Army of Shadows (1969)

When I wrote about the novel Army of Shadows by Joseph Kessel, which is the basis for the film, I mentioned that it would take me a while to see the film. Even though I am writing the blog articles about the novel and the film back-to-back, I didn’t see the film immediately after reading the novel. The novel is a tough read; it doesn’t shy away from wartime violence and the hardships endured by people making life-or-death choices. The film follows the novel quite closely, and I’m glad I waited a bit to see it.

Click here to see my article about the novel Army of Shadows.

The film starts with a shot of l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. A marching parade starts in the distance, in the far background of the shot. As the marchers and band get closer to the camera, viewers can see that the marchers are German soldiers. The sequence ends with a still shot of the soldiers closest to the camera, and the triumphant band music plays on. The effect is a bit of a shock even today.

The opening credits appear over a shot of fields in the rain. The date “October 20, 1942,” appears over the image of a truck driving down a road through the fields after the credits. The truck is carrying a prisoner, Philippe Gerbier, to an internment camp. But German soldiers or Gestapo agents are not the ones who are driving. Two French gendarmes (police officers) are in charge, and they are taking Gerbier to the camp.

Once at the internment camp, Gerbier and another prisoner, a communist named Legrain, start planning an escape. But Gerbier is taken away by car before the plan can be carried out. Gerbier is taken to the Hotel Majestic, now the headquarters for German officers. Gerbier and another prisoner wait in the lobby under the guard of a German soldier. Gerbier asks the guard something, grabs his knife, and slits his throat. The other prisoner is off before Gerbier, which actually makes Gerbier’s escape easier because the other soldiers in the hotel go after the other prisoner first.

The film follows the novel in style: The narrative cuts from one story to another, sometimes without resolving what happens to some of the characters. For instance, viewers never know what happens to the nameless prisoner who escapes the Hotel Majestic at the same time as Gerbier. Both the novel and the film probably approximate the experience of many, if not all, of the underground resistance fighters. People come into and go out of their lives, and they never know what becomes of most of them. The same is true of many of the characters in the novel, and it happens in the film, too; in the film, however, viewers sometimes know more than the characters.

(This article about Army of Shadows contains spoilers.)

Paul Dounat is a resistance fighter who has betrayed his fellow fighters. He is the reason Gerbier was imprisoned in the internment camp in the first place. Dounat is picked up by Gerbier, Guillaume Vermersch (aka Le Bison), and Félix Lepercq, who take him to a seaside house in Marseille. Le Bison’s role as driver is finished once he drops off the other characters. Gerbier and Félix take Dounat to meet Claude Ullmann (aka Le Masque), who is already in the house. Because the other neighbors would hear a gunshot, they decide to strangle Dounat. This sequence involving Dounat is rather long, with discussion between Gerbier, Le Masque, and Félix revealing how they have come to this decision and then carry it out. Dounat’s murder is a brutal scene, but there’s a sense that it is excused, even accepted, because of wartime exigencies.

Félix Lepercq meets Jean-François Jardie, an old friend, in a bar in Marseilles. Félix requests his help, and Jardie agrees without knowing any specifics. Back in Lyons, Félix Lepercq meets Gerbier again. Now, Gerbier is going by the name of Mr. Roussel, and he is running the Lyon Talent Agency. They have to help eight people escape France via Gibraltar: Gerbier himself, three Royal Air Force (RAF) officers who were shot down, two Canadian commandos from Dieppe, and two Belgians sentenced to death by the Germans. Gerbier tells Félix to take them to the Viellat farm; Jean-François Jardie is given the job of leading them from the farm to the beach, where they will row out to a submarine that will take them to England.

Before that assignment, Jean-François Jardie delivers a transmitter to someone named Mathilde in Paris. While delivering the transmitter, he escapes detection twice: once by carrying a toddler for a woman traveling with the toddler and a baby, and thus evading German agents at the train station, and once by telling French gendarme inspectors at the same train station that he’s carrying a radio when one of the gendarmes asks him to open his suitcase. Jean-François thus demonstrates that he can think quickly and escape detection.

