Product Description

JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE’S MASTERPIECE ABOUT THE FRENCH RESISTANCE WENT UNRELEASED IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS, BEFORE ITS TRIUMPHANT THEATRICAL DEBUT IN 2006. ATMOSPHERIC AND GRIPPING, ARMY OF SHADOWS IS MELVILLE’S MOST PERSONAL FILM, FEATURING LINO VENTURA, PAUL MEURISSE, JEAN-PIERRE CASSEL, AND THE INCOMPARABLE SIMONE SIGNORET AS INTREPID UNDERGROUND FIGHTERS WHO MUST GRAPPLE WITH THEIR OWN BRAND OF HONOR IN THEIR FIGHT AGAINST EVIL.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13564 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 145 minutes

Amazon.com
Who would've guessed that the best film of 2006 would be a 37-year-old thriller about the French Resistance during World War II? Hailed as a masterpiece by an overwhelming majority of reputable critics, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows wasn't officially released in America until 2006 (hence its appearance on many of that year's top-ten lists), but its reputation as a French classic was already well-established throughout Europe. Fully restored in 2004 and released in the U.S. by Rialto Pictures, it represents the gold standard of films about the French Resistance, based upon Joseph Kessel's 1943 novel and imbued with personal touches by Melville, an Alsatian Jew whose own involvement in the Resistance qualifies Army of Shadows as a semi-autobiographical exercise in somber nostalgia, as indicated by an opening quote echoing Melville's ironic belief that memories of Nazi occupation needn't always be traumatic.

Having lived through this history, Melville doesn't treat it lightly; in Army of Shadows, the threat of death hangs over every scene like a shroud. Unfolding with flawless precision, the plot begins in 1942 and focuses on a small, secretive band of Resistance fighters led by Gerbier (Lino Ventura), whose intuitive sense of danger lends additional suspense to the film's dark, atmospheric study of grace under pressure. While working in the classical tradition of the Hollywood films he admired, Melville breaks from convention with lengthy, deliberately paced scenes in which tension builds to a subtle yet almost unbearable intensity. With the possible exception of a brief and wryly humorous scene involving Resistance leader (and future Prime Minister) Gen. Charles de Gaulle, every scene in Army of Shadows supports Melville's predominant themes of solitude and futility. Melville's visually and thematically bleak outlook may prove challenging for some, but Army of Shadows is remarkably beautiful in its own way, and it gains power with each additional viewing through flawless development of memorable characters played by a first-rate cast. Especially memorable is Simone Signoret as Gerbier's boldly pragmatic ally Mathilde, a woman in a war of men, with a tragic vulnerability that ultimately decides her fate. As intellectually stimulating as it is thrilling to experience, Army of Shadows represents the triumphant zenith of Melville's posthumous recognition as a world-class auteur. Thanks to the Criterion Collection, this masterpiece can now be widely appreciated, along with Criterion's previous DVD releases of Melville's earlier classics Bob Le Flambeur, Le Samourai, and Le Cercle Rouge. --Jeff Shannon

On the DVDs
On disc 1 in this superior two-disc set, the meticulous 2004 restoration of Army of Shadows is presented in a new high-definition digital transfer supervised by cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. The audio commentary by French film historian Ginette Vincendeau is one of Criterion's finest to date; Vincendeau's scholarship is impeccable, her thematic observations are eloquently expressed, and her knowledge of French cinema is impressively thorough, placing Army of Shadows in a rich context of other films about the French Resistance. The supplements on disc 2 maintain Criterion's highest standards of archival research, beginning with "Jean-Pierre Melville: Filmmaker," a four-minute French TV news segment from 1968, in which Melville discusses the production of Army of Shadows. A new 2006 interview with cinematographer Pierre Lhomme (14:00) is accompanied by a restoration demonstration (7:10) and color-tone reference photos used during the restoration process. Also included is an 11-minute interview (also from 2006) with editor Françoise Bonnot.

