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Derek Malcolm's rating
Army of Crime is beautiful tribute to war's hidden heroes
By
Derek Malcolm
2 Oct 2009
Marseilles film-maker Robert Guédiguian was just the man to make this substantially true tale about the Jews, Eastern Europeans, Spaniards and Italians, many of them communists, who risked their lives harassing the Nazis and their collaborators in German-occupied Paris — he could easily have been one of them himself.
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It’s a story plainly but professionally told with actors who are not stars, though Ariane Ascaride, Guediguian’s wife (a brilliant actress), is at its heart. Guédiguian convincingly shows how the French police collaborated with the Nazis against what they called “the army of crime” and how the brave foreign partisans were eventually rounded up and shot only a few months before Paris was freed.
Most poignant is the story of Missak Manouchian, the Armenian leader who, in a letter before he was killed, wrote: “I die with no hatred of the German people.” He is well played here by Simon Abkarian.
It is a tragic story that deserves to be remembered and has rarely been told on film.
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Reader views (1)
An absorbing film about part of the resistance in France to Nazi occupation. It uses its time well to set the scene, introduce characters and their various ways of resisting before their increased co-operation and organisation in the Resistance, the better to advance their struggle. There were plenty of collaborators in wartime France, but there was also a fine Resistance, and mostly European, often jewish or communist as shown here, refugees who were only such because forced to flee and who continued their fight against the fascist enemy as world war spread. When cynicism has become so commonplace an attitude as a self-administered chit for opting out of public life, this film about those who came forward is like a breath of fresh air.
- Peter, London, United Kingdom, 07/10/2009 14:28
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