I have not seen many films by Jean-Pierre Melville because of their lack of availability in the United States, a phenomena that seems supremely mysterious to me since his one-of-a-kind brand of Modernist art-house gangster stories seems like they would be widely appealing somewhat in a manner similar to that of Chabrol’s thrillers. After viewing a restored print of Meville’s opaque ode to Résistance frustrations and tragedies, Army of Shadows (1969, finally getting its first release ever in the U.S.), I come up with the same reaction I had to the director’s 1970 film Le Cercle Rouge. Namely, that Melville cannot, or perhaps does not want to, tell a story. The film is oddly episodic, following the dealings of an electrical engineer turned Résistance puppet master, Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura). Instead of a conventionally arching story structure, Melville combines two elements he excels at better than almost any other director: oppressively palpable tonal atmosphere, via mise-en-scène, and what could be called “sequence” creation, the extended temporal and spatial exploration of a singular event (think of Jef’s evasion of the police through the Metro in Le Samourai, 1967; the jewel robbery in Le Cercle Rouge; and the helicopter-train heist in Un Flic, 1972). But the film is not made up entirely of these sequences, nor is it a string of sequences bridged by moody atmospheric interludes, and the elusive nature of the film, upon first viewing, may be why I was not as impressed by it as I expected. At the same time, the difficulty in grounding the film in a simple three-act story exemplifies what I identify as the movie’s principle power or driving idea: the pursuit of an ambiance rife with paranoia, uncertainty, ambiguity, and disappointment. Because of the Résistance setting, to an unparalleled degree, Melville explores the political and historical ramifications of his sequences, which grant them a power and a meaning for the film’s characters that usually seems very insular in the director’s other films, as if their actions were dictated only by the criminals and the cops’ interior system of codes and honor. As such, Army of Shadows is a crucial film in the Melville oeuvre, as it lends to the director’s formal mastery a historical and emotional resonance that, perhaps, traces a connection from the actions of those in the Résistance to the actions of Melville’s various other, apolitical protagonists. The following descriptions will hopefully explore the film’s dedication to the paranoid, conspiratorial, and unbelievably perilous atmosphere of the Résistance. The enumeration will, obviously and inevitably, include spoilers.

I. Escape from the Gestapo

Before Gerbeir is able to escape the prison camp he is being held at, the Gestapo escorts him to their headquarters. Before Gerbeir is led into the headquarters, Melville provides an establishing shot of a clock inside the hotel-like interior. He pans from the clock to the hyper-ornate tubes and cords of a telephone operator’s switchboard. Gerbeir is led from an adjoining hallway through this room, and placed on a bench in a small alcove at the end of the hallway, past the switchboard. He is seated on the bench next to a quiet man. Facing them, and next to the glass door into the telephone room, is a Wehrmacht soldier. Gerbeir and the anonymous man exchange looks. It is not clear why Gerbeir has been brought here, nor where exactly he is; in turn, the man on the bench is likewise a mystery. In a moment when the soldier is distracted, Gerbeir whispers in tight close-ups only a few words to the man next to him, saying that he will ask the guard a question, allowing the man to run out the front door. Melville cuts to a shot behind the men’s bench, with their bodies in-between the camera and the soldier. Slowly, the camera tracks in a semi-circle to the right, ending up behind and slightly to the left of the soldier, who is now facing the men on the bench. The only sound on the soundtrack is the footsteps of Wehrmacht patrols and the ticking of the clock in the telephone room. Gerbeir and his anonymous partner share several silent looks, sometimes in close-up, sometimes from this medium shot distance. The tension, rooted in the question of who this anonymous man sitting next to our hero is and whether he will perform correctly, or at all, is unbearable. Each seems to be waiting for the other to do something. Finally, Gerbier slowly gets to his feet, comes towards the soldier and the camera, and asks for a cigarette. Suddenly he lunges forward; Melville quick-cuts to an insert of a hand pulling a knife out of the soldier’s sheath, followed by an equally quick cut back to the original behind-the-soldier shot, of Gerbeir shoving the knife under the man’s jaw, allowing his body to sink to the ground. The man on the bench runs out the door and through the telephone room, gunshots are heard. Gerbeir hesitates, and then follows, but goes out a different way than he came in. Gunshots and machine guns are heard continuously. Cut to an exterior of the building, where more gunshots and Gerbeir’s sightline imply that the man from the bench ran, and was pursued, off-screen right; Gerbeir thereby flees off-screen left in several thrilling tracking shots along a night-cloaked street peppered by snow. It seems to me that while Gerbeir wished this man “good luck,” he was in fact using him as a human decoy for his own escape. The idea, nor even the man’s identity, is ever confirmed, and it is this unspoken and mostly implied ambiguity of sacrifice and subterfuge that invests Army of Shadows with its most subtle power. This sequence is followed by another, shorter but no less tense, where Gerbeir hides in a barbershop and gets shaven by a razor by the barber who, it is clear, know what Gerbeir is up to. In Melvillian fashion, instead of turning our hero in, the barber gives Gerbeir a trench coat, which, along with the Stetson, is the emblem of professionalism and cool. (Later, when an Résistance member is abducted, his hat is knocked off and left on the street.)


