Communists come in all types, from harmless to ruthless: armchair theorist, industrial and peasant organiser, fighter against the class enemy, assassin. This film deals with the last two varieties and accords them some moral scruples. The Manouchian Group decline to blow up a brothel containing German soldiers and French girls; their poet-leader Missak Manouchian initially refuses the path of violence because his 'ethics' forbid him. Nazi-Vichy propaganda famously denied them any scruples by calling them an 'Army of Crime'.

It may be that the film sanitises and romanticises both their violence and their contribution: using the attractive Virginie Ledoyen to play the role of Manouchian's wife certainly increases one's sympathy for the main protagonist. 'Flame and Citron' (2008) and 'Max Manus' (2008) deal with similar material and clearly do not romanticise violent resistance to the Nazis. Both these films leave one wondering if the anti-German actions depicted were truly worthwhile or simply futile and counterproductive.

Army of Crime's aim is to rehabilitate these foreign Jews and Communists so they may join home-grown heroes in the Pantheon of The French Resistance. In that respect it hopes to accomplish what 'Paths of Glory' (2006) and 'A Love To Hide' (2005) successfully achieve for French Muslims and homosexuals. It is no wonder that it bombed at the box office, not that it is a bad film, but because its subject matter is so difficult and obscure and morally ambiguous for modern audiences facing 'terrorism' in a new guise.

The film is good at explaining the motives of the (mainly) young men who decide to shoot and bomb occupying Germans. Jewish families rounded up by Vichy police for the Germans, Republican fighters from the Spanish Civil War, anti-fascist refugees from Hungary and Romania combine to produce individuals with an axe to grind. They have seen Fascism up close and find it brutal and nasty. Their vendetta is personal. The assassinations and bombings are depicted well, in particular the shortage of weapons and lack of expertise in their use.

Less well depicted is the issue of German reprisals for such 'terrorism'. The film refers to imprisoned Communists being shot in retaliation but no mention is made of the many non-Communists – 'innocent civilians' - who paid the ultimate price for 'Communist terrorism'. Most early resistance groups disapproved of terrorism, seeing it as futile, dangerous and leading nowhere. Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941 saw Stalin ordering the French Communist Party to organise an immediate 'Second Front' in order to take the pressure off the Russians.

On 21st August 1941 the Communist Pierre Georges assassinated a German soldier at a Paris Metro station. Other killings soon followed. The Germans shot 50 randomly selected hostages in October. A vicious cycle of attack and reprisal had begun. The Vichy police had largely wiped out the Communist underground by the summer of 1942 and the film shows them dealing efficiently with Manouchian a year later. Active resistance was always a minority affair and informing was widespread.

By 1943-4 Germany was losing the war and opinion was turning against Petain and in favour of more violent resistance. The Jewish deportations had begun and the film shows this as a prime motive in the Manouchian Affair. Manouchian refers to the Armenian genocide which killed his parents to explain his own empathy for his Jewish Communist comrades.

Asking an off-duty German soldier for a light and then shooting him at point blank range may seem rather brutal. So was Vichy torture. So was the Allied bombing of women and children. So were the Nazi deportations to the death camps. The only important question is, 'Did these attacks on Germans do any good?' When asked about the impact of the French Resistance on German war production, Albert Speer famously replied, 'What French Resistance?' Vichy continued to send labourers, food and materials to Germany and to pay for the occupation. Quantifying the contribution of the French Resistance to Allied victory remains problematic and this film provides no answer.

What the film does do is remind us how important the idea of Resistance was in forging post-war French identity. French Communists and their contribution were frozen out of the story as Gaullists and ex-Vichyists joined to create the Fourth French Republic which soon joined the anti-Communist NATO alliance. Anti-Nazi Germans, Spaniards, foreign Jews and Communists who fought alongside 'indigenous' Frenchmen in the 'Resistance' were largely excluded from this new national myth –making. This is what the film aims to redress.

As well as settling personal scores with the Nazis, the Manouchian Group were fighting for a Communist future. Throughout the Cold War period the Communist Red Orchestra in Germany (the subject of 2 little-known films) and the Manouchian Group in France were seen as Stalin's agents. Little sympathy in the West.

History was also being manipulated on the other side of Europe. How appropriate that the Polish film 'Katyn' should be released at the same time as 'Army of Crime.'! 15 months before ordering French Communists to wage war on occupying Germans, Stalin had decided to wipe out the Polish upper-class intelligentsia who did not fit in with his idea of a Communist future. Until 1989 Communist orthodoxy demanded that the 20,000 murdered Polish officers were victims of the Germans, not the Soviets.

I wonder if Karl Marx ever envisaged that 'Das Kapital' might be used to deliver a bomb to a bookshop ? Communism is a great idea. Like all great ideas it can bring out the best and worst in people. However, viewed from my own comfortable life lived through the best half of the 20th Century, I find it difficult to judge these young men who fought a ruthless foe. Within the first 6 months of the occupation, the Germans had beaten up the prefect Jean Moulin and shot Jacques Bonsergent for simply raising his fist against them. Moral ambiguities make this a difficult, murky, subject for a film.

