L'Armée des ombres is quite faithfully adapted from Joseph Kessel's book of the same name, and is a particular (and in some respects documentary) account of France during the Résistance. Melville was particularly pleased with the opening minute of the film, during which traffic was stopped, and in which we see an army march through L'Étoile (or the very famous Arc de Triomphe) and into the Champs-Élysées, finally revealing themselves as the occupying Nazi army. This sets the tone for the whole of the movie, and that tone is bleak.
It is pointless to regurgitate the story of this film, which many others have already done. It is enough to say that it recounts the Résistance not from a heroic angle but more from a psychological point of view: we see, for instance, the engineer Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) as an escapee from a French hotel run by the Nazis (after spending a few nights in a Vichy concentration camp), and his face registers his reactions very subtly. This is not a dog-eat-dog world, but one in which not only informants of the members of the Résistance have to be killed by the Résistants, but any members of the Résistance who are at first captured by the Nazis and then freed have to be killed by their own friends: they are a danger to the Résistance cell because there are inevitably very few Jean Moulins: they will break down under torture. Particularly tragic is the necessary assassination of Mathilde (Simone Signoret), who has saved the lives of so many people, including some responsible for her own death: Lucie Aubrac is one of the models.
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