Customer Rating: 
Summary: I WILL SAY THIS ONLY ONCE
Comment: "Army in the Shadows" or "Army of Shadows?" - I'never known which is the correct translation. Melville's greatest and my favourite movie of all time (currently!) A film about a small group of French resistance agents over a short period of time during the Second World War. One of the film's greatest angles is equating the activities of a clandestine patriotic organisation with those of the criminal underworld and how the skills of one can be socially useful (or not) depending on the circumstances. See also Fritz Lang's "M" which pretty much makes the same comparison but in a different way. Greatest moment for me is when the great Lino Ventura goes to London and ironically shows fear for the first - and only - time of the movie when caught in an air-raid. His fear is contrasted with the indifference of those who had experienced the "routine" of such random attacks over a lengthy period of time. Whether such indifference really happened is another matter - but hey this is the movies - not real life! Whatever that is. As a director I'd put Melville ahead of Lang, Fuller and Ray although I know plenty who would disgree!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cinematic ideal
Comment: Now why would you want to see L'ARMÉE DES OMBRES (or ARMY OF SHADOWS, or ARMY IN THE SHADOWS)?
Do you appreciate beautiful visuals? Jean-Pierre Melville possessed a truly cinematic eye. His characters are part of a setting but they don't get lost in it (unless he wants them lost, for effect). And here he worked with his cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, to produce a blue-tinged world too exquisitely lit to be grim and ugly. This is a visual masterpiece of mood.
How about an honest story of the French Resistance? Not too romantic, nor too cynical? Melville was in the Resistance. So was the writer of the novel that this is based on. Here, Resistance fighters are presented as brave, and frightened. As self-sacrificing, yet pragmatic. As diverse, and single-minded. As successful, or frustrated. As doomed. As hopeful.
Do you like depth of character? This is not an action film. Very little violence is shown. This is a story of the lives between the violence where most of the time is spent. Where suspense dogs each Resistance member's footsteps. Where secrecy, even from family, is the way of life.
Do you like something thoughful? The effect of this film's quiet, deliberate pacing is intellectual - not just emotional. I didn't lose myself entirely in the fatalism of the Resistance fighters' circumstances. There was a sane, comforting person befriending me. And his name was Jean-Pierre Melville.
This was the first Melville film that I had seen. It was like the splash of cold water. This long-lost auteur created a movie that is as close to my cinematic ideal as I'll ever find.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Blue Movie
Comment: "LArmee Des Ombres' is a blue film, blue like early 20th. century Picasso paintings, as blue as a Billie Holiday torch song. Set over a year in Occupied France, Melville, like his name sake offers a polylogical view of the confinement of a nation ( we are afforded the intimacy of more than one point of view by the director's use of voice overs), a confinement in familiar surroundings, a homeland no longer deserving of the name, and it this uncanny sense of space that adds the weight of art to his view of the world set apart from time but not history.
Melville has captured a distinct sense of melancholy, the melancholy that Freud so brilliantly analysis es. His shadow army, seen from the distance of twenty years, inhabits his melancholic vision, a world lost but forever present in the psyche of France. This melancholia, that affords a critical distance is especially important for the central character Gerbier (Lino Ventura), perfectly realised by Ventura who in his acting exemplifies the withdrawl of melancholy, it is as though the actor creates the scintilla of distance between himself and the character he plays and it is just this space that allows us to enter into Meville's penumbrated world. And not just Gerbier but the other characters, Felix (Paul Crauchet), for all the world Magritte's perpetual man in the street, bowler-hatted and just this side of absurd, Simone Signoret's haunting and memorable Mathilde a woman perpetually at the edge of an unasked question, this troupe are positioned in the mise en scene like sentient chess pieces waiting for the hand of fate to deal them their inevitable heroic ends.
Melville's camera, deftly deployed by Pierre L'homme, drifts and prowls in the long blue night of France's principle cities, a cartographer of the invisible gaze. There is throughout the sense of a world under scrutiny, never before have I so keenly been made aware of what it might mean to always assume that you are watched. Even when in the open, the film alternates between the city and the countryside, both equally desolate as though expressing the emptiness of the people caught in this struggle, the rain swept, blue tinged meadows have the strange quality of something under investigation.
