Leon Morin, Priest
How strange to see a Jean-Pierre Melville movie where none of the characters wear trenchcoats or fedoras ! Melville was a king of style, his best films usually tales of gangsters who are looking for a portal back to the Hollywood movies they fell out of. Leon Morin, Priest , though, is the middle of a trilogy of movies in which Melville tried to capture the experience of France during World War II, a time when Melville himself had been soldier in the Resistance -- the first, The Silence of the Sea , was his first feature as director, the third, Army of Shadows , is his most epic masterpiece, the film where he was able to bring together all of his interests, passions, and proclivities, giving them a depth and resonance they'd not quite had before. Leon Morin was originally going to be more epic than it is, but part of Melville's goal in making it was to create a more commercial and popular movie than he had before, and so he sacrificed as much as he could bear to tha...