II. Death of a traitor

Gerbeir’s escape is followed by an unusual ellipsis that jumps to our hero and his crew abducting a young Résistance member who apparently is a traitor. We are never told exactly what he did nor exactly how Gerbeir and his crew knows he is guilty. Their trip to a the site of execution is notably shown in a dreamy car scene where the back-projection is of an unclear and overcast background that makes it seem like they are drifting through clouds or a fog bank. At the abandoned house, Gerbeir and his crew lead the traitor into a room covered in faded wallpaper and filled only with a folded mattress. This one of two kinds of emblematic rooms Melville generally has in this films, the minimal dilapidation of anonymous and unused middle-class apartments and houses, or the equally vacuous but more polished interiors of higher class establishments (like the Gestapo headquarters). The young boy presses himself against the far wall of the room, in a space between two windows. It is discovered that a family has moved in next door and, the walls being paper thin, they cannot shoot the boy to death. The men debate over the best way to kill him up close, bringing up the idea of a knife but dismissing it with horror. If the men are discomforted over their inability to kill easily, the boy becomes positively terrified as the men talk both nonchalantly and with considerable moral queasiness over the most effective way of killing the youth. Upset, he collapses on the discarded mattress, while the men fetch a chair, a towel, and a wooden stick from the kitchen. Despite the haphazard nature of the execution, it is carried out in a methodical and almost formal manner: the boy is seated on the chair, one man holds his legs, one man holds his arms, and a third pulls the towel around his neck, tightening it by twisting the stick in a circular motion. Melville does not show the strangling, showing instead the forceful positions of Gerbeir and his crew, but it is the deadened soundtrack, filled only with muffed, struggling sobs, that tells that audience what is happening. As the sobs continue, Melville finally cuts to a close-up of the youth, whose dead eyes are open and look out at nothing, a tear having run and fallen down each cheek. His head holds this position for a second, and then tips and falls down to his chest. But the sobbing sound continues, and the director cuts to a high-angle shot showing one of the men kneeling at the traitor’s feet in order to hold him down: it was he who was making all the noise, not, apparently, the dying boy. Melville cuts to a long shot of the three men in the room variously placed around the seated, dead traitor. This is followed by the same shot of the slumped boy’s head, which the strangler tips backward into an upright position. This shot, like the one of the crying eyes of the dead and the long shot of all the men, has an iconic quality of spiritual portraiture, like the look of Jef Costello dying at the end of Le Samourai. This sequence should be held up along side Hitchcock’s blackly comedic scene of the death of Gromek in Torn Curtain, released three years previously, which played with the idea of how physically difficult it was to kill a man. Melville amends the idea by showing not only how difficult physically it is, but how difficult covertly, and most importantly, how difficult morally it is.

III. Foiled rescue

Later in the film, after not one but two of Gerbeir’s comrades is captured, tortured, and held at the Gestapo headquarters, his team organizes an escape attempt. I will not go into detail as to this human-heist sequence, which involves the team dressing up as hospital transporters and arranging for a false transfer of the prisoner, but suffice to say it is directed and enacted in a manner as precise and methodical as the previous sequences, paced for maximum ambiguity and suspense. The difference, however, is that the plan does not work. And it is not even that they are discovered; rather, the doctor on duty orders that the prisoner is too hurt to be moved. Thus Melville has constructed an ornate sequence that collapses in on itself, and not even in dramatic failure but in the most banal manner. Details abound in the decidedly ambiguous tone of the film: someone notices a picture of Gerbeir on a most-wanted poster, it takes an incredible amount of time for the various guards and doctors to approve the crew’s entrance into the prison, the two prisoners only have one cyanide capsule between them. The centerpiece of the sequence is the brutally beaten and demented faces of the two prisoners, whose unrecognizable visages serve as images of the fatalistic inevitability of, in the long run, Gerbeir’s organization, and in the short run, of this incredibly risky and time consuming heist sequence. Thus the abortion and anti-climactic nature of this centerpiece of dramatic (in)action is emblematic of the film’s portrayal of the disappointments and sacrifices of the Résistance.


