World War II and the Noir Sensibility

My first encounter with the work of Jean-Pierre Melville

They’re doing a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective at Film Forum now, and in an effort to beat the heat (and the rain), I managed to catch two of his films, neither of which I’d ever seen before, as indeed, to my shame, I had not seen any of his films until I saw these two: The Red Circle and Army of Shadows. I enjoyed both very much, but I also found both of them depressing, bleak rather than tragic, and since I saw them I have been mulling over why that might be.

The Red Circle is a very cool crime film with a thrilling heist at its climax. Alain Delon plays Corey, a mid-level underworld figure who gets out of prison early for good behavior thanks to the influence of a prison guard with his own agenda: he has a job for Delon to do on the outside. At the same time, another criminal, Vogel, played by Gian Maria Volonté, is being transported by train in the custody of police commissioner François Mattei, played by the singer and comedian Bourvil. Corey looks up his old boss, who abandoned him in prison and stole his mistress, and steals a pile a cash from him as compensation; Vogel escapes custody and, in the course of his escape, hides in Corey’s trunk. This chance meeting—apparently fortuitous but ultimately fatal—is the basis for the title, from the following text which opens the film:

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.”

Each man saves the other’s life, and they decide to do the job together, a jewelry heist that is the extraordinary set piece for which the film is rightly famous, and for which they bring in a third partner, Jansen, played by Yves Montand, a former policeman and expert marksman who resigned from the force out of disgust at corruption and is now a broken-down alcoholic (we first meet him in the throes of delirium tremens, another extraordinary and surreal scene). They pull of the job with precision and panache, but the police and Corey’s old underworld boss are able to tighten the red circle into a noose in which all three criminals are ultimately trapped and killed. The moral of the film is delivered by the inspector general of the police, Mattei’s ultimate boss: all men are fundamentally corrupt and ultimately criminal.

So far so noir. I’m a huge fan of noir classics like Double Indemnity, Night and the City or The Third Man, as well as of any number of later films that harken back to those classics like Blade Runner, Blood Simple or Blue Velvet. So why did The Red Circle leave me kind of cold?

In a perceptive short essay on the enduring power of Chinatown, one of the greatest noirs of all time, David Polansky (no relation to the director of that film) points out that most neo-noirs are formal exercises, putting its characters through the paces of the genre’s conventions rather than exemplifying a deeply-felt worldview. The Red Circle felt formal to me, but for the opposite reason: because its fatalistic worldview is so fully embraced by its characters that they seem to have almost no interiority left at all. Corey and Vogel’s actions can be described in terms of motivation—they’ll get money from the heist, at least—but that motivation seems almost beside the point. They’re doing what they do because of the characters they are playing in this story, but they seem almost emotionless about it, as though they know they are in the grip of fate and have no interest in struggling vainly against it.

Jansen and Mattei both have actual character arcs, but they bend toward the mode of being that Corey and Vogel already exemplify. The opportunity to participate in the heist is what gets Jansen off the bottle, and in gratitude for that gift he foreswears any share in the profits of the heist. Despair has been vanquished not by hope but simply by having a role to play, and it doesn’t really matter that the role not only has no profit but leads inevitably to death—and death at the hands of Mattei, who turns out to be his old classmate at the police academy. That discovery, that one of the criminals was once a policeman, is what triggers the inspector general’s final line, which Mattei cannot dispute, but must impassively accept, which is the end of his character arc.

I suppose there’s a feeling there, but it isn’t the pity and terror of tragedy. Rather, it’s the feeling of initiation into a bleak mystery, into a comradeship of cool. And I guess I just didn’t buy it; I felt that it was ultimately a pose, a deflection, a kind of false bravado. It felt, in fact, like the kind of thing that another noir might reveal to be false bravado. In any event, at the end of the film I didn’t feel cool; I was left cold.

Army of Shadows is a far more consequential film, following a group of individuals in the French Resistance over a few months in 1942 and 1943. Melville himself was a member of the Resistance during the war, so he has some credibility in describing what it was like, though the specific events of the film are not drawn from his biography. I didn’t know that about Melville before watching the film, so I wasn’t contaminated by that knowledge, and its unremitting bleakness felt earned as I watched it. Knowing it now, though, I wondered whether I was witnessing the basis of the feeling that Melville was deflecting himself from in the other film.

