Melville’s first feature is one of the most disturbing and poetic films on the Occupation. In the tradition that would become associated with Bresson, it is a film of interiors and silence, of gazes and time passing, but all, in fact, with narrative justification. A German officer is billeted in the country with an old man and his niece. They maintain a disdainful silence in the soldier’s presence as he sorts aloud through his feelings towards the French, the Occupation, and the niece. Too late the icy silence is broken with a barely audible word. Melville shot the film in the house of the story’s author, Vercors. This precise interiority (which looks forward to Les enfants terribles) gives a shock to the film’s exterior sequences in which the soldier begins to see the naiveté of his “marriage of our two people.” A montage of Paris through his awed eyes can’t help but recall the Nazi newsreel of Hitler’s dawn tour of his newly acquired gem.