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L' Armée des Ombres - Army of Shadows (1969 - Jean-Pierre Melville)
Fantastic "lost" entry from Melville that stands as tall as anything in his career. Army of Shadows is a look at a few months of The Resistance in occupied France in late '42 and early '43. Lino Ventura stars as a middle-aged seemingly mild-mannered engineer who is actually a wiley and cooly determined higher up in The Resistance. The members of his cell include Paul Crauchet, Claude Mann, Christian Barbier, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Simone Signoret, plus the leader of the entire operation who he reports to, played by Diabolique's Paul Meurisse. We follow them through various missions and escapes from the clutches of The Gastapo and The Vichy, doing what they can to establish an underground network and defeat the Nazis. They are smart, careful and resourceful, and they all agree the real glue of the operation is Signore's Mathilde, a housewife turned cunning espionage agent. The couple action sequences are tense and extremely well choreographed and even reach Hitchockian levels of suspense, but mostly this is a quiet character piece about a small group of courageous patriots doing what they can under the dire circumstances of war. These are not a muscled, square-jawed bunch of commandos, but ordinary people thrust into extraordinay events. It's a different and very effective take on wartime mission flicks like The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare.
This one has "lost" status because though it was released in France in 1969, somehow it had gone completely unreleased in the United States for the past thirty-seven years (it wasn't even released in the U.K. until the late 1970s). Thankfully it has made it's belated debut, and the restored film is a time-capsuled treat for movie fans. Made at the tail end of Melville's career when he was in his gangster cycle of Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic, this one deserves all the reputation and accolades of those better known works.
GRADE: A-
L' Armée des Ombres - Army of Shadows (1969 - Jean-Pierre Melville)
Fantastic "lost" entry from Melville that stands as tall as anything in his career. Army of Shadows is a look at a few months of The Resistance in occupied France in late '42 and early '43. Lino Ventura stars as a middle-aged seemingly mild-mannered engineer who is actually a wiley and cooly determined higher up in The Resistance. The members of his cell include Paul Crauchet, Claude Mann, Christian Barbier, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Simone Signoret, plus the leader of the entire operation who he reports to, played by Diabolique's Paul Meurisse. We follow them through various missions and escapes from the clutches of The Gastapo and The Vichy, doing what they can to establish an underground network and defeat the Nazis. They are smart, careful and resourceful, and they all agree the real glue of the operation is Signore's Mathilde, a housewife turned cunning espionage agent. The couple action sequences are tense and extremely well choreographed and even reach Hitchockian levels of suspense, but mostly this is a quiet character piece about a small group of courageous patriots doing what they can under the dire circumstances of war. These are not a muscled, square-jawed bunch of commandos, but ordinary people thrust into extraordinay events. It's a different and very effective take on wartime mission flicks like The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare.
This one has "lost" status because though it was released in France in 1969, somehow it had gone completely unreleased in the United States for the past thirty-seven years (it wasn't even released in the U.K. until the late 1970s). Thankfully it has made it's belated debut, and the restored film is a time-capsuled treat for movie fans. Made at the tail end of Melville's career when he was in his gangster cycle of Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic, this one deserves all the reputation and accolades of those better known works.
GRADE: A-