N16 Film Title, Director, Actor
Army in the Shadows-L'Armeé des Ombres
Melville's tribute to the French Resistance in WWII was a project he nurtured for 25v years, and is the summit of both his own work and his collaboration with actror Ventura. The film was wrongly criticised for introducing the codes of the French gangster film to the sentimental heroics of the French Resistance, because it was the former which borrowed and sustained the myths and rituals of the latter in the first place. Melville's style here has a quite outstanding hallucinatory quality entirely appropriate to its subject of lives and memories taht are forced undeground for too lond. It is in a way, the stoic alternative to Cocteau's Orphée, a film whose suspense derives from a state where any moment may be the moment of death. [Chris Petit, Time Out]
Melville's gangster film metier clearly stood him in good stead for portraying Nazis in this tense, lucid and affecting study of French Resistance fighters. The combination of intrepid action, paranoid mistrust and stirring patriotism make for a stunning film and a blunt rebuke to the French intellectuals of the time who impotently stood back. Lino ventura excels as the leader, Signoret and Cassel are also excellent. The best film about this subject by far, unless you count his own The Silence de la Mer.