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Made by the French director Jean-Pierre Melville in the late 60s Army In The Shadows is a hauntingly sombre but brilliant account of a group of mainly middle-aged resistance fighters in Occupied France during World War Two. Avoiding acts of spectacular heroism, Melville presents a twilight world, where the clandestine freedom-fighters seek to avoid capture and are forced to eliminate informants from their own ranks.

Adapted from Joseph Kessel's wartime novel, Army In The Shadows concentrates on a four-month period between October 1942 and February 1943 and the activities of an Underground cell headed by Lino Ventura's engineer Gerbier. Save for the powerful opening sequence of Wehrmacht soldiers marching through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysees, Germans are almost entirely absent from the drama. The emphasis is less on historical reality than conveying the spirit of the Resistance.

"MOVINGLY RESTRAINED PERFORMANCES"

Melville handles with consummate cinematic mastery the suspenseful set-pieces, including Gerbier's escape from the Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Majestic and the daring attempt dreamt up by Simone Signoret's Mathilde to rescue a tortured prisoner by posing as a German ambulance crew. In many ways Army In The Shadows resembles one of the director's own gangster pictures: hence the chilly colours, the movingly restrained performances, the blurring of moral boundaries (nowhere more evident than when a teenage traitor is strangled to death with a towel), and the iconographic details of hats, guns and cars. Above all however, it's suffused in a mood of pessimism and futility, illustrating Melville's own belief that "man is always defeated".