Recently, I watched "Where Eagles Dare," a 1968 action thriller that had Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood going into a castle in which the Gestapo was holding and interrogating a US general with knowledge about the upcoming invasion of Europe. Eastwood himself is supposed to have suggested that the title should have been "Where Stuntmen Dare." Along with Eastwood's character gunning down something like a battalion of Nazis, there are scuffle on top of a chair lift, traitors, and good guys in Nazi uniforms.

In Jean-Pierre Melville's "L'armée des ombres( Army of Shadows), released in Europe in 1969 and not in the United States until last year, there is also a (melo)dramatic rescue in which Simone Signoret's Mathilde (unlike Richard Burton) actually speaks German and a high-adrenaline escape by Lino Ventura's Philippe (the local Resistance commander) engineered by Mathilde (who has become his resourceful second-in-command). Actually, Philippe twice escapes from incarcerations (unrecognized by the Germans as a Resistance leader).*

"Where Eagles Dare" is as cartoonish and filled with improbably successful feats of daring as recent Hollywood cartoons. The Gestapo villains are buffoons, easily fooled and easily gunned down by Eastwood with a seemingly infinite supply of bullets. There is no character like the American Superman Eastwood in Melville's film. Lino Ventura has some of the world-weariness that was Burton's specialty, but is faced by much tougher choices with fewer good options than Burton was (and with no romantic opportunities, perfunctory as Burton's supposed romance with Mary Ure was in "Eagles").

"Army of Shadows," which was based on French Academician Joseph Kessel's 1943 autobiographical novel (with some experiences and tone from Melville's own Resistance experience) has a very grim look--particularly devoid of yellows and with very grayish greens and browns and blues--shot by Pierre Lhomme, who supervised the DVD transfer. Watching "Army," I could see again why I misremembered "Le Samourai" having been shot in black and white. Both these Melville movies have colors so muted that the contrasts seems to be the light and the dark of black-and-white rather than the full spectrum of colors.

Melville's Resistance fighters (in 1942-43 when the Nazis were triumphing/triumphant) are brave and persistent. They have internal resources of cunning without any Hollywood glamour. As Mick LaSalle put it in his review for my local paper (the San Francisco Chronicle), for the Resistance cell, "life is grim and ugly, a succession of ambiguous victories, moral compromises and the constant threat of capture. If anything, the resistance members act as if they've all sold their souls to the devil and can't get them back."

Indeed, the Gestapo functionaries seem more pleased with themselves (without any hamming) and content to be doing their jobs well. Philippe faces some very ugly necessities--and also turns in the least heroic portrayal of someone parachuting behind enemy lines that I can remember. It is another unpleasant necessity which he stoically accepts.

Melville shot heists and assassinations meticulously in the trilogy of neo-noirs starring Alain Delon made around the same time (Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, Un Flic). Although more interested in faces than Robert Bresson was, one might mistake "Army of Shadows" for a Bresson movie--perhaps even with the explosion of fraught music (the start of Morton Gould's "Spirituals for Orchestra"). As in Bresson movies, particularly A Condemned Man Escapes (also involving an imprisoned Resistance fighter) there is no music in many of the scenes, but great attention was obviously (audibly!) given to sound engineering (I can't say "natural sound," but the sounds of what is going on in the scenes).

LaSalle suggests that the movie was too American (genre) for French audiences of 1969 and not sufficiently American (mindless) for American ones. Apparently, many French critics were unhappy that there was a scene in which General De Gaulle bestowed a Cross of Lorraine medal on the leader (Philippe's commander) Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse). The reviewer for Cahiers de Cinema (which had been the home of Jean-Luc Godard before he began directing movies, featuring Melville in his first, "Breathless"), dismissed it with contempt as "the first and greatest example of Gaullist film art." The scene with De Gaulle (whose name is not mentioned even once in the film) seems a minor scene and historically accurate. De Gaulle was the London-based head of the Free French, non? And the band of Resistance fighters is portrayed (accurately) as small and without a whole lot of social support (not like fish in water!).

Mathilde is adept at disguises (from an unremarkable housewife in a head scarf to an over-the-hill prostitute in a ratty fur coat) and has the great Signoret tristesse. Jean-Pierre Cassell is brilliant as a black-leather-clad private in the army who finds a way to do something that needs to be done, and the movie provides a third reminder to American audiences of why Lino Ventura as a very revered character actor in French films, following the Criterion edition of Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbiwith an early Ventura performance and the Rialto restoration of Louis Malle's "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud"(Elevator to the Gallows. (Ventura also starred for Melville in , " LeDeuxième souffle," (The Second Skin, 1963) ,which, alas, I have not had the opportunity yet to see (it's only available on a PAL/region-2 DVD.

I think that "Army of Shadows" is an outstanding unheroic film about genuine patriots, though I don't think that it needed to run for more than two hours (145 minutes) or that it is as great a film as "Le samourai" or "Le cercle rouge." I think that it jumps from character to character (including some voice-over narrations) too much. Although not a perfect film, it is a riveting, unglamorous (minimialist)one. That it took 37 years to make it across the Atlantic is shocking, but now it is available on DVD with an edition that includes a very informative and analytical (though droning and heavily accented) commentary track by Ginette Vincendeau, and a second disc with interviews of cinematographer Lhomme and editor Françoise Bonnot, a 2006 "making of" featurette that includes including on-set footage and interviews with Melville, cast members, writer Joseph Kessel, and Resistance fighters who survived to the late-1960s, a film restoration demonstration by Lhomme and a 1944 documentary "Le journal de la Resistance," which was shot during the German occupation (the waning days of it, admittedly).

(Melville's great 1950 film of Jean Cocteau's Les enfants terribles is coming out on DVD later this month, and I'm hoping for one of "Leon Morin, Prêtre" someday.)

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* I think the first one could be called "antidramatic." Philippe runs and goes into the first lit place he sees, a barber shop. He gazes as a Vichy poster about Marshall Pétain doing what he says as the barber (Serge Reggiani) cuts off his mustache. There is no dialogue until Philippe is leaving. And then, pretty much everything remains unverbalized, while a gesture says everything that needs to be said. (More Eastwood than Burton, I guess one could say? Though there is no lip-curl of pleasure after any of the killings.)

This is part of the pre-Bastille Day celebration of Ifif1938's breaking the epinions 500 barrier. Go Barbara!

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




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