Les guerriers dans l'ombre

I did not know this film about French Belgian resistance army. I did not know either that Chuck Crichton made such non comedy features, and I am not disappointed at all. And Simone Signoret gives here one of the three French partisan character she had - and maybe more, I don't exactly know - in her career. Before Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMEE DES OMBRES and René Clément's LE JOUR ET L'HEURE. She is awesome here and I don't understand the reviews against this movie. I just discover it after decades of film passion. Later is better than never.

Two years before Odette and a decade before Carve her Name with Pride, this film imagines a Special Operations Executive mission in Belgium. The SOE is not identified by name, and seems to be operating from a room inside the Natural History Museum instead of an office building on Baker Street, but many of the other elements are there - training in a country house, techniques of maintaining cover while on mission, and parachute jumps. There is even a workshop devising clever ways of concealing explosives - including dead rats and horse manure. Interesting to see so soon after the war what aspects of SOE, still now cloaked in secrecy more than half a century later, were seemingly well known. The workshop is also clearly a cinematic ancestor of Q's gadget factory in the Bond movies. One of the true to life aspects of this well scripted and directed (by Charles Crichton, better known for comedies The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titchfield Thunderbolt) film is the danger of being an agent in occupied Europe. Networks are vulnerable to betrayal (and one of the group we are introduced to in training turns out to be passing secrets to the Germans via an Irish contact) and the Gestapo are everywhere. People die, quite a lot of them, and suddenly. There is some dubious licence (Simone Signoret as Michèle operates a radio hidden in a sewing machine, which surely would have been vulnerable to detection, while John Slater as Emile has plastic surgery so effective his wife does not recognise him), but the story, while the characters and their mission are fictitious, seems to be informed by recent experience of the secret world. It is also ironic and poignant, in times of Brexit, to see again the common purpose of a bunch of foreigners in wartime England and the mortal risks they are prepared to take to liberate Europe from the Nazis. The women take roles equally as important as the men; which Gordon Jackson's character, who is drafted in from the explosive factory, is a bit stuffy about. Robert Beatty plays Father Elliot, a French-Canadian Catholic priest who is sent in to Belgium liberate an agent called Andrew (played by the Austrian actor Peter Illing) who has been caught after blowing up an archive office. James Robertson Justice, who would later play a similar role in The Guns of Navarone, is the mastermind in the museum back in London. His description of what his group does is as good a description of SOE as you get in movies portraying its activities: 'We collect all kinds of queer fish in this organisation, people who would never be taken for saboteurs. We send them back to school to learn all the things they were thrashed for - cheating and deceiving, pretending to be everything they are not. Playing rough games and dirty tricks.' Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE in France who appears at the beginning of Odette, could hardly have put it better. The dramatic licence of the conclusion stretches credibility a bit far, and the constant background music gets a bit overpowering at times. But the strong cast of actors get well developed and believable characters to work with and Against the Wind is one of the better examples of its genre, even though it is one of the first.

