Film and Television Features

Melville's war

Jean-Pierre Melville never made a big war epic. As a French Resistance veteran, he had a more valid stake on the subject of war than most of his contemporaries. What’s more, he owned a small studio and had the business savvy to join production partnerships when the right project came along. Yet there was something unappetising about the war epics that were in fashion at the time, where human drama was compromised through jingoistic posturings or dwarfed by phony action sequences. To put it simply, this wasn’t the war he had fought. His first feature film, the low-budgeted Le Silence de la Mer, was a war drama, but it would take him years to return to the subject. When he finally did, with Léon Morin, Priest, time had given him the perspective to deal once again with a subject close to home, though as a hired hand. Army of Shadows, his most personal film and last masterpiece, finally exposes the emotional scars, warts and all. These films, as human-scale dramas, are about people living with war at their door. As such, they deal honestly with the imperatives of survival, revealing a great deal more about Melville than his crime films.

Le Silence de la Mer (1949) was made under difficult conditions on a shoestring budget, but this was a film Melville was compelled to do. The 1942 novel had been a call to arms for a defeated France, then living under Nazi occupation and the shameful rule of the collaborationist Vichy government. Melville acquits himself remarkably in this story about a middle-aged man and his niece (Jean-Marie Romain and Nicole Stéphane), who are forced to provide free lodging to a German officer (Howard Vernon). The officer is a worldly charmer, intent to win their hearts and minds while rambling about the arts and his desire for a marriage of the French and German cultures. With their house occupied and no arms for defense, all that is left for the uncle and niece is to live in silence while the officer is around. Their defiance is conveyed with subtle medium-shots, the living room becoming an unusual battleground. Though the officer bares his soul to them, he only succeeds in revealing his naiveté. A visit to Paris finally opens his eyes about the real goals of the Third Reich.

Born a Jew but a sceptic at heart, Melville was the least likely candidate to helm Léon Morin, Priest (1961). He still jumped at the chance, and it isn't hard to see why. The setting is a French Alps town during the German occupation. Its citizens, who have seen crushing defeat and endure the tight yoke of their new overlords on a daily basis, are now just trying to get by. Barny, a widowed mother played by Emmanuelle Riva, isn't impervious to the new state of affairs, but her crush on a female co-worker is preeminent in her thoughts. While carrying out a prank at a church's confessional, she meets Father Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Though she confronts him and attacks everything he stands for, the priest has a riposte to all her arguments, a surprising turn that starts her spiritual journey. Morin is a paradox: a man of the cloth living an austere life, yet a sexual magnet to the town's single women, who are eager to make appointments for spiritual guidance. Without questioning her own motives, Barny accepts Morin's invitation, and their theological conversations at his rectory soon take over her life. Morin engages her intellectually, expounding on principles that have been minimized by organized religion but are the source of true Christianity. Yet the world around her isn't ruled by moral certainties. Some townsfolk willingly join in the persecution of their Jewish neighbors while others risk their lives to save them. This duality is also found amongst the town's occupying forces; Italian, German, and American soldiers are just ordinary men reacting to opportunity or privation. War reveals the worst in people, but peacetime only provides a fragile stability, good and evil being always in battle. In Barny's case, her conversion to Catholicism isn't enough to hold back her feelings for the priest. Only self-control will help keep those feelings in check. As Morin puts it: "Human nature is corrupted. We mustn't resign ourselves to that".

Army of Shadows (1969) is based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, a French Resistance veteran, but the film version allows Melville to draw from his own experience. Therefore, the memories here are collective, the voice-over narration shared by the principal characters serving as testament to the past. These memories are unhappy, an account of clandestine activities done at a point in time when the war's outcome was uncertain. There are moments of bold bravery throughout the film, but the heroics are counterbalanced by hard moral choices, unfulfilled justice, and fear.

The film opens with German soldiers marching before the Arc de Triomphe, a mockery of the values every French holds dear, but the parade of indignities is just starting. The undermanned French Resistance operates under these tough circumstances, and the next sequence explains, with remarkable economy, the sad ironies of living under the collaborationist Vichy Regime. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), an engineer turned Resistance leader, has been arrested by the French police, who see him as a terrorist. A police van is taking him to a prison camp that was meant for German soldiers but is now used for the internment of Resistance fighters and other undesirables. Worst of all, Gerbier has been sold out by one of his own men.

Melville avoids flashy action sequences, shunning quick-cutting, drawn-out fights and the use of somersaulting doubles. Instead, he achieves a rhythm that heightens the suspense. For instance, Gerbier's escape approximates real time, done with movements and reactions that look plausible because they recreate a real event. Then there's the sequence where Gerbier and his cohorts execute the young man who had sold him out. It starts with the drama of reluctant men forced to kill a traitor, not just as reprisal but for survival, then Melville takes us through every step of the young man's execution, all intended to make the viewer an uncomfortable witness.

The Resistance functions under a strict code of silence and layers of secrecy, with the identity of the top leaders hidden from the low ranks. Still, death lurks at every corner, and dangerous living takes its toll on its members. That's the case of Gerbier's assistant, Mathilde (Simone Signoret), a brave woman who plans the most daring rescues throughout the film. Mathilde's only mistake is carrying a picture of her daughter at the moment of her arrest, placing the whole network at risk.

These three films are about ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. Melville's own life was marked by war, and he saw his share of brutality and violence. The films portrait all that, but they reveal a deeper truth. Fascism, with all its evils, operates in the guise of next-door neighbors, amiable soldiers, and dutiful policemen. At home, the most powerful weapon is the adherence to the ideal of democracy, fought for by ordinary citizens through sacrifice, pain, and endurance.