A 1969 French film examining patriotism that's just now debuting in the U.S. may be among the greatest movies ever made.
Jean-Pierre Melville's brilliant 1969 movie about the ragtag Resistance movement during WWII gets its very first exposure to American audiences today, with new subtitles from Rialto Pictures.
It's a white-knuckler all the way, with most of that tension coming from the smallest facial expressions exchanged in uneasy silence between compatriots who knew what they were getting into, but were nevertheless unprepared for the moral and emotional fallout of their patriotic actions. Almost 40 years after it was made, has more to tell us about the internal toll of war and taking a stand than anything Hollywood has produced.

One of the great pleasures of being a young moviegoer is sifting through the boundless treasure of movies that were made long ago, perhaps before you were born, pictures that have found a fresh audience year after year, decade after decade. The problem is that whenever you find something that particularly excites you– it could be "Breathless" or "The Rules of the Game" or "The Bicycle Thief" -- there's always some smarty-pants type around who's eager to remind you that he or she got to it first: "Oh, I saw that 20 years ago, when I was in college," these people say, as if to grab credit for having made some grand discovery. That been-there, done-that spiel, aside from being purely annoying, makes it seem as if there are no "new" classics to discover. Everything great has been seen by someone, somewhere, before.

Then again, maybe not. Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows," the story of a group of men (and one woman) working for the French resistance, was released in France in 1969. It received a lukewarm critical reception there, and was never released in the United States. Even American moviegoers who know Melville's other pictures – like the somber-elegant 1970 gangster film "Le Cercle Rouge" or the brilliant 1967 end-of-an-era, end-of-a-man noir "Le Samourai" –may barely be aware of its existence.