"Quite simply, colonel, because the men had dropped them."
~ Marguerite Gonnet (Lyon Resistance) - when asked at trial why she'd taken up arms against the occupying Nazis

Julien Duvivier was a giant of French cinema before the war, but his prickly ways and off beat methods saw him fall out of favour after he returned to France from Hollywood, where he sat out the war while his countrymen suffered under the Nazi occupation. Therefore, for him to address the labyrinthine issues surrounding the occupation and the Resistance was always going to be a fraught equation, but here he tackles the subject front on, with a first-rate cast led by Danielle Darrieux, Paul Meurisse, Serge Reggiani and Lino Ventura and a cracking script from veteran screenwriter Henri Jeanson. 

Marie-Helene (code name Marie-Octobre) has summoned several of her war-time resistance colleagues to a reunion, 15 years after the end of the war. The group are now mostly successful professionals or businessmen and are informed that Marie and another ex-member Francois (Paul Meurisse) have recently learned that their beloved group leader Castille, was betrayed by one of their number on the night he was killed in a sudden Gestapo raid during the war. The setting is the very manor house where the incident took place, and the group is forced to relive the night as they try to uncover who the traitor was.

Pulling the sticky band-aid off the scab of the festering wound that was the French experience with collaboration and resistance was a bold move from Duvivier, who had already upset certain sections of the French public with his controversial collaboration allegory, Panique, in 1946. Duvier had settled into directing a wide array of projects in the interim, broad populist comedies, gangster films and love stories and this film was his only overt rendering of issues around the war since Panique, and it would be his last. Duvivier was not one to fall for De Gaulle’s self-mythologising or the widespread notion that it was the French themselves who liberated France and wasn’t shy in delving into that murky past. In true fashion, Duvivier melded his clear-eyed story of ordinary people under extreme pressure and infused it with a hefty dose of l’amour fou.

The drama plays out like a taut Agatha Christie exercise or wordy courtroom sparring session as accusations and memory collide and perceptions are tested. The characters pick apart each other’s alibis mercilessly as they attempt to come up with an answer, and then to carry out the rough justice that such an uncovering would demand. The cinematography from (Jacques Becker favourite) Robert Lefebvre is superb and incisive as it needs to capture every nuance in expression and change in body language from the multiple participants and yet accent the claustrophobic nature of the scenario. Duvivier makes the shots and sequences fluid and interesting in order to propel what is otherwise a stagy affair, with flashbacks to take the action out of the country manor.

The script was adapted by Henri Jeanson, along with Duvivier and Jacques Robert from Robert’s recent novel of the same name. Jeanson was a frequent collaborator with Duvier, notably on the immortal Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal in the 1930s. The first rate ensemble is beautifully handled by Duvivier and all work superbly in service of the piece, but ultimately the luminous Danielle Darrieux is the stunning centerpiece of a poisonous merry go round. The standout supports for her central figure are Paul Meurisse, Lino Ventura and Bernard Blier as old wounds, perceived slights and enmities are paraded around as the former resistance fighters pick each other apart, from the perspective of their mundane post-war occupations of printer, industrialist, lawyer, nightclub owner – in direct contrast to the dark thrills they shared in the war.  

Perhaps Duviiver’s most direct challenge to the ‘received’ history of the Resistance is to work with people who all had ‘collaboration’ baggage from the war. Jeanson was editing a magazine that had to promote Nazi propaganda, cinematographer Lefebvre worked for Continental, the Nazi controlled Paris film company, as did actors Darrieux, Blier, Meurisse and Noël Roquevert (who appeared in Clouzot’s resistance classic Le Corbeau). Whilst it was not unusual for the cinema workers who remained in occupied France to work for the Germans, several fell afoul of the score settlers après le guerre, not least Darrieux who was sentenced to death for entertaining audiences in Germany. She claimed the head of Continental, Alfred Greven, had threatened to deport her brother if she didn’t comply. She was exonerated after the liberation.

Duvivier, who made films in many genres, was always more at home when exploring the darker impulses of the human character, and in this story of heroism and betrayal he finds a rich and bloody vein to tap. Collaboration was inevitable at one level – millions of Frenchmen were employed in ways to aid the Nazi war effort as a matter of course, but the myth of resistance that arose after the Liberation became popular history – that the French widely worked an underground resistance helping the allies during the darkest days of Nazi rule. The truth was that resistance was almost solely the ambit of the far left, communists mainly, and that most Frenchmen complied to their German masters – in fact many of the Catholic far right were content to rat out their Jewish neighbors in the infamous Round Up. Accusations of collaboration and claims of resistance were complex and fraught and this tacit and overt in Marie-Octobre. That difficulty is underlined by having the absent hero, a near sainted figure, centre of the action but unseen and eulogised by ‘everyman’ types, the butcher, the baker… et. al., in a quasi-national mea culpa.

Regardless of the appetite for the average French cinema goer in 1959 to reflect on the national calamity of the war years, the film was of a type that was not to the taste of the darlings of Cahier Du Cinema, the film critics who condemned Duvivier as part of the ‘cinema du papa.’ It ticked off most of the cinema sins they viewed as problematic – it was adapted from a novel, it was not a ‘personal’ film of the directors, it was stagey and professionally acted, and it was not American. Duvivier was persona non-grata for the critics and his post 1950s career, although it contained many vibrant and interesting films, was overlooked by the critics, if not by the public who fronted up to enjoy his comedies regardless of critical condemnation.  

Duvivier made another half a dozen films after Marie-Octobre and worked until his death at 71 in a car accident in 1967, fully in the shadow of the ascendent Nouvelle Vague, never getting the critical reputation he fully deserved. Marie-Octobre is evidence of a master storyteller and fine cinema craftsman who could conjure quality at will, regardless of the prevailing orthodoxy.