Made between two of Melville’s most acclaimed gangster films Le Samourai (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1970), The Army in the Shadows was released in France in the autumn of 1969, some 25 years after the country’s liberation. De Gaulle had now retired from power following a no confidence vote in a referendum, and Georges Pompidou had become the new president. The film was based on a book by Resistance member Joseph Kessel, which Melville had first read in London back in the summer of 1943, around the same time as he’d come across The Silence of the Sea. Melville’s The Army in the Shadows did not receive universal critical acclaim upon its initial release. The influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma wrote that ‘this is about the resistance as played and seen by the Gaullists – the first and most handsome example of Gaullist art, in both content and form’. [15] Yet viewed from a twenty-first century perspective, this hauntingly sombre film undermines many of the then dominant myths surrounding the Resistance, whilst commemorating the courage of its characters.
The Army in the Shadows follows a group of mainly middle-aged resistants, headed by Lino Ventura’s engineer Philippe Gerbier and also including a reclusive academic Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), a businesswoman Mathilde (Simone Signoret) and former pilot Jean-François Jaride (Jean-Pierre Cassel): so secretive are their identities that Jean-François doesn’t even know that his brother Luc is a member of the Resistance. The four month time period – between October 1942 and February 1943 – is also significant, because as Amy Taubin writes, ‘It is before the rise of the Maquis and the number of active resistance fighters was only in the hundreds.’ [16]
What’s noticeable here is the absence of spectacular heroism: we don’t witness any bridges or trains being blown up, Germans ambushed in gunfights or towns thrillingly recaptured. There are no stirring speeches or renditions of partisan songs. Instead Melville presents us with a twilight world in which the clandestine freedom-fighters seek to avoid capture and are forced to eliminate informants from their own ranks. In a particularly chilling early sequence in Marseilles, Gerbier and his colleagues, having posed as police officers, take the young traitor Dounat (Alain Libolt) to a safe house. In front of their terrified victim, the men discuss as to what is the best method of elimination: they end up tying him to a chair and strangling him with a tea towel.
From its opening unattributed epigraph (it’s actually from the playwright and novelist Georges Courtliness), ‘Bad memories, you are welcome…you are my distant youth’, The Army in the Shadows is suffused with a mood of pessimism and what Vincendau memorably calls ‘tragic futility’, [17] the funereal atmosphere only lightened by the interlude in London. According to Melville himself, ‘the film must resemble one of life’s truths. And that is man is always defeated.’ [18] Signoret’s Mathilde is eventually gunned down on the street by her colleagues, who fear that she might reveal information to the Germans in order to protect her daughter. And the roll-call in the final credits, which details the tragic fates of all the principal characters, is a moving illustration of Melville’s morbid credo.
Interspersed through The Army in the Shadows are a series of suspenseful set-pieces, which demonstrate Melville’s mastery of the cinematic medium: there’s Gerbier’s escape from the Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Majestic, the daring attempt carried out by Mathilde and two fellow resistants Le Masque (Claude Mann) and Le Bison (Christian Barbier) to rescue their tortured comrade Felix (Paul Crauchet) by posing as a German ambulance crew, and the rescue of Gerbier from an enemy ‘shooting gallery’. Melville however isn’t weighed down by expectations of being faithful to historical ‘realism’. Save for the opening images of Wehrmacht soldiers marching in time to military music in front of the Arc de Triomphe, and then turning on to an empty Champs-Élysées to face the camera, Germans are almost entirely absent from the drama. As with Bresson’s A Man Escaped, what’s important here for the filmmaker is conveying the spirit of the Resistance. Thus when the taciturn Gerbier faces almost certain execution by firing squad in a Lyon jail, we learn from his voice-over his thoughts: “I am going to die and I’m not afraid… It is because I’m too limited, too much of an animal to believe it. But if I don’t believe it until the last possible moment, until the ultimate limit, I shall never die. What a discovery!” [18b]
Vincendau persuasively argues that The Army in the Shadows in visual terms resembles one of Melville’s gangster pictures. Hence the overcast palette of greys and chilly blues, the purposefully restrained performances and the concentration on such iconographic details as hats, guns and cars, whilst the moral boundaries between right and wrong become ever blurred. The resistants adopt tactics that are not dissimilar to the German occupiers – see the way Dounat is eliminated above. At a time when audiences would have been familiar with representations of ‘good’ Frenchmen and ‘bad’ Germans, here was a film revealing some uncomfortable truths about what it took to survive in the Resistance. Moreover in depicting Vichy-run internment camps that had originally been built for the expected German prisoners-of-war and gendarmes profiting from black-marketeering, The Army in the Shadows paved the way for the likes of The Sorrow and the Pity and Lacombe Lucien, which did so much to shatter the Gaullist resistancialist myth.
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