Recommended

Like Melville's Zen crooks, Army's anti-Nazi resisters are professionals first and foremost, dedicated here to a cause instead of a code. Lino Ventura's midlevel agent rarely lets an emotion cross his face. Even when he's ordering a traitor's death by strangulation, or dodging Nazi bullets, he hardly seems to break a sweat.

MAN IN THE SHADOWS: Lino Ventura (left) faces the music.

The cool-dude stoicism of Melville's gangster movies is his most easily fetishized trait, but Army's soldiers aren't posturing; they know a stray glance could get them killed. Fleeing German guards in the streets of Paris, Ventura ducks into a barbershop and sits for a shave, eyeing the Pétainist posters on the wall as the razor traces his skin. For his implacability, he's rewarded with the barber's trench coat ... an invaluable disguise, and an unexpected act of brotherhood between men who dare not speak their bond aloud.

Melville, a resister himself (at a time, he notes in an interview on Rialto's Web site, when the ranks of the resistance numbered in the hundreds), gives Ventura and his comrades few moments of glory. The movie begins in October of 1942 and ends early the following year, just as the resistance was just beginning to gather steam. Victory is in surviving, or, failing that, in exerting some measure of control over one's own death. A good chunk of the movie is given over to an attempted prison break that comes to a chilly, cyanide-tinged end.

Although Melville based some of his characters on his resistance comrades, and pays moving tribute to them in the movie's epilogue, they're important as individuals only to the extent they serve a greater purpose. Personal details are glimpsed or gleaned; a fleeting scene shows Ventura working his day job as a theatrical agent, and a single encounter connects him to his apparently indolent older brother (Paul Meurisse). (The two are linked in a far more profound way, but Ventura will never know it.) Personal details can be turned against them, like the photo of her daughter Simone Signoret's matronly Mata Hari carries.

Melville doesn't sentimentalize his fallen comrades, but he carved them a splendid tombstone. Army of Shadows is as awesomely controlled as Melville's freeze-dried thrillers, but here he's applying the technique to the real world rather than creating his own. The movie's determined fatalism may not be what audiences want in time of war ... it wasn't in 1969, when the movie went unreleased in the U.S. ... but Melville does the dead an awesome service by instilling their end with as much meaning as the life that preceded it.

Army of Shadows

Directed by Jean-Pierre MelvilleA Rialto Pictures releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Bourse