IV. Rescue before execution

Gerbeir is captured again by the Gestapo while he is eating are a restaurant, which the police raid because if its use of black-market food. The next sequence is in a cavernous Nazi prison cell with several other men, and it is entirely unclear whether Gerbeir is being held with the rest of the people who were eating in the restaurant or if he has been identified as a Résistance leader. Gerbeir pulls out a crumpled back of cigarettes, counts them, looks around the room, and tosses the pack to the man next to him. In a series of cuts, Melville shows each man as he receives the pack or the lighter, and ends up on the man on the other side of Gerbeir, who takes the last cigarette, leaving Gerbeir with none. It is difficult to determine if Melville’s direct showing of each of these men in this manner is out of compassion or of suspicion; the seemingly callous behavior of the last man in the circle points to possible suspicion, in the same manner as in Sam Fuller’s later The Big Red One (1980), where a Nazi spy is outted when he sups with several American soldiers and a Belgian woman notices the specific way he eats. Instead, a guard comes to tell them they must be ready to get going, and the tone of the scene deepens and darkens immediately, as, somehow without saying it, it becomes clear every one of these men is going to be executed. They are led down a hallway, whereupon Gerbeir has flashbacks to brief scenes seen previously in the movie (one of which has yet to come, bizarrely). The men are placed in a the middle of long concrete corridor, at one end of which are two German MG42 machine guns, and the other end a bullet ridden wall. The officer in charge tells them they will give the prisoners a sporting head start, and the last man who makes it to the wall alive will win the honor of being amongst the next set of prisoners to be executed in a similar manner. In voiceover Gerbeir tells himself he will not run; when the officer gives the signal all but he bolt off the line, but once the officer starts shooting the ground beneath his feet, he bolts too. Machinegun fire traces the ground and an explosion is heard—the space behind Gerbeir, where the Germans are, is suddenly obscured by smoke. He keeps running but a smoke grenade has exploded in front of him, and, a wave of black fog pouring forward, his aborted, stunned momentum makes him stumble backwards. In the moment of bewilderment he is shot twice. A rope is dangled into the corridor, and the injured Gerbeir climbs up, and is finally pulled to the roof of the prison by one of his crew. Continued machine gun fire is heard as Gerbeir escapes by car. Presumably all the other men were killed, and no attempt to help them escape was made by the Résistance team.


V. Inactivity and execution

After his escape Gerbeir is deposited at an abandoned house in order to lay low and recuperate from his wounds. Although he spends most of his time writing a report based on his imprisonment and escape, in voiceover he acknowledges his uselessness while squirreled away. Finally the “boss” arrives, a man above Gerbeir. Although his “bossness” is never defined, we have seen him decorated by De Gaulle. The boss informs Gerbeir that a key member of their organization, Mathilde, who also helped organize Gerbeir’s escape, has been arrested and blackmailed, using threats against her daughter, into giving up members of the Résistance. Rescue is impossible, as the Germans will still harm the girl, so the two decide on assassinating their comrade instead. Two members of Gerbeir’s (and Mathilde’s) crew arrive and deliver the news that Mathilde has been released and that two members of the team are dead. Gerbeir says they must kill the informant, a crewmember revolts, and the boss steps in and convinces the crew, using nebulous information, that murdering Matthilde is a rational and much needed act. They all leave the house, and the next scene is of all the surviving members, including the boss and Gerbeir, driving in a car, happening upon Mathilde on the street, and gunning her down. The final act in the film, the culmination after the disappointments of an aborted rescue, an imprisonment and immobilization, and finally three weeks of useless inactivity, is therefore the murder of one of their own.

As can be seen, the work accomplished by Gerbeir and his Résistance team in Army of Shadows is, at best, about survival rather than subversion. From what I recall, in the film they accomplish only one positive act, in that they assist some downed fliers of various Allied nationalities in getting back to London. However, this activity also served the double purpose of getting the boss to that city in order to be awarded a medal from De Gaulle. As such, even though Melville’s style intrinsically romanticizes its protagonists through the steely, professional cool by which they carry out their actions, and also in the steadfastness of adhering to their codes of behavior, this film de-romanticizes the Résistance to some degree by downplaying the actual active effect of its members. Instead, what interests the film, beyond the aforementioned elaborations of the Melvillian world and characters onto a political scenario, is the pervasive possibly of betrayal, sacrifice, frustration, and ineffectiveness amongst even the closest members of the Résistance team. There is little to no stability of information or comfort in the film, and it seems like anyone’s behavior or motivations in any given scene are suspect, even those of Gerbeir.

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