Melville was renown for his stylish, oft-referenced gangster films. Neil Jordan remade Melville's deliciously witty Bob le flambeur as The Good Thief with Nick Nolte, and Jim Jarmusch credits the Alain Delon starrer Le Samourai as inspiration for his Forest Whitaker led Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samourai.
This picture takes place in the early 1940's and follows several members of the French Resistance against the Nazi occupiers and collaborating Vichy puppet government. These are ordinary adults forced by circumstance and conviction to be calculating, paranoid, deft and brutal in ways they never would have been in a normal world. It is based on a novel by Joseph Kessel actually written in 1943, and Melville himself was a member of the French Underground during that period, as a very young man.
Consequently, the movie reeks of authenticity. While it has been described elsewhere as a thriller, Melville eschewed that description, and while the sustained suspense is often unbearable, the picture moves at a somewhat careful pace. By the end the viewer is forced to recognize exactly how much of a death trip these characters are on, that their reserved Gallic manner belies the enormity of their personal risk, and it continues to haunt days later.
I was reminded of three other films in particular by Army of Shadows, the first of which is Roberto Rossellini's masterpiece of Italian Fascist resistance, Rome, Open City. Rossellini made his version just moments after the war ended, and it begins with shots of marching soldiers actually taken on the sly before the Liberation. For all the wonderful critical writing on the movie I would want a potential viewer to know that it moves relatively quickly, more of an actual thriller than Melville's, a little bit like history written with lightning. Both films have that dead-seriousness of purpose, as only those who participated in the pivotal struggle against tyranny in their very own countries might know.
I was also reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, a 1966 East-West espionage tale set in Copenhagen during the height of the Cold War. Hitchcock's picture is much less successful, but the cold dark blues in the cinematography are similar, an icy world of perilous secrets and glacial intentions, and both films have a protracted murder scene that makes the act feel far more real than 99% of movies ever made.
Lastly, I found myself thinking a lot about Steven Spielberg's recent masterpiece (yes, masterpiece), Munich. Both films take the ostensibly benign Europe of agreeable everyday culture and desirable tourism, and use these locations as the bare surface for a primal, subterranean game. In both pictures morals are by necessity compromised, in both pictures the ground can suddenly cave in under a major character's feet and does, repeatedly.
Moreover, both pictures are fundamentally honest about the cost of engagement. Just like in Munich, Melville is steadfast that the intentions of the Resistance members, the absolute need for a response, are morally justified. At the same time, both filmmakers are clear that compromises in pursuit of such goals end up being made at every level. In Munich the protagonist finds himself going off on homicidal side quests that have little to do with the original mission; in Army of Shadows the closest of comrades must be murdered for the cause to go on.
Call me incorrigible but I think that theme has a whole lot of relevance for our times. If only the folks that see this exceptional movie would be the ones who need it the most.
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