The Great Movies III

His second strength is a complete command of tone. Like her friend Henry James, Edith Wharton seldom allowed her characters to state bluntly what they were thinking. They talked around it, inhibited by society and perhaps afraid of their own thoughts. Wharton, however, allows herself a narrator who does state the plain truth. At a key point in the story, May, now Archer's wife, makes comments that reveal how frankly she views the world, and then quickly returns to her tame and naive persona. The narrator tells us what Archer cannot, that he wonders "how such depths of feeling could coexist with such an absence of imagination."

Consider the most crucial passage in the film. Archer has decided to take a decisive step, to break away from his flawless but banal wife, be with the Countess, and accept the consequences. Then the prospects of the Countess change dramatically, and his wife tells him something he did not expect to hear. He is an intelligent man and realizes at once what has been done, how it cannot be undone, and what as a gentleman he must do. His fate is sealed. As he regards the future, the narrator tells us what cannot, in this world, possibly be said in dialogue: he guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears. He understood that, somehow, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved. And he knew that now the whole tribe had rallied around his wife. He was a prisoner in the center of an armed camp.

The film ends with a sense of loss, sadness, and resignation, reminding me of the elegiac feeling in Orson Welles's 7be MagncentAmbersons. The final scene, on a park bench in Paris, sums up not only the movie but Scorsese's reason for making it; it contains a revelation showing that love is more complex and secret than we imagine. Archer's son Ted says his mother told him his father could be trusted because "when she asked you to, you gave up the thing you wanted most." Archer replies, "She never asked me."We reflect, first, that she never did, and, second, that she never needed to.

ean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows is about members of the French Resistance who persist in the face of despair. Rarely has a film shown so truly that place in the heart where hope lives with fatalism. It is not a film about daring raids and exploding trains, but about cold, hungry, desperate men and women who move invisibly through the Nazi occupation of France. Their army is indeed made of shadows: they use false names, they have no addresses, they can be betrayed in an instant by a traitor or an accident. They know they will probably die.

This is not a war film. It is about a state of mind. Under the Vichy government of the World War I hero Petain, France officially permitted the Nazi occupation. Most Frenchmen accepted it as the price of immunity from German armies. DeGaulle runs the Free French movement from London but is a voice on the radio and commands no troops-none except for those in the Resistance, who pose as ordinary citizens, lead two lives, spy on the Germans, provide information to the Allies, and sometimes carry out guerrilla raids against the enemy.

Many films have shown such actions. Melville, who was himself a member of the Resistance, is not interested in making an action film. Action releases tension and makes it external. His film is about the war within the minds of Resistance members, who must live with constant fear, persist in the face of futility, accept the deaths of their comrades, and expect no reward, except the knowledge that they are doing the right thing. Because many die under false names, their sacrifices are never known; in the film, two brothers never discover that they are both in the Resistance, and one dies anonymously.

As one of his films after another is rediscovered, Melville is moving into the ranks of the greatest directors. He was not much honored in his lifetime. We now know from his gangster film Bob le Flambeur (1955) that he was an early father of the New Wave-before Godard, Truffaut, Malle. He used actual locations, dolly shots with a camera mounted on a bicycle, unknown actors and unrehearsed street scenes, everyday incidents instead of heightened melodrama. In Le Samourai (1967), at a time when movie hit men were larger than life, he reduced the existence of a professional assassin (Alain Delon) to ritual, solitude, simplicity, and understatement. And in Le Cercle Rouge (1970), he showed police and gangsters who know how a man must win the respect of those few others who understand the code. His films, with their precision of image and movement, are startlingly beautiful.