Sharing, from a safe cinema seat, the anguish of an occupied people gave us a view of how we might behave in such terrible circumstances. The villains are not the Germans but the French people themselves. The real horror is not in the big scenes of torture but the ordinariness of the concierge cheerfully denouncing people in her own building. The French are still living today with the guilt of all that and this film is one of the rare examples of a frank look at this from the inside. I called it a "worthy" film which carries the film-makers problem of telling a tough story but still needing to seduce an audience into the cinema. The Picture House had a very small audience when I saw it tonight.

A rousing, lengthy and straightforward political thriller about a key aspect of the French resistance during the Second Wold War, Robert Guédiguian's new film focuses on the movement's early stages, when both leaders and foot soldiers made up an organization called the FTP-MOI: Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d'oeuvre immigrée or Partisans and Irregulars - Immigrant Work Force. it was made up of non-Party member communists or communist sympathizers of foreign, often Jewish, origin -- Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, or, like the director himself, Armenian. Of course resistance tales have been told before, most recently (in a film seen in the US) Danish director Ole Christian Madsen's Flame and Citron, about his country's most famous resistance fighters. Some will point to Jean-Pierre Melville's grim 1969 saga Army of Shadows/L'armé des ombres, which was given its first-ever US release to extravagant praise in 2006. This particular subject was treated in the 1976 French feature L'affiche rouge.

Guédiguian's film lacks the noirish flavor of Melville or the Butch Cassidy and Sundance panache of Madsen's film; but it starts well with Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Robinson Stévenin as two brave young men who begin acting on their own, and later are recruited to serve a more organized cause. There were always contrasts between young upstarts and disciplined old-timers. Resistance fighters worked outside the law and sub rosa; the "shadow" army was an army of "crime." Though the phrase "Army of Crime" is a Vichy smear issued after the principals of this story were rounded up and eliminated, the resistance life always attracted rebels and outliers.

The gentle Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) is the leader. His ballsy girlfriend Mélinée (the lovely Virginie Ledoyen) marries him and becomes a passionate supporter after his release from internment gradually turns him from peaceful propagandist to one capable of throwing a grenade into a German marching squad and taking out a dozen German soldiers (an incident neatly filmed here). He gets to know fiery young Marxist bomb-rigger Thomas Elek (Leprince-Ringuet) and swim-champion-pistol killer Marcel Rayman (Stévenin). Marcel becomes infuriated when his parents are taken away and he learns that he won't ever see them again. He begins asking one German officer after another for a light and then pulling a pistol and killing them. He's good at less close range too and gives Missak a lesson in marksmanship. Thomas blows up a Nazi literary gathering by planting a big copy of Das Kapital with a time bomb inside.

Older group leaders periodically chide the younger ones for acting independently and not maintaining cover; but it is one of the older ones who eventually names many members of the group after capture. Various group scenes, including an Armenian musical celebration with Zorba-style performances visited by a group of French cops, show that the authorities are onto the foreign communists and the rashness of one can endanger many.

We get a look at French cops called upon by German occupiers to squash the resisters. They enlist a certain Inspector Pujol ( Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who plays a dubious Judas game of informing, rounding up Jews, and gaining rapid promotion by the French Gestapo while simultaneously sympathizing with the partisans, sleeping with a Jewish girl, and doling out favors to her, including gentler treatment for her interned family members. She wants to be a partisan too, but seems destined to go the way of the anonymous protagonist of Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin.

The FTP-MOI throws out flyers (from above, so they won't be seen) urging the French to sabotage Vichy-run industries. Their other mission is to strike visible blows at the Nazis, assassinating major figures of the Nazis in France like General Julius Ritter.

A theme of the film is the complex bonds forged among immigrants and the loyalties among resisters. Missak , whose parents were murdered by Turks, looks upon his Parisian communist friends as his new adopted family. Marcel knows what remains of his family is only his little brother Simon (Léopold Szabatura), and so takes him everywhere; unfortunately that meant that in a raid that targets Marcel, Simon is taken away. An original touch is a homage to the young militant, Henri Krasucki (Adrien Jolivet), who took it upon himself to bring Simon back alive from the concentration camp where they were sent.

In The Army of Crime, the mix of nationalities and motivations is continually interesting and harmonizes nicely with the picture of how quite disparate individuals came together Very important also is that toward the end, Guérdiguian films sequences of the mass corralling and deportation of Jewish people by the French out of a stadium, an infamous moment that deserves to be seen as well as read about. The film is less effective in evoking strong emotion, and despite its generally favorable reception in September in France (after a Cannes summer debut), it's been criticized for a lackluster mise-en-scene. Some communist historians in France have insisted that Marcel is over-mythologized; that there was more restraint and coordination and more direct Soviet supervision than is shown. However the film's strengths remain its focus on youth and its strong ethnic and cultural mix.

This is involving, fascinating stuff, and as good an evocation of that place and time as I can think of, but it doesn't seem as personal as the other films by Guédiguian that I've seen -- The Town Is Quiet (in US theaters) and Lady Jane (SFIFF). But since he is a communist of working-class origins with an Armenian father, it may be in another sense the most personal thing he has done. Another film of his, the 2006 Armenia/Le voyage en Arménie, is about rediscovering Armenian roots.

Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, March 2010.