Around 1971 Jean-Pierre Melville said, “I sometimes read (I am thinking of the reviews after Le Samourai and Army of Shadows), ‘Melville is being Bressonian.’ I’m sorry, but it’s Bresson who has always been Melvillian.”
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Bresson spent nine months in a German internment camp in 1940-’41, before the occupation of France, and his imprisonment is alluded to in one of his greatest films, A Man Escaped (1956). Melville, born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, joined the resistance in the early 40s—changing his Jewish surname to Cartier and then Melville in homage to Herman Melville—and three of his 13 features, all made after the war, deal with the German occupation. The Silence of the Sea, from 1948, was his first feature, and Leon Morin, Priest, from 1961, was his biggest commercial success. But Army of Shadows, from 1969, is his only film about the resistance. It’s now opening in the U.S. for the first time and playing here at the Music Box. (This English title is vastly superior to two earlier ones, Army in the Shadows and The Shadow Army, because, as critic J. Hoberman points out, the title’s meaning is literal—all the soldiers in this army are doomed.)
Army of Shadows is based on a novel of the same title by Joseph Kessel (also the author of the source novel for Luis Bunuel’s very different Belle de Jour), which Melville first read in 1943 and which is said to be far more optimistic than the film. Like other features of his, it suggests that the extreme solitude of most of its characters can be explained by secret wounds—also a theme of one of his favorite movies, which he reportedly saw dozens of times, The Asphalt Jungle. It’s tempting to speculate on the biographical basis for this focus. Unlike Bresson, who kept much of his life concealed from public scrutiny, Melville was something of an exhibitionist who projected an invented persona—another way of hiding. (A record of this persona is the novelist Parvulesco in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which Melville played and acknowledged was himself.)
Directed and written by Jean-Pierre Melville
With Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret, Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, and Serge Reggiani.
