Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows opens with the startling image of German soldiers marching down the Champs-Élysées, framed by the Arc de Triomphe. The image was, this French director later admitted to an interviewer, a "crazy idea." Actors in German uniforms had not been permitted on the avenue since World War I, or so he claimed, and the shot was both costly and logistically complex. And yet, "it was a fantastic sight," Melville said with unmistakable satisfaction. "Wagnerian. Unfilmable." This former Resistance fighter had exacted a peculiar revenge on his complicit countrymen: he had invaded Paris himself, seizing it for his own vision.

Dark as pitch and utterly without compromise, Army of Shadows traces the harrowing feats of a small band of Resistance fighters operating during the occupation. Melville first read Joseph Kessel's slim novel of the same title in 1943, the year it was published, and for the next quarter-century nurtured a desire to turn it into a film. (Cinephiles will appreciate that Kessel also wrote the novel "Belle de Jour.") He finally did so in 1969. By then he had already directed two other films about the war, along with some of the thrillers for which he is justly renowned, like Bob le Flambeur. But he clearly wasn't finished with the fight of his life and not long after making Army of Shadows he exclaimed, "The war period was awful, horrible ... marvellous."

The same can be said of Army of Shadows, which is bleak and beautiful by turns, that rare work of art that thrills the senses and the mind. Lino Ventura plays Philippe Gerbier, a Resistance fighter who has willingly surrendered his entire being to the cause. (Much as Melville surrendered to cinema.) The film opens with Gerbier's imprisonment in a concentration camp and, shortly thereafter, his escape from his captors. Exciting if implausible, the escape seems almost an afterthought to the scene immediately after in which Gerbier hides in a barbershop. Sitting in a chair with a face full of lather, his throat to a strange blade, the escapee seems cruelly vulnerable anew, the tension abating only after the barber puts down his razor and shows his true colors.

What makes the scene so memorable isn't only the austere beauty of Melville's mise en scène or the leaden silence that fills the room; it's the unexpected intimacy between the men. The actors say very little; as is often the case in a Melville film, they don't have to. Rather, they express everything you (and they) need to know through the geometry of their gazes, in the way Gerbier notices a Vichy sign and how the barber never seems to catch the other man's eye. Through the masculine ritual of a barbershop shave, one of the few public arenas in which men are permitted intimacy, the two recognize each other both as Frenchmen and as men. In this barbershop Gerbier is delivered from barbarism back into civilization.

Melville's world is a world of broad shoulders and heavy burdens, shaved and grizzled faces, the civilized and the savage. It is a world in which a man's hat is an emblem of his professionalism, part of the armour he dons for battle. When a Resistance member walks into a boîte in Army of Shadows, and Melville shows us a row of Nazi caps neatly lined on a shelf, it's as if he were showing us a cache of weapons.
Later this same man will be whisked away by the enemy and lose his own hat in the confusion. The image of the hat lying in the street like an upturned turtle is unexpectedly poignant because we understand with fatal certitude that the head that wore it will soon be no more.

Women don't play much of a role in this world, though there are exceptions, including Melville's film Léon Morin, Prêtre, about a priest and the women who, in wartime, cluster around him. This gender balance gave Melville a bad rap among some feminists and no doubt his more outrageous comments didn't help. He once said that the American ideal woman was "a female with a pair of buttocks in her brassiere," which is both funny and, given that he made this observation in the 1950's, also true. Yet to fixate on his arguable sexism is to ignore the women who do appear in his films, like the fierce Resistance fighter played by Simone Signoret in Army of Shadows, and, crucially, to miss that the films are, at their core, studies in troubled masculinity.

There may be psychosexual explanations for why this is the case, but the war and France's shame were reason enough. Melville, a Jew, was serving in the military when France capitulated to Germany, and he subsequently joined several networks in the Resistance. Decades later, while discussing Army of Shadows, he pointedly noted, "Don't forget that there are more people who didn't work for the Resistance than people who did." It's no wonder Army of Shadows feels like a cold rejoinder to the cherished romance of the French Resistance fighter, wearing a beret and a sneer, and holding back the Nazi tide that had already swept the country. Kessel writes: "Today it is nearly always death, death, death. But on our side we kill, kill, kill." That is Melville's war.

When Army of Shadows was originally released, a French critic wrote that "this Resistance epic was, in the end, a sublime thriller." Melville rejected the comparison, even if it is also entirely possible to see his sublime thrillers as epics of resistance. The great man died in 1973 at the unfair age of 55, collapsing into the arms of a male friend. He left behind one short film and 13 features, a few of which, including Army of Shadows, are worthy of that overused superlative masterpiece.

This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Melville, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel; director of photography, Pierre Lhomme; edited by Françoise Bonnot; music by Éric de Marsan; art director, Théobald Meurisse; produced by Jacques Dorfmann;

WITH: Lino Ventura (Philippe Gerbier), Simone Signoret (Mathilde), Paul Meurisse (Luc Jardie), Jean-Pierre Cassel (François), Claude Mann (Le Masque) and Paul Crauchet (Félix).

One of filmgoing's most thrilling adventures, the collected tough-guy cinema of France's Jean-Pierre Melville could make a cultist out of just about anybody. Imagine the cool gunmetal palette of a Michael Mann bruiser, swaddled in the voluptuous music, mood and political complexity of a Bertolucci film, and peopled with contemplative gangsters straight out of high-period John Woo, and you're only scratching the surface.

Based on the essential French Resistance novel by Joseph Kessel (also the writer of Belle de Jour), Melville's epic Army of Shadows easily stands with his better-known works like Le Samouraï; never before released in the U.S., it's the revival of the season-a stunning lost masterpiece. Anchored by Lino Ventura's magnetically reserved and dignified performance as an underground operative, the movie plays like a magnificent series of stealthy set pieces: daring escapes from Gestapo detention centers, nighttime parachute leaps out of planes, even a private submarine cruise.

But Army of Shadows isn't merely the sum of its nail-biting parts. Suffused with an understated flush of intimacy, the movie creates a stirring sense of secret comradeship, beautifully supplied by the entire supporting cast, but especially Simone Signoret (left) as the shrewd, maternal Mathilde. An expert mix of political intrigue and explosive action, Melville's film is so poised, it could run breathlessly for another three hours.

Joshua Rothkopf

BFI:

In July 2003 bfi Distribution released a number of titles by Jean-Pierre Melville - Le Cercle rouge (1970), Le Doulos (1963), Leon Morin, pretre (1961) - coinciding with a complete Melville retrospective at the National Film Theatre and the publication of Ginette Vincendeau's 'Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris' (bfi Publishing). This new restoration of Army in the Shadows was not then available, but we are delighted that it has now been completed, enabling us to make this important title widely available in the UK.

The godfather of the Nouvelle Vague, Melville inspired directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut to Quentin Tarantino, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. Melville admired American culture as epitomised by Hollywood movies of the 30s and 40s and adopted many of the stylistic qualities of the era (Stetsons, Ray-bans) for himself and for his films, but always with a uniquely Gallic interpretation.

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