I got this as one of a number of recent acquisitions and kept putting off watching it because war films have to be very good to hold my interest and I wasn't all that interested in a British war film that would be starring Simone Signoret and Robert Beatty, expecting some kind of wartime mishmash of a love story accompanied by London blackouts. Boy, was I wrong! I found this an absolutely first-rate film all the way, and I cannot understand some of the negative reviews seen here, unless they are mainly from younger reviewers who want shoot-'em-up action before all else. And several of the reviews don't even get the story right while still nastily including 'spoilers' (one of which does not include a warning). This has to be just about the earliest film to include a crash course in the techniques of wartime infiltration and espionage, and we are given full measure of this by being walked through various training and laboratory facilities and seeing just how ingenious some of these things are and just how conscienceless even potential heroes are expected to be. The laboratory part of it, much involved in explosives of kinds most normal and upstanding people can't even imagine, is reminiscent of later tours through the latest inventions 007 will be given and made familiar with in order to accomplish his own missions. And Peter Illing makes a marvelous and quite lengthy speech to the potential spies and infiltrators, the main point of which is that they must never let their emotions interfere with their duty - which is, of course, to accomplish the mission and/or avoid being caught. If you have to sacrifice a comrade, even a good friend, you do so, because by doing so you will save many more lives than his or hers. And you WILL take that suicide pill if you are caught; your death is as unimportant as your friend's as long as the mission is served. That's a rather heady set of instructions to hear back in 1948, when Great Britain and all the rest of Europe were but three years' distant from the worst and most humanly costly war in history. And that's just for a start. In the course of the film, you will see how this training plays out, and in some cases, the least-likely characters, portrayed by the least-likely actors (considering stardom or sympathetic characterizations) are so suddenly gone from the scene or so brutally betrayed by circumstances that it is a considerable shock to the viewer to even realize what is going on before their eyes. I agree with a couple of reviewers that the Signoret-Gordon Jackson romance seems unrealistic, but that is not Jackson's fault (he is always an excellent actor), just a mistake of casting. Yet there is only two years' difference in their ages, but Signoret seems so much more mature. But when considering such duos, it is well to remember that Margaret Leighton was six years older than Laurence Harvey, and that Elizabeth Taylor, while four years younger than Eddie Fisher, was about a thousand years older than he was in experience. I mention these mundane comparisons to show that surely such pairings were not necessarily so unusual, maybe especially so in wartime, as to invalidate their inclusion in this particular storyline. Anyway, there was not a performance in the film that I didn't consider somewhere between excellent and superb, most especially those of Signoret, Illing, Beatty, Warner and Justice (what actor ever had more easy authority than Mr. Justice?). As for the reviewer who has up to this moment scored an amazing 0 - 21 where agreements with his assessment of the film are concerned, it should be noted that Mr. Warner, 54 at the time the film was made, could easily have been a decade younger in his character, and that being overweight (Mr. Warner was always overweight) is not necessarily an impediment to being in overall excellent physical condition. After all, he didn't even make his first movie until he was 48, stuck around in films for another 35 years, had a hit TV series wherein he played a policeman until he was just past 80 years of age, and died at 85. I think he was in good enough shape to be a soldier during World War Two, don't you? (Another similarly porky fellow, Ernest Borgnine, spent ten years in the U.S. Navy, lived to be 95, and made five films in the last year of his life!) All in all, I thought this a superb film, and I can't imagine why I never heard of it before recently picking it up.

Despite the usual budgetary restrictions, this manages to convey a sense of the danger and great sacrifice made by these brave people who fought for our freedom. Charles Crichton brings out the human story rather than the all-action tale of some movies. Scenes with John Slater visiting his wife seems slightly corny now, but then must have seemed so close to events (just 3 years after the end of WW2). And the outcome later makes it all the more poignant. I thought a movie like this would be good to show in schools, as a part of history lesson. I love all those character actors they were part of my childhood, and they were such real actors and people. (Take note Arnold, et al) And I still haven't got over Jack Warner's Max (our own Dixon of Dock green) who would have adam 'n' eved it!

I am a great fan of WWII movies, especially the ones concerning the resistance. To me, there is nothing better than a good film about the underground - British, Dutch, French, whatever, and "Against The Wind" is a good one. It takes a while to get going; there are many scenes setting up the planned rescue in Belgium and some time is spent on character development. A team of five are in the plan, and, of course, one is a double agent working for the Nazis.

As in many such movies, the Nazis are slow-witted bumblers, which always adds to my enjoyment even if a caricature. The action here is fast-paced and is in the second half of the picture and is one reason for my rating. The other reason is Simone Signoret, who I consider the best actress to ever grace the silver screen. She is aided and abetted by an able cast including Robert Beatty, Jack Warner and Gordon Jackson. If you are a fan of spy movies you should catch this one.