The opening shot of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 lost masterpiece Army Of Shadows follows a procession of German troops as they march down the Champs-Elysées, a daily ritual that enforced feelings of hopelessness and humiliation among the occupied French. Melville initially planned to put the shot at the very end of the film, but inserting it at the beginning sets an extraordinarily bleak tone, making clear that this will be no ordinary tribute to bravery and derring-do among the Resistance fighters, but a tale infused with deep tragedy. In its grim fatalism and utter lack of sentiment, Army Of Shadows is of a piece with work like Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, Melville's famed deconstructions of American gangster films, except here, his connection is more personal. As a member of the Resistance himself, Melville harbors no illusions about the real sacrifices involved in operating against the Gestapo and the Vichy government, not just in lives lost, but also in souls forever compromised.