LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Lino Ventura: Philippe Gerbier
built 230 days ago
Lino Ventura is wonderful as Philippe Gerbier, a civil engineer whose work with the resistance lands him in a POW camp, where he befriends an avowed young Communist, who helps him hatch an escape plan. Even more mesmerizing (and a bit late to the movie) is Simone Signoret as perhaps the most prominent woman in the Resistance, whose steely resolve to fight is put to the most brutal test by her tormentors. Somewhat peculiarly for a war movie, this one has an almost dreamy, ethereal quality—it doesn't shrink from the worst of it, but somehow it's not an unrelenting nightmare, even as violence and mayhem seem to infect every frame. It ... has elements of an old-style police procedural, especially as the freedom fighters seek to break one of their own out of a Gestapo prison camp. It very much feels like Melville is using the lessons he's learned from his crime pictures and using them on a grander and more brutal scale.
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With the invasion of France by the Nazis, civil engineer Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) suddenly finds himself a key member of the Resistance. He is turned over to the Germans by a traitor in the movement and sent to a concentration camp. Another inmate helps him escape the prison and Gerbier joins his network in Marseilles where he sets about to uncover the turncoat and execute him in “Army of Shadows.”
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Inside the car is Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a prisoner of the German forces, who is being ferried to a small camp of fellow-undesirables. He stands before the commanding officer, who reads an official description of the new inmate: “Distant and ironic attitude. Suspected of Gaullist ideas.” Two things are crucial here. First, nothing has been proved; suspicion is more potent than hard evidence in the twilit limbo patrolled by Melville’s creatures. Second, the officer does not read
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The audience entry point is Philippe Gerbier, played by Lino Ventura, a husky, downbeat Italian whose demeanor and restraint bring to mind Robert De Niro. Gerbier formulates escape plans in an instant and enacts them with the cold, crisp authority of a ninja.
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Philippe Gerbier