Undercover of the Night

Sod had not yet overgrown the mass graves, nor had the gaping holes been fully plugged in Poland's cities, when Andrzej Munk decided to show his countrymen that their resistance to Nazi occupation had been an act of drunken slapstick. Do you want to see a provocation? Try Eroica, released in 1957, in which Munk summed up the partisan movement--then fresh in living memory--in the figure of a horny lounge lizard, who served his country by stumbling blindly across enemy lines.

Since Munk had been a partisan himself, and was a Jew, too, he had the right to raise his middle finger if he felt like it. So did Jean-Pierre Melville, and for exactly the same reasons. Though far less sardonic than Munk in his view of the struggle against Nazism, Melville was just as anti-heroic in his great Army of Shadows. Released in 1969, it represented the French Resistance as a kind of gangland operation carried out by grim men bundled in hats and overcoats.

So much for Casablanca. Cinema's romantic image of the Resistance, formulated while the battles were still raging, became for Munk and Melville a myth that needed debunking. This target shifted, though, for a later generation of filmmakers who had no firsthand experience of the fighting. Younger writer-directors, who grew up wondering about the role their parents played in the war, have tended to question not the character of the Resistance but rather the myth of its popularity. For example: In his insidiously amusing A Self-Made Hero (1996), Jacques Audiard tells a fable about a dreamy and protected young fellow who, like so many Frenchmen, begins his career as a Resistance fighter on May 8, 1945.

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