Army of Shadows

(1969)

★ 7.9 IMDb · 772 votes

Genres: War, Drama, Thriller, History

Year: 1969

Runtime: 145 мин

Country: France, Italy

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Лино Вентура, Paul Meurisse, Жан-Пьер Кассель, Simone Signoret, Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, Alain Dekok, Alain Libolt, Jean-Marie Robain

Plot

Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.

France, 1942, under German occupation. Philippe Gerbier, a civil engineer, is a French Resistance commandant. Denounced by a French collaborator, he is interned in a concentration camp. He manages to escape, and rejoins his network in Marseille, where he has the traitor executed. This movie reveals rigorously and austerely what life was like in the French Resistance: the solitude and fear of its members; their relationships with one another; the constant threat of arrest by the Gestapo; the Resistance command structure and the way its orders were carried out. Head writer Joseph Kessel and co-writer/director Jean-Pierre Melville were both veterans of the "Shadow Army".