the room, the older man looking for a knife. Le Masque tells Gerbier he will not cause a merciless death. He will not painfully murder one of his own countryman, no matter what the man has done. But Le Masque is then asked to hold the traitors legs: the older men are going to strangle the offending boy. In silence – in the sputtering but still present flame of working for the resistance – Le Masque does as he is told. And as the traitor struggles, Le Masque turns his head away. The camera looks down at him. He is quiet, eyes closed, less the foot soldier than the bitter old man, willing himself to do... what exactly? Not to cry? Not to break his hold? Not to go along complacently with the murder? The young man has grown into brutal adulthood in an instant. Throughout the rest of the film he fulfills his tasks coldly, without once cracking a smile.
Growth like this dominates in the gritty polemics of "Army in the Shadows." The film is a fog of cycling violence. Resistance members are continually on the run from the Gestapo, to such an extent that it seems like they never actually conduct any offensive of their own. Those captured by the Nazis are tortured or faced with execution in an attempt for information. Those who talk are instantly marked by the resistance and quickly killed. But given the absolute madness of the Nazi’s beatings seen on the faces of the captured resistors Felix (Paul Crauchet) and Jean-Francois (Jean-Pierre Cassel), who wouldn’t talk? The disloyalty, the vehemence, the ruthlessness is endless, and the process repeats as a result. Finally, the Nazis capture someone the resistors truly love. In the film’s final moments, the resistors are faced with the question of killing one entirely too close to their hearts.
"Army in the Shadows" is, in this way, a brutally clear film. The French resistance was not some heroic commune of organized dissent, it was a viscous organization facing frightening odds, which too often asked its members to do the most ignoble thing: kill its own to save its hide. In the context of Melville’s other films, this theme makes "Army in the Shadows" a masterpiece of determined filmmaking: it not only draws from Melville’s experience, it contains all of Melville’s trademarks. The moment when Gerbier kills a German guard and escapes confinement after being taken to be executed – a scene that mostly consists of Gerbier sitting quietly on a bench next to an anonymous co-conspirator, lasting more than five minutes onscreen with only seconds of talking – has the slow, almost frozen rhythm that Melville often forces onto his stories’ most visceral and brutal turns. The scenes showing Mathlide (Simone Signoret) pouring over blueprints and conversing with Gerbier as she draws up plans for sneaking into a Gestapo stronghold display Melville’s love for meticulous preparation; the planning scenes often outweigh the action itself. And since Mathtilde’s plan fails, "Army in the Shadows" displays Melville’s ultimate pessimism: "the best laid plans all go to shit," his films often say, "eventually."
At the same time, Melville’s once forgotten gem is a lesson of a less cinematic sort: the joy of rediscovering an original work. For in this age of sloppy remakes and trashy sequels – moneymaking ventures, all of them – an age Melville’s films have been a part of, since "Bob the Gambler" became 2002’s "The Good Thief" (Neil Jordan), no way could "Army in the Shadows" mean anything if it was not made pure by Melville. No way could it – should it – exist without the man who lived its story himself. And the only way it will exist now is by screening it the way it existed then. Thank you, the someone at the French film archives remembered the film and brought it back. Thank you, the men and women who have screened it. Thank you, those who know this film should never be remade, should only be rescreened. It lets us keep discovering such masterpieces, and relive what it must have been like to see such genius flourish for the first time.