French films about the "Résistance" are few and far between, serious ones, that is ( I therefore exclude rubbish such as "Papy fait de la Résistance" and "Le Mur de l'Atlantique" ) - Whilst those made in the US and the UK were far better, this one "L'Armée des Ombres - Army of the Shadows, i.e. the underground resistance movement - does have some good moments.
The film has recently been restored and whilst the picture looks a bit better than in 1969, it has lost some of its brightness and there are overbearing yellowish/grey hues throughout the film which end up being rather depressing.
The strong point of this film is its actors - a magnificent selection of the great French actors of the time - Ventura, Meurisse, Signoret and to a lesser extent J-P Cassel. Their performances are spot-on.
Plotwise the film is very weak though, the story is disjointed, there is a sequence in London where a maximum of the surroundings are masked out ( but we get to see some double yellow lines - I m not sure whether those existed in 1943 !! ), Lino Ventura is not a talkative man at the best of times and there are many minutes of him not talking.
There are some hairy moments, the most notable being when the Nazis tell Ventura and his friends to start running down that dark passage - and they say they will let them get a head start before firing - but no explanation is given - makes for good suspense though ! Another futile expedition is that to recuperate Felix Leperq - what appears to be a suspenseful attempt to recuperate a Resistance leader from within a Kommandatur falls promptly flat on its face when the doctor says that the said person is dying and too ill to be moved ! So one asks what was it all for ! The film gives a gloomy and austere picture of the Resistance, a group of people who don't talk much, keep to themselves, we see little of their heroic acts and at the end have to painfully witness the assassination of Mathilde ( Signoret ) who is being blackmailed by the Nazis as regards her daughter. It's a very cruel world.
One gets the impression that these people obtain little through their actions and that their future is very bleak. I can only hope to believe that the real "Résistance" was a little more optimistic than this, if not, "God Save France" !! These good bits apart, the film is overlong with a lot of drab moments where nothing interesting happens, especially at the beginning.
I would recommend viewing of this at least once, with plenty of strong coffee to hand, if only for the magnificent performances put in by some of the greatest actors France has produced.
The film has recently been restored and whilst the picture looks a bit better than in 1969, it has lost some of its brightness and there are overbearing yellowish/grey hues throughout the film which end up being rather depressing.
The strong point of this film is its actors - a magnificent selection of the great French actors of the time - Ventura, Meurisse, Signoret and to a lesser extent J-P Cassel. Their performances are spot-on.
Plotwise the film is very weak though, the story is disjointed, there is a sequence in London where a maximum of the surroundings are masked out ( but we get to see some double yellow lines - I m not sure whether those existed in 1943 !! ), Lino Ventura is not a talkative man at the best of times and there are many minutes of him not talking.
There are some hairy moments, the most notable being when the Nazis tell Ventura and his friends to start running down that dark passage - and they say they will let them get a head start before firing - but no explanation is given - makes for good suspense though ! Another futile expedition is that to recuperate Felix Leperq - what appears to be a suspenseful attempt to recuperate a Resistance leader from within a Kommandatur falls promptly flat on its face when the doctor says that the said person is dying and too ill to be moved ! So one asks what was it all for ! The film gives a gloomy and austere picture of the Resistance, a group of people who don't talk much, keep to themselves, we see little of their heroic acts and at the end have to painfully witness the assassination of Mathilde ( Signoret ) who is being blackmailed by the Nazis as regards her daughter. It's a very cruel world.
One gets the impression that these people obtain little through their actions and that their future is very bleak. I can only hope to believe that the real "Résistance" was a little more optimistic than this, if not, "God Save France" !! These good bits apart, the film is overlong with a lot of drab moments where nothing interesting happens, especially at the beginning.
I would recommend viewing of this at least once, with plenty of strong coffee to hand, if only for the magnificent performances put in by some of the greatest actors France has produced.