DVD Review: Army of Crime

I have a certain fascination with the resistance movements of the second world war.  In there lies a million individual stories of the best and worst of human behaviour.  In France for instance, less than 2% of the population were ever actively involved in the Resistance in one way or another.  Of them, one in five were killed as a result of their activities (approx 100,000).  These stark figures prompt the question about whether we could have shown such defiance and bravery in similar circumstances or whether we would have followed an easier and safer path (a well trodden theme perhaps brought into focus most famously for a UK audience in It Happened Here).

Since then there have been many attempts to tell this story on film, far more than I have seen (and probably ever will see).  I've tried to keep up to speed with some of the more recent films about resistance but have become increasingly disappointed.  I'm thinking in particular of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, the Danish Flame and Citron, the Oscar nominated Outside the Law set in the struggle for Algerian Independence, and my most recent viewing Army of Crime.  Black Book with its gratuitous close up of the (female) lead dying her pubic hair, as well as stripping and covering her with slurry later in the film, is only slightly less sensationalist than Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (which, despite its faults, is a better film than any of these imo).  Flame and Citron plods along fairly predictably while Outside the Law is overlong and loses its way.

Army of Crime, unfortunately, doesn't do much to breathe life into this genre.  From the director who so delicately handled The Last Mitterrand we got something that felt much more like a TV movie, uninterestingly shot and lacking any distinctive qualities.  It also falls into the same trap as the others with its jarringly expositional dialogue that hammers home the background and motives of the individual résistants without going to the trouble of making you care.  They seem to miss the point too- I don't need to be told the reasons why someone has chosen to resist- that would be perfectly obvious to every non-fascist.  What I'm interested in is what is it about their character that has led them to do what the majority of the population didn't.  Flagging up that one of them reads Marx and another has a Jewish dad is not a satisfactory substitute.

These films are not without their positives (except Black Book which is awful) and tell an important moral story that is as relevant as ever today.  I just can't help but feel that the subject matter deserves better than these most recent offerings.

Or perhaps I'm just using too high a benchmark (see right).