Melville--but not that Melville

Jean-Pierre Grumbach so loved things American (particularly its movies) that he changed his last name to Melville, and it's under that name that he directed a brilliant series of movies about the French underworld of killers and thieves, including four of his last five movies. The series begins with perhaps the best of them, Le Samourai, starring Alain Delon as a contract killer with his own code (the movie is also important because it forms another link in the stylistic chain of fashionable criminals from Gun Crazy to Face/Off). The movie not about criminals in that group of five is 1969's Army of Shadows, a film about the early French resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II. It was not shown in the United States until last year, and when it was, it was hailed as a lost classic. Criterion recently issued a characteristically outstanding DVD of the restored film, and having seen it, I have to agree with the general consensus.

At first, though, it's hard to understand why. Most movies about a resistance movement are chiefly engaged in generating suspense, yet Melville is so methodical, almost architectural in building his scenes, that little tension is generated. What then becomes interesting is character.

In one scene, the active leader of the small cell of resistance fighters has been captured by the police and is about to be shot without trial. A long scene in a jail cell shows him distributing the last of his cigarettes to his fellow prisoners; as the camera follows the pack around the cell, we see from each prisoner's face how he will face death. They are summoned from the cell, and during their slow journey to the death-room, the leader meditates on how he will face death. Their shackles are deliberately removed; the guards leave them; they face a machine-gun some 50 feet away. They are told to run in the opposite direction: the first one who reaches the wall will be spared until the next execution. The leader refuses to run, until the German officer shoots at his feet. He runs; stops because of smoke bombs that bar his path; notices a rope hanging from a side wall; escapes. As they are driving off, one thought dominates his mind--that the German officer knew he would run.

All this is presented almost clinically, almost--dare I say it?--existentially. The escape is as surprising to us as it is to the leader, but it's not exhilirating in any sense. In fact, we realize that if he hadn't run, he would have been dead. By displaying courage, he would have doomed himself. The movie is full of moments like this, where we are forced to evaluate motives, causality, character.

What is trust? What is true loyalty? Can a mathematics of morality be achieved? These are the questions Melville asks in this somber movie about ombres, and indeed, throughout his crime pictures as well.