The film is a departure for Melville from his much (deservedly) acclaimed gangster films Le Samourai and The Second Breath while retaining the distanced tone that set them apart from other similar films of the era. It concerns the movements of a French resistance group during german occupation. There's not much plot to follow as the film is more than happy to capture the mundane everyday activities of these members. It's adapted from a very franctured day to day account of the resistance by Joseph Kessel and the film retains much of the rhythm that such a piece may be imagined to possess, with sporadic bursts of action punctuating a quiet sombre atmosphere. The idea here is to strip the rebels of any romanticism and conventional heroism and to portray them in a very humanistic way. And unfortunately as such things go, it also makes for some very laborious pacing and large patches of film where nothing really happens.

The plot (or what passes for it) concerns a group of revolutionaries influenced by the thoughts of a French intellectual who goes by the name of Luc Jardier and led by a man named Philippe Garbier (played with good authority by Lino Ventura). But instead of kicking ass as one would expect revolutionaries to do, here they just spend a lot of time hiding and finding ways to display their loyalty to the cause. Much of the patriotism is muted and is restricted to sacrificial acts, the most extreme of which involves one of the members selflessly surrendering himself so he could deliver suicide pills to a party member who's been arrested. Most of the set-pieces in the film start off impressively only to be dragged along to an interminable length. Even individual scenes far outstay their welcome and would likely have worked much better as short snippets or maybe even films  in themselves. In fact much of the film seems to have been structured in a fragmentary fashion where idle moments occupy more screen-time than the actual action. Even the characters for all the time we spend with them aren't ones you really feel for and the reason for this could be that they are looked at from a very cold distancing perspective. The only moments they really come alive are when they are called to do acts of violence which they are very much uncomfortable with. There are also scenes that ring completely false, like the pre-climax at a firing range where Garbier has to run for his life from machine gun fire, also a scene which starts off tremendously only to end with a whimper.

But for all that, the film does hold ones attention, if only infrequently. To its credit, it offers a very honest, unconventional and objective view of a revolution that's not peppered with heroics. It succeeds the most when its characters suffer moments of indecision on how best to tackle enemy torture, by popping in suicide pills or by living on to see if one survives unscathed, both morally and mentally. It's to the film's credit that, despite the many holes, it does make you care for what happens to these characters. It's maybe this demystification of national heroes that led to its being banned from release for 20 years. When it was restored and re-released it was treated on the same level as universally acknowledged landmarks as Sunrise and Metropolis by topping year-end polls everywhere. I'm not sure it merits such lofty praise but it's certainly worth a view if one is prepared to be persistent enough.