Film Club French Season - Army in the Shadows

There’s a scene near the beginning of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 drama Army in the Shadows which leaves you in no doubt about what a disturbing but compelling film it’s going to be. We’re in Marseille in 1942. A group of French resistance men hoax a traitor into a car and take him to a flat they’ve rented for the purpose of killing him. When they arrive they realise that the next-door flat has been unexpectedly let, so it’s going to be too noisy to use a gun to perform the execution. So what do they do? Do they use a kitchen knife? Do they bash his brains out with the gun butt? Do they strangle him? It turns out that this is the first execution any of them have carried out, and their unease at the enormity of what they are doing is palpable. There are tears. There is resolve. There is leadership, and acquiescence. These are heroes, sure, bravely fighting against the German occupiers of their country. But the nature of their heroism is ambivalent.

Army in the Shadows is a brilliant bit of filmmaking. Jean-Pierre Melville is remembered primarily for his French take on gangster movies, but the digital remastering of ‘L’Armee des Ombres’ last year rightly brought it to the critics’ attention as one of his most significant - and timeless - works. It’s a taut, twisting, noirish nightmare of a movie, shot in muted blues and browns with flecks of unexpected colours; all long takes, bare rooms and seriously good acting.
The director was in the resistance movement himself. He used the surname ‘Melville’ (after the American writer) as a nom de guerre before he started making films. When, after escaping to England in 1943, he read Joseph Kessel’s novel of the same name - a collection