Though the film is really an ensemble piece, the principal character is Philippe Gerbier, played by Lino Ventura, the head of a cell whom we first meet as he is being transported to a concentration camp that had originally been built to house German POWs. Gerbier seems worldly wise and bides his time until a fellow inmate, a young Communist engineer, hatches a plan to escape. Before they can execute that plan, however, Gerbier is brought to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. As he waits on a bench, he hatches an escape plan with another French patriot sitting beside him: he will distract the guard while the other man makes a run for it. But the other patriot is the real distraction, for while the other guards turn to shoot at him, Gerbier grabs the knife from the guard nearest him, stabs him to death, and flees.

The sequence sets the pattern for much of the rest of the action of the film. Felix Lepercq (played by Paul Crauchet) grabs the traitor who ratted Gerbier out to the police and, with Gerbier and a third member of the cell, they set out to execute him for his treason, a process that takes an agonizingly long time as the house they’ve selected for the action is less private than they supposed. They can’t use a gun because it will be heard, and they can’t find a knife, so they have to strangle the young man to death. Later, Lepercq himself is picked up by the Gestapo, and Gerbier and other members of the cell—led by Mathilde (Simone Signoret), the only significant female character in the film—hatch a plan either to spring him or to kill him to put him out of his misery (and prevent him from talking, though Gerbier is convinced he would never do that). Another member of the cell, who had been recruited by Lepercq, winds up sacrificing himself, getting himself arrested so that he can be placed in the same cell as Lepercq and provide him with a cyanide capsule.

Later still, Gerbier is picked up by the Gestapo, and Mathilde and the other members of the cell arrange a daring escape. The scene seems like it might have inspired Squid Game—the Gestapo line their prisoners up and tell them to run toward a far wall away from a machine gun, and that whoever reaches the wall first will be spared until the next group execution is scheduled. Gerbier at first decides that he won’t run, but is forced to as the Germans fire bullets at his feet, when suddenly smoke grenades explode behind him and in front of him, obscuring the gunners’ view, and a rope drops down for him to climb. Any triumph is short-lived, however; as he waits in his safe house, Gerbier is visited by the chief, Luc Gardie (Paul Meurisse), a genial intellectual who is the only person Gerbier professes to love, who tells him that Mathilde herself has been picked up by the Gestapo, and is being blackmailed by them with threats to her daughter. Gerbier must kill her to prevent her from talking.

The common pattern is that the members of the Resistance in this film are always either saving each other, sacrificing themselves for the cause, or sacrificing others for the cause. The cause itself, though, is almost invisible. There’s a sequence where members of the cell smuggle a radio transmitter, another sequence where a French royalist aristocrat allows his estate to be used as a landing strip for clandestine aircraft, and we do follow Gerbier and Gardie to London to beg for allied assistance, which is not forthcoming (their British contact says they lack confidence in the capabilities of the Resistance). But there is no discussion in the film of actual plans to sabotage the Nazi occupiers or otherwise assist the war effort against them. Melville chose a time period and a frame for his story within which all that is left for the Resistance to do is not get wiped out—and even in this effort they fail.

Because of this, they seem to lack conventional motivation. It feels like they are members of the Resistance as a matter of pure existential commitment rather than in order to achieve any objective. And over the course of the film, this feeling starts to become generalized; I came to feel that the ultimate point of the film was to impress upon me that this isn’t just the way it felt to be the Resistance in 1942 and 1943, but that this is how things are, essentially, a truth that only that kind of experience could make unavoidable. The Resistance fighters of Army of Shadows are not the cool, cynical criminals of The Red Circle; they feel, and we see them feel, every necessary killing and betrayal. But the film is an initiation of sorts into the bleak, pointless sense of the nature of things that, in the heist film, has hardened into a kind of badge of honor, and a shield against feeling. It’s certainly not a film that made the Resistance seem heroic, except, again, the existential sense of being able to continue playing their hopeless right roles down to the end.

It’s a commonplace to say that noir as a style emerged in response to the agonies of World War II. Army of Shadows was made two decades after the noir era, and it isn’t a noir itself. It felt to me, though, like a conscious attempt by the filmmaker to present those wartime experiences in a way that explained and justified the emergence of the noir sensibility. It’s all right there in the title, after all. Noir is all about shadows, the literal chiaroscuro conveying the moral reality of our world; here, they are mustered into an army required to mostly aim its weapons at itself.