Raising Questions
The French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who died in 1973, has become an almost private idol to some cineastes; but unlike many such idols, he deserves more renown. A step toward wider Melville knowledge is now at hand.  

He began making films in 1945, right after his military service; suffused with admiration for American films, he set out to use American genres in his own way. (Even his name was an American adoption. His original surname was Grumbach, but he changed it--daringly, we might say--after he read Moby-Dick.) A prime instance of his Gallicized use of Hollywood is Le Samouraï (1967), unforgettable, in which Alain Delon plays a contract killer--a familiar film figure, but this one is swathed in existential mystique.  

A story about Delon, possibly true, applies to the film reviewed below. In 1967 Melville was reading his screenplay of Le Samouraï to Delon to see if the actor would accept the leading role. After Melville had read five or six pages, through which the protagonist moves silently, Delon said, "I'll do it." "But," said Melville, "you haven't even had one line of dialogue yet." Delon said, "That's why I'll do it."
 
This taciturnity is very marked in Army of Shadows, Melville's film of 1969, which is now having its sorrily belated American premiere. The total amount of dialogue in the script makes it a contender for the "Least Talk in a Sound Film" prize. What is cannily winning is that, as we begin to realize how little is being said, we also realize that this procedure is exactly right for this picture. 

Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, Melville's screenplay is about the French Resistance during World War II, a subject with which, in the course of his military service, he had personal experience--as did Kessel. The very first shot puts facts before us with clenched-jaw reticence. It is a long shot of the Arc de Triomphe. A column of soldiers in the distance moves from the left toward the Arc. There they wheel and come down the Champs Élysées toward us. As they approach, we see that they are German. A sad history has been synopsized for us in our assumption that they were French and in our discovery otherwise. 

It is 1942. The story, which need not be sketched here, is taut, evoking a special fright that is tinged with gratitude--about matters that we know will eventually turn out well for the cause, if not for the individuals. The film centers on a group of Resistance fighters in civilian clothes who are seemingly carrying on civilian lives. The head of the group is played by Lino Ventura, an actor little known here despite a four-decade career that ended in 1987, during which he reminded many of Jean Gabin, not in looks but in quiet power. His colleagues are played by, among others, Simone Signoret, an attractive stalwart of French film, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, who was charming in his early balletic roles but who has a terrible non-dancing role here. Serge Reggiani, who played Signoret's lover in the musky Casque d'Or, appears briefly as a barber whose part in the Resistance is to shave Ventura without reporting him. Reggiani's acceptance of this tiny role is, I assume, a bow to the subject and to Melville. 

One particular bit of luck for this reissue is the fact that Melville's cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, was on hand to help with the restoration of this thirty-five-year-old film. The result is a paradoxical beauty. Very many of the scenes are in sunlight--Melville avoided such facile stuff as shadows for suspense--yet they are chilly. The seasons vary, but the general effect is of a bright winter day that is freezing. 

A salute to the distributors, Rialto Pictures. This company specializes in re-issuing films of the past, American and foreign, that deserve to be seen again--or, as in this case, for the first time--in good form. The Rialto list is admirable, and Army of Shadows ranks high on it. 

To see a film about the Resistance these days is a peculiar experience. Who could want such conditions back again? But if in some pernicious way that should happen, would there be people--ordinary people who had been living quite ordinary lives--who would behave as these people do? May the question remain theoretical: still, it nags.