A half-hour segment of the French TV show L'invite du dimanche, from March 1969, features behind-the scenes production footage and fascinating interviews with Melville, the primary cast of Army of Shadows, novelist Joseph Kessell, and French Resistance fighter André Dewavrin (whom Melville recruited to play Colonel Passy in Army of Shadows). "Melville et 'L'Armée Des Ombres'" ("Melville and Army of Shadows) is an excellent half-hour documentary featuring interviews of many of Melville's contemporaries (including director Bertrand Tavernier) sharing insights and anecdotes in an in-depth appreciation of Melville and Army of Shadows. A superb section devoted to the French Resistance includes "Le Journal de la Resistance," a riveting 33-minute documentary filmed in Paris in August 1944 (and narrated by Noel Coward), just as the final French insurrection and pending arrival of U.S. liberation troops were leading to Nazi surrender and massive celebration in the streets of Paris. A five-minute TV interview segment, from 1984, features Simone Signoret paying tribute to Lucie Aubrac, a Resistance fighter (also interviewed) who was a key inspiration for Signoret's character in Army of Shadows. Finally, disc 2 closes with a 23-minute excerpt from a 1973 episode of the French TV show Ouvrez les guillemets, in which several former members of the French Resistance discuss their clandestine activities during the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Long Overdue Release of a French Classic
Many thanks to Criterion for bringing yet another forgotten foreign classic to a U.S. audience on DVD. "Army of Shadows" is one of the most underrated and magnificently shot films ever made about the French experience in World War II, and was a marked departure for director Jean Pierre Melville, who built his reputation on crime-themed noirs such as "Le Samourai," "Un Flic," and "Le Doulos." For my money, this was his best film, and also his most personal statement: He was involved in the French Resistance himself, and he knew that most of war is not about the pageantry, gallantry, and heroism depicted in so many flagwaving epics. Instead, Melville attempts a more honest portrayal of people who were afraid, on the run, unable to trust anyone, physically and emotionally exhausted, and all too familiar with the painful task of killing their own as well as the enemy. The result is a film in which the filmmaker's feelings are as evident and moving as his cinematic technique is impressive. A must-own. Now that it's finally possible to own it!

Melville's masterpiece
L'Armée des Ombres is not nearly as well-known as it deserves to be. For a long time incredibly difficult to track down unless you speak French and overshadowed by the reputations of Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge and Bob le Flambeur, it's by far Jean-Pierre Melville's most heartfelt and powerful film. The resistance is as much a part of Melville as cinema - Melville was one of the false names he used during the war - and this is a film that feels as if it has been lived by the people making it: it's not so much a tribute as a confession of guilt. Although the gangster parallels are there, it's not an affectation: after the war, many resistance figures famously put their newly learned talents to use by either going into crime or politics. Melville went into movies.

His protagonists aren't action heroes. They don't blow up trains or bridges. They deliver radios and spend more time killing each other than killing Germans. Indeed, the film's four month timespan from October 1942 to February 1943 covers a moral journey that sees them go from killing traitors to killing friends. Many of their plans fail, their gestures often futile as it becomes clear that these people will never live to see the liberation - something brought tragically to light in the film's final moments that carry a real emotional punch absent in Melville's other work. The final image of the Arc de Triomphe glimpsed furtively through the windscreen of a car hurrying away from the murder of a friend is a solemn and bitter one: this is the human cost of victory. (The sequence originally ended with a shot of German troops parading down the Champs Elysee, emphasizing that nothing has changed, but the shot was moved to the opening of the film, acting both as historical scene-setter and leitmotif bookend.)

These people are afraid and ashamed, but that's what makes them so truly heroic and their inevitable fate so truly tragic. They don't need speeches or backstory - they are ennobled by their actions, futile or not.

Irony abounds. In the opening scenes, Lino Ventura's civil engineer and suspected resistance fighter is sent to a barely finished P.O.W. camp built by the French for German prisoners they never got the chance to capture and is now the exclusive domain of patriots, communists and fools waiting `to be broken.' Jean-Pierre Cassel, having eluded Nazi search parties, is stopped by gendarmes on the lookout for black market goods who ignore the radio transmitters he openly and casually shows them before waving him on his way. Even capture is as likely to come from a random identity check at a restaurant serving black market beef as it is from an informer.

It's the kind of film that gives low-key moviemaking a good name. As the film's composer Eric Demarsan noted, "I was struck by the strength of the silences, the looks, the waiting moments." Along with a great use of locations that are deliberately empty to emphasise the loneliness of the life they find themselves in, there's a wonderful use of sound and stillness: a daring attempt to rescue one of their number from an SS prison is played mostly in silence interrupted only by the constant clicking and unclicking of automated locks. When one character is seized, it is so quick and so silent that it is over almost before we know it, with only his signature hat left in the street to show he was ever there. The only `big' moment in the score is the use of Morton Gould's Re-Spirituals in the build-up to the chicken-run scene, underscoring Gerbier's desperate mental efforts to avoid death by an act of will. It sounds melodramatic, but it works, not least because of the sudden violence of the silence that ends it, heralding the end of hope.

