L'Armee des Ombres DVD review
By John Seal
March 8, 2007
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I shoulda waited for that BFI disc
One of the finest films of the late 1960s, Jean-Pierre Melville's L'Armee des Ombres didn't get an American theatrical release until last year, and had never had a home video release in the United States until May 2007. In fact, until distributor Rialto Pictures dusted it off in 2006, the film had been nearly impossible to see anywhere since 1969, when it crashed and burned at the French box-office and was summarily consigned to the vaults for the better part of four decades. As of this writing (and pending Criterion's forthcoming release) Stateside film buffs still have only one home video option — a PAL disc for which you'll need a multi-format player—but rest assured, the investment is a worthwhile one, especially for neophytes such as myself who missed L'Armee des Ombres at the cinema.

Based on a wartime novel by Joseph Kessel — translated into English in 1944 for a long since out of print Cresset Press edition — the film details the activities of a resistance cell operating in Vichy France. Lino Ventura stars as Philippe Gerbier, an urbane maquis leader plotting against both the German occupiers and their collaborators in the Petain government. His co-conspirators include fast-thinking Mathilde (Simone Signoret), a callow youth known as 'le Masque' (Claude Mann), bulky hard man 'le Bison' (Christian Barbier), and handsome rake Felix (Jean-Pierre Cassel). When Felix is captured and tortured by the Germans, the cell's safety is compromised, and Mathilde masterminds an effort to rescue their comrade. The rescue mission fails, and the net begins to tighten around the remaining members, setting up a tragic finale that would still be considered anathema in most Hollywood features, and probably didn't help the film's box office performance in France either.

Melville, whose own wartime experiences in the Maquis deeply informed this film, frequently saw his work sink into oblivion on both sides of the Atlantic. With the notable exceptions of Bob le Flambeur (1955) and (arguably) Le Cercle Rouge (1970), his films have seen limited or no distribution in Anglophone territories. I have no personal knowledge of his other films — even the renowned nouvelle vague gangster epic Le Samourai has so far evaded me — but it's obvious from these three crime films that Melville used his art to examine his own feelings about his time spent in the underground. As renowned critic David Thomson astutely noted in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Melville "subtly turns the (criminal) underworld into the Resistance." In the eyes of the authorities, the protagonists in each of these films are villains, and counter-intuitively, that's most true of those in L'Armee des Ombres. The poker-faced Ventura's Phillippe is particularly memorable, his incautious loyalty to the cause matched only by that of Signoret's Mathilde, and Paul Meuresse is riveting in a small but critical role as the unseen controller of Gerbier's cell. Shot by Pierre Lhomme (King of Hearts, Le Divorce) and Walter Wottitz (John Frankenheimer's The Train), the film is suffused in cold steel blues that will have you shivering in empathy on your sofa. This is a film that feels frigid, damp, and musty.

Eager to see this much heralded feature and impatient as always, I whetted my appetite with a bare-bones Spanish DVD entitled El Ejercito de las Sombres. Though perfectly respectable in terms of print quality, this disc includes nothing more than the film itself, the original French trailer, and a not terribly interesting photo gallery. L'Armee des Ombres has since had a far more respectful release courtesy the British Film Institute, which features the same pristine print as well as an English-language commentary by Melville expert and Sight and Sound contributor Ginette Vincendeau, a 1945 documentary entitled Le Journal de la Resistance with narration by Noel Coward, a brief contemporaneous segment shot while the film was in production, and a nice booklet that reproduces Cahiers du Cinema's original review. The bulk of these features will also be included on Criterion's double disc set, but if you can't wait a moment longer and have a multi-format machine, the BFI disc is the way to go.