In Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville subtly transforms his interest in the underworld to the Underground, creating a lament for the French Resistance that is as austere as it is profoundly moving. Secret acts of courage, personal commitments, interpersonal loyalties and impersonal betrayals--the elements of the Melville policier--here take on heightened significance. Lino Ventura (who played Gu in Melville's 1966 Le Deuxième Souffle, which screened recently at PFA) and Simone Signoret star in the tale of a still-small Resistance group in collaboration with the British in a desperate fight against the Germans. Signoret creates a complex portrait of a woman who must choose between her daughter's life and her beliefs.
Melville's taut style de-emphasizes action while skillfully advancing a plot that depends entirely upon it. As British film critic Chris Peachment notes, “Whether it is a solitary Alain Delon, hunted down like a lone wolf in Le Samourai, or Lino Ventura pondering upon the meaning of his own future death in a Gestapo cell in L'Armée des Ombres, Melville's constant ground-base is the emotional well-springs of action.... (T)here are very few who, like Melville, can demonstrate the passionate feelings that action generates.”
Melville comments on the film, adapted from a novel by Joseph Kessel: “L'Armée des Ombres is the book about the Resistance: the greatest and the most comprehensive of all the documents about this tragic period in the history of humanity. Nevertheless, I had no intention of making a film about the Resistance. So with one exception--the German Occupation--I excluded all realism.... Out of a sublime documentary about the Resistance, I have created a retrospective reverie; a nostalgic pilgrimage back to a period which profoundly marked my generation” (in Rui Nogueira's “Melville”).