Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows
Reviewed by Josh Rosenblatt, Fri., May 4, 2007
Army of Shadows
Criterion, $39.95
Arriving as it did between two of Jean-Pierre Melville's greatest triumphs, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, Army of Shadows should have been a huge success, both in its native France and on the international arthouse circuit. Unfortunately, the release of the movie, which follows a group of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of France, couldn't have been more poorly timed. To many in the French film community (including the tastemakers at Cahiers du Cinéma, to whom, ironically, Melville had been an inspiration) the film played as a glorification of their president and former Free French leader Charles de Gaulle – who, at the time, was widely out of favor on the left for his perceived betrayal of the student uprisings of May 1968 – and they trashed it accordingly.
As a consequence, the movie wasn't released in the United States until last year, when it received a deserved hero's welcome from critics. Based on the book of the same title by former resistance fighter Joseph Kessel and on Melville's own experiences fighting with the Free French, Army of Shadows is as tense as you'd hope a movie about small, ragtag bands fighting the great Nazi death machine with little more than bows and arrows would be. Its scenes of torture and mass executions, shot with unblinking dispassion by cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, are terrifying for their banality; it's clear from their stone faces that the film's protagonists have seen worse and expect their own lives to end under similar circumstances, and soon.
At the same time, Melville, who was deep in his celebrated gangster-movie period, isn't above romanticizing a life spent in the underground, where daring escapes, cyanide capsules, and mysterious figures with names like the Mask were the order of the day. The two-disc set features a wealth of extras, including interviews with Melville and Lhomme and former resistance fighters and a short documentary from 1944 called "Le Journal de la Resistance," which chronicles the last dark days of the German occupation.
Also Out:
Brute Force (Criterion, $39.95): Burt Lancaster plays a hardened prisoner living under the ironfisted rule of guard Hume Cronyn in Jules Dassin's melodrama.
Upcoming:
Ace in the Hole (Criterion, July 17): Cynical and rarely screened, this Billy Wilder classic has eluded me all my filmgoing life. My long, personal nightmare ends this summer.
