Jean-Pierre Melville’s renowned films include L’armée des ombres (“Army Of Shadows” 1969), Le samouraï (1967), Bob le flambeur (1956), and of course Les enfants terribles (1950). But it’s Léon Morin, prêtre (“Leon Morin, Priest” / “The Forgiven Sinner” 1961) that I’ve always wanted to see, Melville’s adaptation of the Béatrix Beck novel about Catholic and Communist resistance to the German occupation of France.
The film’s recent revival at Film Forum in New York has again whetted my interest, and having decided not to move to Manhattan for the time being, I’ve gone ahead and ordered a VHS copy. (There’s a Region 2 DVD available, but I balked at the import price). Here’s Richard Brody, from his April 17 Front Row blog post. and the April 20 New Yorker print blurb.
“The story is centered on a young widow, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a Communist whose late husband was Jewish and who struggles to spare their two young children from being deported to a concentration camp . . . The film’s main drama concerns Barny’s relationship with the handsome, brave, vigorous, and intellectual priest of the title (Jean-Paul Belmondo) . . . Melville films wartime with barely restrained passion, he films religious dialectics with remarkable but dispassionate skill, and he uses the story of Barny and Morin to skew the postwar political context—to reinforce the role of Catholics in the newly founded Fifth Republic and suppress that of Communists . . . He doesn’t just make the woman’s Communism vanish, he makes all the Communists in the early part of the story vanish. Melville’s depiction of the Occupation is superbly textured and detailed, but his vision of the way he wanted postwar France to be then took precedence over his power to depict it as it was.”
I’m thinking triple-feature, with Robert Bresson’s masterful A Man Escaped (“Un condamné à mort s’est échappé” 1951) and – for the early-Sixties political-religious context – the completely and justifiably forgotten Question 7 (1961, Stuart Rosenberg) – though it’s only fair to note that the National Board of Review did name it “Best Film of the Year.” Make that a quadruple-feature: mustn’t forget Open City (“Roma, città aperta” 1945, Roberto Rossellini). Maybe this’ll need to be a whole festival…