DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Melville 
PRODUCER: Jacques Dorfmann
SCREENPLAY: Jean-Pierre Melville. Based on novel by Joseph Kessel
PHOTOGRAPHY: Pierre Lhomme, Walter Wottitz
EDITOR: Françoise Bonnot
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Théobald Meurisse
COSTUME DESIGNER: Madame Colette Baudot
MUSIC: Éric Demarsan
WITH: Lino Ventura (Philippe Gerbier), Paul Meurisse (Luc Jardie), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Jean François Jardie), Simone Signoret (Mathilde)
Claude Mann (Claude Ullmann dit 'Le Masque'), Paul Crauchet (Felix Lepercq)

REVIEW

Atmospheric and gripping, Army of Shadows is Melville’s most personal film, featuring Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler’s regime.

“This drama of the French Resistance is Joseph Kessel’s novel translated through director Jean-Pierre Melville’s personal recollections of the period, and of course his extraordinary cinema technique. Lino Ventura stars as a member of a Resistance unit in the early years of the war, when nobility and recklessness were called for in equal measure. He wears a suit in prison, but sangfroid masks purity of mission: he’ll give you his last cigarette or execute you, depending. In a marvelous cast, Simone Signoret stands out as a master of disguises – bomb-maker, whore, old woman, collaborationist nurse, and, fatally, mother. Great escapes, intricate plotting, superb suspense in secret acts of courage: following all of Melville’s great gangster films, all the experiments in form, here is the original underworld. Army of Shadows is the Melville blueprint, revealed post-construction.”

— Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Hamilton     
Monday 3 August, 8.00pm

Palmerston North     
Monday 17 August, 6.00pm

Auckland     
Monday 24 August, 6.00pm (suspended)

New Plymouth     
Wednesday 2 September, 6.00pm

Tauranga     
Wednesday 23 September, 6.15pm

Nelson     
Tuesday 6 October, 6.00pm

Wellington     
Monday 19 October, 6.15pm
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French Cinema presented with the cooperation of the Embassy of France and Institut Français