After delivering the transmitter to Mathilde in Paris, Jean-François visits his brother, Luc Jardie (aka Saint Luc). When he leaves again for Marseilles, Jean-François wonders how he and his brother have grown so far apart; he doesn’t know that Luc Jardie is also working in the resistance. Viewers don’t know this about Luc Jardie yet either, and Jean-François never learns this about his brother in the film. Jean-François returns to complete the assignment of delivering the eight escapees to a waiting submarine. He must also transport “le grand patron,” the leader of the resistance (Luc Jardie), but “le grand patron” must be rowed in a separate boat to ensure his safety. It’s so dark that Jean-François never sees that “le grand patron” is his brother, but viewers see Luc Jardie’s face once he is on board the submarine.

The life of the French Resistance fighters is hardly romantic and most often cut short. Neither the novel nor the film glorifies their work or their expectations. Félix Lepercq is arrested, taken off the street, for interrogation. He is tortured and eventually dies under German arrest. Jean-François Jardie is also captured and tortured, although in the film, he gives himself up to find out what happened to Félix.

Gerbier is rounded up with others in a café called Germaine. Mathilde, who is now working closely with Gerbier, had just left the café. (The audio commentary on the DVD that I watched identifies the arresting officers as the Milice Française.) After Philippe Gerbier is taken from the café, he is brought to Gestapo headquarters and kept chained in a cell with other prisoners. They are to be executed by firing squad. He and the other prisoners are shackled, and each is led by two S.S. officers to the rifle range, where they will be shot and killed. Their shackles are removed, and they are given their instructions: They are allowed to run, and if they make it behind the stop-butts, they will be spared until the next execution.

This seems like a good point to introduce a brief list of definitions. I always seem to find myself in need of a dictionary when I see a film noir, neo-noir, or any other film from a previous era! Click on each term for more information from Wikipedia:

◊ maquis: rural guerrilla bands of French and Belgian resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

◊ la Milice: The Milice Française, generally called la Milice, was a political paramilitary organization created on January 30, 1943, by the Vichy regime to help fight against the French Resistance during World War II.

Gerbier thinks of Luc Jardie in his final moments. Gerbier is facing a pure existential crisis, and viewers hear his thoughts in voice-over, the words taken almost exactly from the novel. He reasons that his refusal to believe that he will die could mean that he will never really die, a realization that he thinks would appeal to Luc Jardie. Existentialism is often a feature of film noir, and in Army of Shadows, existential crises are heightened to the extreme because of wartime and the almost impossible choices that so many characters are forced to make. Gerbier escapes his execution because Mathilde, Le Masque, and Le Bison rescue him, but he still ponders his realizations after his rescue.

Gerbier’s resistance cell of fighters faces another existential threat when they learn that Mathilde has been arrested by the Gestapo. The Gestapo discovered Mathilde’s true identity and her address, and they found a photo of her daughter that she still carried, the one that Gerbier warned her to get rid of. The Gestapo gave Mathilde a choice: name all the contacts in her network or her daughter would be sent to a whorehouse in Poland. Gerbier, Luc Jardie, Le Bison, and Le Masque reach the difficult decision to execute Mathilde themselves. Luc Jardie maintains that Mathilde would want her friends to kill her. She can’t kill herself, and she can’t refuse to name names because of what would happen to her daughter. Either way, her daughter would suffer. In the meantime, she has told the Gestapo that she needs to be released so she can reestablish contacts. This gives the resistance cell a window of opportunity, and they take advantage of it.

As I said, the novel is a tough read, and the film is tough to watch. Melville doesn’t glorify his main characters, and there is nothing romantic about the tasks they set out for themselves to oppose the German occupation of their country. I found myself rooting for them, even though their lives were harsh and I hoped I never had to face some of the decisions they had to make.

