Army of Shadows (1969)
"L'armée des ombres" (original title)

France, 1942, during the occupation. Philippe Gerbier, a civil engineer, is one of the French Resistance's chiefs. Given away by a traitor, he is interned in a camp. He manages to escape, ... See full summary »

Director:

Jean-Pierre Melville

Writers:

Joseph Kessel (novel), Jean-Pierre Melville (adaptation)

Stars:

Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel

3 wins.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Lino Ventura	...	Philippe Gerbier
Paul Meurisse	...	Luc Jardie
Jean-Pierre Cassel	...	Jean François Jardie
Simone Signoret	...	Mathilde
Claude Mann	...	Claude Ullmann dit 'Le Masque'
Paul Crauchet	...	Felix Lepercq
Christian Barbier	...	Guillaume Vermersch dit 'Le Bison'
Serge Reggiani	...	The hairdresser
André Dewavrin	...	Colonel Passy
Alain Dekok	...	Legrain
Alain Mottet	...	Commander of the camp
Alain Libolt	...	Paul Dounat
Jean-Marie Robain	...	Baron de Ferte Talloire
Albert Michel	...	Gendarm
Denis Sadier	...	Gestapo's doctor

Storyline

France, 1942, during the occupation. Philippe Gerbier, a civil engineer, is one of the French Resistance's chiefs. Given away by a traitor, he is interned in a camp. He manages to escape, and joins his network at Marseilles, where he makes the traitor be executed... This non-spectacular movie (do not expect any Rambo or Robin Hood) shows us rigorously and austerely the everyday of the French Resistants : their solitude, their fears, their relationships, the arrests, the forwarding of orders and their carrying out... Both writer Joseph Kessel and co-writer and director Jean-Pierre Melville belonged to this "Army in the Shadows".

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Plot Keywords:

traitor | civil engineer | camp | marseille | resistance | 

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Genres:

Drama | War

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Official Sites:

Rialto Pictures

Country:

France Italy

Language:

French German English

Release Date:

12 September 1969 (France)

Also Known As:

Army of Shadows

Filming Locations:

Avenue Hoche, Paris 8, Paris, France

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

$12,620 (USA) (28 April 2006)

Gross:

$741,733 (USA) (20 April 2007)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Les Films Corona, Fono Roma

Technical Specs

Runtime:

145 min

Sound Mix:

Mono Dolby Digital (2006 restoration)

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

For the shot depicting German soldiers marching down the Champs Elysees, Jean-Pierre Melville thought that it would be impossible to get regular Frenchmen to provide the proper marching movements. He ended up casting dancers to correctly provide the march steps he wanted from the soldiers. This shot was originally the last in the film and prints were sent to theaters with it in that place. After the first showings, Melville decided the scene was better placed at the start of the film and it was physically spliced into the new position. This apparently resulted in several missing frames in the negative. These frames were restored from another source when the 2005 digital restoration was accomplished.

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Goofs

When Gerbier is being taken to the concentration camp at the beginning of the film, and the guard driving the police van makes an unexpected stop at the house, it is clear that the rain is only falling in front of the camera and directly on the van. Only a few feet away, there are no raindrops hitting the mud or the puddles of water.

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Quotes

Jean François Jardie: She said five minutes, but she'll wait a lifetime.

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Connections

Referenced in The Icicle Thief (1989)

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Soundtracks

"Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter)"
(uncredited)
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

User Reviews

Recommended-now if only Bush, Blair et. al. could only see this they might learn something about patriotism

Today, watching a film like Mr.and Mrs. North (2005) or one of the Bourne or Mission Impossibles or any of the current crop of 'action' films up to and including the latest Kung Fu spectacular with invulnerable flying fighting machines, seems to have rendered the genre into a profitable degeneracy rendering the depiction of actual human beings or their cinematic similitude obsolete as cave paintings. That anyone could be entertained by the goings on of a Charlie's Angles movie puzzles me. I do know there is no audience for a genuine film detailing the lives and works of a genuine underground resistance like that of the French during the German Nazi occupation.

This might be the most mundane, matter-of-fact war movie since Robert Montgomery's overlooked masterpiece The Gallant Hours. This is because the people, patriots all, who rose to fight, were pretty ordinary people from rather prosaic walks of life. When it come to resisting a foreign tyranny in the form of an occupying army it isn't a bunch of professionally trained assassins who can be counted on but politically aware citizens who organize. These are ordinary people who had to rise to a situation. It is pure Existentialism.

This is a very spare, almost Jansenist version of the true story of the French Resistance. This Melville is, as usual, the opposite side of the coin from his twin, Robert Bresson. At one point the central character played by Lino Ventura, escapes by simply running away. He is helped along the way by a man who doesn't even mention the situation or his role in assisting. Its just done because that is what one does. The German's are hardly seen as this film is simply not about them. Each death, there are very, very few of them, is a moral and ethical agony. At least for the resistance. The torture scenes are all off camera.

Directoral moments are minimal, such as when Ventura buys a new suit and shoes and then must leave them behind. Its like what soldiers say about combat, extreme longueurs of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

The truth behind the story is that the German Gestapo commander, Klaus Barbie, the so called Butcher of Lyon, was a war criminal who was spirited out of Europe after the war by the US to train military regimes in South America in the techniques of torture that he perfected in France.

In one of the set pieces British STOL Lysander aircraft land to and take off to bring certain resistance members to London. This scene features the actual aircraft. This was particularly amazing as most Melville films suffer from budgetary constrictions which usually effect the realism of certain scenes (see the helicopter/train transfer in Un Flic) and there were possibly only two airworthy Lysanders at the time of the filming of L' Armée des ombres. The parachuting scene is also so nicely judged in its almost prosaic ordinariness, yet we know its still a jump into the seemingly limitless darkness, but which would aggravate the ADD generation. The dry, almost Islandic renderings of scenes, sometimes to the level of an Industrial film, reminds me of the flat rendering Truffaut did of simply fueling a car at a service station in Le Peau Douce. This is why Melville and Bresson were the honorary mentors of the New Wave. It was a further adaptation of Realism and neo-realism but with an awareness that at all times it was a film and therefore an adaption of reality but distorted only to make the truth more vivid.

It is a pity if, as I think, this film will fail to connect with a generation saturated on the super hero shenanigans of SFX dare-a-doings. One writer pointed out the ridiculousness of someone deliberately sending himself to prison in order to deliver a cyanide capsule, totally discounting true sacrifice for the type of action where the pretty actors manage to survive almost any cataclysm so that in the end, after the death of countless nameless and faceless minions and the elimination of the satanic villain-in-chief, while ankle deep in gore, they can have a nice chuckle. Hey babes, that's entertainment.

Looking at the restored version of L' Armée des ombres just emphasizes the death of film culture, not because there are no writers and directors who can make films like this but because there are no audiences for films like this. Highly recommended.