When critics accused Jean-Pierre Melville of shooting his characters as if they were in a gangster movie, he didn't take the remark as a compliment. 'Absolutely idiotic,' he said. He was right in a sense, because the critics were not intending a compliment, but what was he resisting? Melville's best-known films - Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle rouge (1970), for example - are gangster movies, versions of America converted into sheer style by the transfer to France. Why wouldn't they be shot accordingly? Well, the film in question was not any of the above, and not a gangster movie. It was L'Armée des ombres (1969), Melville's masterpiece about the Resistance, still often a matter of style, ways of acting and speaking, and above all not speaking, but also a matter of what we might call moral style: how to sound certain when you're not, how to make ugly but necessary decisions, how to live with the lessons of your own fear.

LRB 21 June 2007 | PDF Download