I watched the film on a DVD published by the Criterion Collection, and it came with audio commentary by film historian Ginette Vincendeau. Listening to her commentary is well worth the time because she provides lots of background information that many viewers, especially non-French citizens, would probably never get otherwise. I list here just a few details from the commentary, including Vincendeau’s noted differences between the film and the novel, but this list just scratches the surface:

◊ Communists and Catholics working together during the war, in spite of philosophical differences, was common knowledge.

This was true in Roberto Rossellini’s film Rome: Open City (Roma città aperta) (1945), where Communists and Catholics worked together in the Italian Resistance. Rossellini’s film is also fictional, but it was filmed in a semidocumentary style on location in Rome while the city was still under German occupation.

◊ Melville used Kessel’s novel as the basis for the film, but he made many changes. Melville’s film emphasizes pessimism and abstraction. He aims to portray the spirit of the resistance movement rather than details and specific spectacular actions. Abstraction and minimalism are part of Melville’s style, especially evident in the scenes depicting the internment camp.

◊ In the novel, Gerbier escapes from the internment camp. In the film, he is taken away by the Gestapo. The film emphasizes fatality and disillusionment. Human endeavor is negated arbitrarily by fate.

◊ The move to Marseilles for the meeting about Paul Dounat’s abduction is one of the few sunny sequences in the film. Dounat is responsible for Gerbier’s imprisonment because he told what he knew to the Germans. In the novel, Kessel talks about Dounat’s fear, remorse, and reasons for betrayal. Melville concentrates on the betrayal.

◊ Melville withholds Luc Jardie’s identity from his brother Jean-François, which wasn’t the case in Kessel’s novel.

◊ La Milice was a military police force created by the Vichy government. They liked to take people by surprise and to abduct them in public places.

Army of Shadows is almost two and a half hours long, so it’s quite an investment of time. It’s twice that length of time if you plan to listen to the audio commentary, too. It’s well worth it, however, for fans of noir. I have developed an appreciation for the historical background that forms the basis for many films noir and noir literature; Army of Shadows (both the novel and the film) would be of interest for history fans, too, whether or not they are interested in noir in particular.

September 12, 1969 (France), October 6, 1970 (Italy), release dates  •  Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville  •  Screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville  •  Based on the novel Army of Shadows by Joseph Kessel  •  Music by Éric Demarsan  •  Edited by Françoise Bonnot  •  Cinematography by Pierre Lhomme

Lino Ventura as Philippe Gerbier  •  Paul Meurisse as Luc Jardie (aka Saint Luc)  •  Jean-Pierre Cassel as Jean-François Jardie •  Luc’s younger brother  •  Simone Signoret as Mathilde  •  Claude Mann as Claude Ullmann (aka Le Masque)  •  Paul Crauchet as Félix Lepercq  •  Christian Barbier as Guillaume Vermersch (aka Le Bison)  •  Serge Reggiani as the barber  •  André Dewavrin (aka Colonel Passy) as himself, an official of the Free France intelligence services based in London  •  Alain Dekok as Legrain  •  Alain Mottet as the commander of the internment camp  •  Alain Libolt as Paul Dounat  •  Jean-Marie Robain as Baron de Ferté-Talloire  •  Albert Michel as the gendarme who escorts Gerbier to the internment camp  •  Denis Sadier as the doctor at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon  •  Georges Sellier as Colonel Jarret du Plessis  •  Marco Perrin as Octave Bonnafous  •  Hubert de Lapparent as Aubert  •  Colin Mann as the British Royal Air Force (RAF) soldier  •  Anthony Stuart as an RAF major  •  Michel Fretault as the “anonymous patriot” who escapes with Gerbier in Paris  •  Michel Dacquin as one of Gerbier’s cellmates  •  Jeanne Pérez as Marie, Luc’s maid  •  Pierre Vaudier as the man at the antique shop  •  Jacques Marbeuf as the lead interrogator at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon  •  Marcel Bernier as the customs agent

Distributed by Valoria Films (France), Fida Cinematografica (Italy)  •  Produced by Les Films Corona, Fono Roma