“The Last Metro” (1980)
Though he was a child during the occupation, Francois Truffaut didn’t directly address that time in French history until near the end of his career, with “The Last Metro” (a title referring to the train that Parisians had to get for fear of breaking curfew when the Nazis were in charge). The film stars Catherine Deneuve as Marion, a woman who has to hide her Jewish director husband (Heinz Bennet) in the cellar of their theatre, with Gerard Depardieu in an impressive early role as an actor who joins the company and who falls for Marion. On the surface, it’s a film more about the occupation than the resistance —in sharp contrast to most of the films on this list, no bullets are fired or bombs thrown. Instead, it’s a vividly captured portrait of the city under Nazi rule, with antisemitism and fear seeping out of almost every frame, even as its characters try to distract themselves. If you were expecting something more explosive from the director, you clearly don’t know his work, but in its own, quietly compassionate, Truffaut-ish way, it’s absolutely about standing up to oppression, about how making art can be both a political act and a comfort, and a way to hold on to your humanity, which in inhuman times is itself a profound statement of resistance.
“Edge of Darkness” (1943)
There’s something especially fascinating about WWII films made while the war was still in progress, and in 1942, when this Lewis Milestone film was being shot, the outcome was very far from clear. Yet the film, starring Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan, along with Walter Huston, Ruth Gordon and Judith Anderson, is surprisingly complex and layered. Set in the fictional fishing village of Trollness during the Nazi occupation of Norway, it shows the manifold ways the locals respond: from resistance firebrands, to hesitant humanists, to pollyannas, to outright traitors or “quislings.” The story takes some unexpected turns, like when Sheridan’s radical convinces the dashing Flynn not to kill the German soldier who brutally raped her, or when her nervy, distracted mother, played by Gordon, proves that heroism can come in tiny gestures by simply bringing her husband his hat and coat so that he can attend an underground meeting. It builds to an inarguably rousing climax when the townspeople finally unite in a pitched battle for their little hamlet— old ladies firing from upstairs windows and women turning on their German lovers. It’s a remarkably effective and affecting portrayal of ordinary people responding with extraordinary resourcefulness to an extraordinary war.
“Casablanca” (1942)
Nodded to directly by “Allied” (which not only sets its opening act in the title city of Michael Curtiz’s film, but also has a key plot point later on about playing the Marseillaise defiantly in front of occupying soldiers), “Casablanca” was only a modest success at the time, but now stands as maybe Hollywood’s greatest ever resistance movie. Directed by Curtiz, penned by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch and famously turned down by Ronald Reagan, the film’s set in Nazi-occupied Morocco, where expat Rick (Humphrey Bogart) runs a nightclub whose visitors include refugees, Nazis, the Vichy French and the criminal underworld. But his neutrality is thrown for a loop when his ex-lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) turns up with her husband (Paul Henreid), a Czech Resistance leader, in the hopes that he can help them escape to America. It’s been ripped off, homaged and joked about so many times that it could feel overly familiar looking back at it 75 years on, but a perfect script, Curtiz’s fleet-footed direction and an impeccable cast, many of whom, like key creatives, were refugees from Europe (also including Claude Rains and Peter Lorre, most memorably) make it feel as fresh as a daisy and fiery as a volcano. Few films are as fierce and commanding on the moral duty, and sacrifices that come with it, of standing up to the worst of humanity in times of crisis.
“Inglorious Basterds” (2009)
Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated epic is many things —impossibly indulgent, often infuriating, sloppily plotted, glib, cartoonish, beautifully acted and fitfully incredible. But it’s definitely a World War Two resistance movie, and despite all its flaws on other levels, it works pretty well on that level. Tarantino’s script follows three threads loosely —the titular unit of Jewish-American soldiers traveling behind enemy lines scalping Nazis and led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a British film-buff agent (Michael Fassbender) going undercover to plot an attack on a propaganda movie premiere which will contain high-ranking Nazis, and a Jewish movie theater manager (Melanie Laurent) whose workplace will host the premiere and has similar plans for vengeance. None of the three storylines feel totally fleshed out —the Basterds don’t get all that much screen time until the end, Fassbender’s section is essentially one scene, albeit a really good one— but Laurent’s Shosanna’s is the best, with Tarantino evoking Resistance classics like “Army Of Shadows” and “The Last Metro” while also painting a love letter to cinema and to Jewish vengeance. As frustrating as the film can often be, it comes closest to greatness when it follows Shosanna’s under-the-radar plotting.
“A Man Escaped” (1956)
Older than Louis Malle or Francois Truffaut, Robert Bresson spent eighteen months in a prisoner-of-war camp during the German occupation of France, and that experience directly informs what might be the greatest film of a mighty career, “A Man Escaped.” Based more directly on the memoirs of André Devigny, the film stars François Leterrier as Fontaine, a Resistance member captured by the Germans but who carefully plots an escape at every moment nevertheless. The best trademarks of Bresson’s work are all here —it’s controlled, almost austere in its minimalism and is utterly fascinated by process and detail. It’s almost breathlessly suspenseful, dominated by a feeling that the wrong move or word could leave to execution, but it also has the quiet, almost holy grace that the director brings to the interior lives of his characters. You feel almost every minute of Fontaine’s incarceration —few movies have captured the crushing sense of imprisonment better. But hope is always there, with Leterrier giving a sense of unswerving determination to his character —he knows with certainty that he’s getting out. To say that it’s a film about never giving up sounds a bit pat, but the sense of relief that comes when Fontaine finally breaks out is almost unutterably moving.
