The Resistance drama The Army in the Shadows is based on Joseph Kessel's novel translated through Melville's personal recollections of the period, and of course his extraordinary cinema technique. Lino Ventura stars as a member of a Resistance unit in the early years of the war, when nobility and recklessness were called for in equal measure. He wears a suit in prison but sangfroid masks purity of mission: he'll give you his last cigarette or execute you, depending. In a marvelous cast, Simone Signoret stands out as a master of disguises-bomb-maker, whore, old woman, collaborationist nurse, and, fatally, mother. Georges Sadoul's comment on The Silence of the Sea applies equally to this film made twenty years later: "It goes right to the heart because its director's heart was in it." Great escapes, intricate plotting, superb suspense in secret acts of courage: following all the great gangster films, the experiments in form, here is the original underworld. The Army in the Shadows is the Melville blueprint, revealed post-construction.