Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) opened in 1969 to a hostile reception in France, where the post-1968 left dismissed it as Gaullist nostalgia, and it went effectively unreleased in the English-speaking world for thirty-seven years. Rialto Pictures' restored American release in 2006 changed its reputation almost overnight. It now sits permanently in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll, and we would call it the greatest film about the French Resistance and one of Melville's very best.

Joseph Kessel wrote the source novel in 1943, out of his own underground experience. The film follows a small Resistance cell in Vichy and Occupied France in 1942-43, led by Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura, in the role that defined his career), with the strategist Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), the bomb-maker Le Bison (Christian Barbier) and the courageous Mathilde (Simone Signoret). Melville had served with both the Free French and the Resistance, and the procedural texture of the film (patience, terror, the routine of clandestine life) comes straight from what he had lived.

Pierre Lhomme photographs it in a grey-blue palette, and Melville holds back emotionally throughout, refusing every comfort the heroic war drama usually offers. The result is the most convincing account cinema has given of the Resistance as it was lived from the inside. Dismissed at home by the post-1968 left as Gaullist, effectively shelved abroad, then rediscovered in the 2000s, it went through one of the most striking critical reversals in modern film history.