Nothing feels sensationalized. Even murder is treated in a coldly matter of fact manner as a practical problem as much as a moral one. You have to kill a man, but you can't use a gun because the walls are paper-thin and it will alert the neighbors. What do you do? How do you rationalize killing a friend? And at what cost? All become more disturbing because they feel all-too real.

Some of the special effects are primitive even for their day, but it doesn't matter: you forgive them because you buy into the characters and the reality of their situation absolutely. And although the London sequences have problems, not least the embarrassingly Christ-like approach to filming De Gaulle, they are an interesting inversion of the French scenes. Here the war is fought noisily and openly with air raids and burning buildings, yet the traditionally repressed British still let their hair down - something Gerbier (Lino Ventura), having lived in secret for so long, cannot. He is left alone at the door to a pub, unable to join in, quietly leaving before anyone even notices him. In France, the war is fought in silence and in shadows, and it is the French who repress their every emotion. One character is even unable to confide in his own brother, completely unaware that his sibling is actually the head of his resistance group.

Even the smallest characters are splendidly drawn, from the gendarme accompanying Gerbier to the prison camp to Serge Reggiani's great matter-of-fact cameo as a barber who displays Vichy posters but holds De Gaullist sympathies. The film is so well cast that you believe in these people on sight. But quietly towering over them all is Ventura in his best performance, with a warmth that is not overt but still there, as well as a weakness - his shame at running at the behest of a sadistic German officer is all too convincing. Indeed, for all the undoubted right of their cause, the unifying feature of the main characters is their growing sense of shame.

Sobering, powerful and very moving - with the only one of Melville's pre-destined endings that is, offering no resolution, only damnation and the promise of death - L'Armee des Ombres is a genuine tragedy.

The extras on Criterion's 2-disc set are both plentiful and superb, covering both the film and the real resistance and include everything found on the French disc (30-minute documentary, the original French trailer) and the UK disc (audio commentary by Ginette Vincendeau, WW2 documentary on the resistance, TV excerpt of Melville directing the opening sequence, a booklet reprinting a lengthy part of the long out-of-print Melville on Melville on the film), as well as many more unique to the set, from interviews with the cinematographer and editor, a French documentary interviewing real members of the resistance and a TV interview with Simone Signoret and Lucie Aubrac, one of the inspirations for her character. A superb disc of a film that's finally gaining the recognition it always deserved.

Nerves of Steel
Director Jean-Pierre Melville drew from his own experiences of The French Resistance during World War II to make the same-titled novel into an inspired movie. Capturing the gamut of participants and demonstrating that not all of the French were on board, 'Army of Shadows' zeroes in on some of the more effective players who must operate with nerves of steel to sneak around, outfox, and escape from their German occupiers and undermine their influence.

Protagonist Phillippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a civil engineer, is the focal point. At the beginning he is sent to a prison the French originally meant for the Germans. After a skillful escape, he must continue the mission and dote over any fellow member who may be subsequently captured and tortured, so that the operation won't be revealed to the Nazis. One focal point of tension is when fellow member Felix (Paul Crauchet) is captured, and Phillipe laments he has no cyanide capsules to take his own life if the pressure is too much for him. Having connections for communication and arms from London and a spy network that matters make their operation essential are amongst many of the tactics in their arsenal. (Some of the London scenes are quite interesting. Phillipe's British laison doesn't trust the bumbling French and is stingy with arms. Visiting a jazz discoteque in London, the dancers don't even flinch at the sounds and shaking of bombs.) Resourceful in their repertoire is shop owner Matilde (Simone Signoret) whose own family doesn't even suspect her involvement. Her clever insights make her a key player in their operation.

'Army of Shadows' is methodical, sometimes requiring the patience requisite of the resistance. The timing merely gives the audience an unnerving sense of the imminent dangers lurking amongst them. Resourceful and keenly observant, the movie transports us into the vigilant world of their underground. The performances demonstrate steely coolness that is never overdone. Neither the dialogue nor the action is ever wasted. I was truly fascinated about a matter I'd always wondered about: Whatever happened in France during the German occupation? Now I feel like I know through a perceptive and honest cinematic account.