Made in the 60s and sometimes accused of an apology for Gaullism, it is a film that has not yet ready to mourn, it is as though Melville has caught the world of shadows, not the shadows of light but the shadows of the not yet lost, a film that calls to the past in a desire to understand the moment in time when people must act beyond their own sense of themselves, even when they acknowledge their own mortal stupidity. There are two moments when the two central characters, only central because they bear the weight of self-recognition, Gerbier and Mathilde, confront their existential reality, at these moments Melville allows us to peek into the soul, both actors offer us a version of that moment when we accidentally catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror and mistake the image for someone else.
I wonder if this film, in the 60s at least, didn't have the same effect on the French audience, maybe all great art achieves this, Melville's certainly does, a blue vision of ourselves in the shadowed night, touching, yet completely lacking in sentimentality, classical in construction, yet challenging, a masterpiece.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A grim, austere masterpiece of the French resistance during World War II, by Jean-Pierre Melville
Comment: "...but I'm going to die and I'm not afraid. It's impossible not to be afraid of dying. But I'm too stubborn, too much of an animal to believe it. If I don't believe it to the very last moment, the last split second, I'll never die." This is Philippe Gerbier speaking. The time is between October, 1942 and February, 1943. He's the leader of a resistance cell in German-occupied France. He was an engineer. Now he is a hard man of skeptical intelligence. He kills a German guard with a knife to the throat so quickly and so unexpectedly it's nerve rattling. In Jean-Pierre Melville's austere, somber Army of Shadows, we follow what happens to Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and a handful of others, primarily Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), a weak-seeming intellectual who turns out to be the head of resistance in France; Jean François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel), Luc Jardie's younger brother; and the remarkable Mathilde (Simone Signoret), resourceful with icy nerves, a woman, Gerbier tells us, who is "strong-willed, methodical and patient. She knows both how to command and how to carry out orders." For four months we watch them operating in a claustrophobic environment of matter-of-fact violence, the realities of betrayal, hiding and planning, a life without humor and only cautious trust, and above all else, the goal of killing Germans. That also means the need to kill informers, no matter how young or how respected. They will all probably die.
The movie is really a series of incidents that happen during these four months and how this group must respond: a prison camp and an escape, a shave from a barber who might be a Petainist, the killing of a young informer in an empty house when three of the resistance, including Gerbier, discover they cannot use a gun, there is no knife and finally they decide to use a towel to strangle the man. All the while, gagged and tied, the informer can hear them discuss the problem. This will be the first time any of the three have ever killed a man, and they do it. There's Mathilde's nerve in smuggling a radio through a German cordon, and her attempt to rescue a Resistance comrade from a prison where he has been tortured. There's the death of one of the four, carried out by three. Briefly, at the very end, we read of what happened to the members of this group...a cyanide pill, a beheading, tortured to death, survived. The ending is logical and incredibly sad.
One of the most effective aspects of this movie is how it concentrates on this small group of people. There are no explosions, gun fights, beatings and torture scenes, no gore, no bravado. In fact, there are comparatively few Germans. What there is is the unremitting pressure of discovery, of making a mistake, of tension, of never being able to relax. All the main characters were based on members of the French resistance. The actors are excellent. Lino Ventura dominates his scenes. Signoret is incredible.
This is tragedy, not melodrama, says Amy Taubin, author of an article which appears in the Criterion booklet. When that last note on the screen is finished, we feel exhausted. We have to remind ourselves that the right side won. Otherwise, I, at least, would feel not just respect for these men and women, but also deeply pessimistic. We've gotten to know them. Not to like them; they are too grim and dedicated for that, but to understand them to a degree. We know that if they had never existed there would have been others in their place. But I came to understand that I probably would never have had the fatalism, the nerves or the courage to undertake what they did.
Army of Shadows was shot in color, but the effect has been so deliberately muted that the movie looks as chilly and overcast as the time period.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Grim Story
Comment: The film is based on a book purporting to be a true story of the French Resistance during the occupation. Apart from an escape sequence that strains credulity, this may well be so. The necessary ruthlessness of the Resistance is not disguised, there is a manual strangulation of a collaborator and the shooting of a loved and respected colleague exposed to blackmail by the Nazis. It should be seen by anyone interested in the period. The name Melville is a guarantee of taut and skilful direction.
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![L'Armee Des Ombres [1969]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51g-U%2BfyTFL._SL160_.jpg)
