He said that in an interview in 1971. It was as though the war had never ended. In the same vein, he added, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” It is?

Melville’s singular habits extended to his professional career—not easy, when the profession in question calls for a cast, a crew, and the difficult raising of funds. After being demobilized, in October, 1945, he founded his own production company the following month, in part because the technicians’ union, which was overwhelmingly Communist, would not give him a union card. Hence, in “Le Silence de la Mer,” the grandeur of the opening logo: “melville Productions.” Two years later, he had his own studios built, on a dour Paris street, with two sound stages, two editing rooms, a wardrobe room, and a screening room. He gradually became, to use his own term, “opocentric,” convinced that everything should revolve around his work, and that “undue disorder in one’s daily life excludes all possibility of creativity.” He lived above the studios, with a woman named Florence Welsh, whom he married in 1952 and stayed with until his death. They had no children and three cats.

The first thing we see in “Le Silence de la Mer” is a man walking along a sunny street. He carries a suitcase, which he puts down beside another man, before moving on. No word is exchanged. Could these be smugglers, or spies? The second man opens the case, at the bottom of which, under a layer of clothing, he finds a book, “Le Silence de la Mer,” by Vercors—the contraband wartime novel that Melville has adapted for the screen. We are watching the opening credits. How stylish can you get? Such is the start of Melville’s first feature film, and already his touch is sure.

Most of the movie takes place in the home of an elderly man and his niece, in rural France. A German officer is billeted with them. He turns out to be a cultivated fellow and an ardent Francophile; every evening, he stands and talks to them, as they sit in front of the fire, about his interests, his past, and his hopes for civilization. The old man smokes his pipe, the young woman sews, and they say nothing—not until the final minutes, when, in a seraphic closeup, she utters one word of farewell. Ingmar Bergman constructs a similar plight in “Persona” (1966), where a nurse chatters helplessly, as if filling a void, to her patient, who stays mute, but for Bergman the clash—the waves of speech beating against a rock—is psychological, whereas the old man and his niece, like their homeland, are under siege. Silence is their resistance.

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Things are noisier and busier in “Léon Morin, Priest,” which twitches with the feuds and the frictions, great and small, that beset a French provincial town during the war. At one point, the graceful heroine, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), slaps an office colleague who is said to be consorting with the enemy. Barny has a young daughter; the father, now deceased, was Jewish, so a baptism must be hastily arranged, if the child is to stay safe. From here, we enter into an extraordinary spiritual joust between the widow and the combative priest (Belmondo), which feels as fraught as any gun-toting standoff in one of the director’s later thrillers. Even if you know and love this masterly movie—the first and last occasion, for Melville, in which a female character takes center stage—seek it out afresh at Film Forum, where eleven minutes of additional footage have been restored, most of it overtly concerned with the ethical agonies of occupation. Should Barny tip off a friend who has been targeted for summary justice by the Resistance? Or risk her neck by going to collect ration cards for a family on the run? “I never answer when the doorbell rings. It could be the Gestapo,” she tells Morin. He answers, “It could also be someone who needs you.”

What has to be borne in mind, under such conditions, is that the plainest action, or a preference for inaction, can brim with political intent. Those French who neither struck back at the invading Germans nor entered into official collaboration with them were said to be practicing attentisme—a policy of wait and see, exemplified by Marshal Pétain in the early stages of the Vichy government. If mere waiting can represent a crisis (as Samuel Beckett, who also dwelled in Occupied France, knew well), where does that leave the moral virtue of patience, or the dramatic virtue of suspense? No director, save Hitchcock, delved further than Melville into these anxieties; moreover, unlike Hitchcock, he had witnessed their effects on the world around him, in an era of profound risk, and that is why his best films are timed with a precision that verges on the excruciating. He is not playing games with us. He is putting us through the mill.

Anybody with a heart murmur should probably consult a cardiologist before heading to Film Forum. Melville requires nerve. The tick of the grandfather clock in the peaceful parlor of “Le Silence de la Mer” is echoed, twenty years later, in “Army of Shadows,” when Gerbier—a leading light in the shadows of the Resistance, played by the matchless Lino Ventura—is taken to Gestapo headquarters, in what used to be a luxury hotel. He and another suspect sit in an antechamber, off a hallway, with a German guard standing nearby. We hear the clock. We know that this is Gerbier’s last chance; the moment must be seized, but not quite yet. Wait and see. The ticking grows louder. Gerbier gets to his feet, politely requests a cigarette, pulls a knife from the guard’s belt, stabs him in the throat, lowers him to the floor, and runs through the doors and away. The camera, hitherto so calm, picks up speed, travelling beside him down the avenue, under falling snow.

The movie was not popular in some quarters of France. There were accusations that it was a Gaullist work of art, leaning rightward—hardly a badge of honor in the late nineteen-sixties. It’s true that General de Gaulle, or an actor resembling him, appears briefly during a strange interlude, mid-film, when Gerbier goes to London, but then de Gaulle was the leader of what he considered to be the legitimate French government in exile. In the course of Gerbier’s trip, he watches “Gone with the Wind”—as did Melville, when he was in London on leave, in 1943. In fact, he saw twenty-seven films in one week. In a shirtmaker’s shop, a few days after gazing at Rhett and Scarlett, he encountered Clark Gable in person, “whom I recognized by the sound of his voice before I saw him and he flashed his teeth at me in a smile.” Melville was not a Gaullist, or a Communist, or a believer in God. He did own up to being an “anarcho-feudalist,” whatever that may be. But he was a cinéaste. That was faith enough.

One way to take stock of Melville is to watch him act. Spooky and unhurried, with dark sleepless rings around his low-lidded eyes, he could be the chubby offspring of Buster Keaton. He appeared a few times onscreen, and you catch a glimpse of him in the dining car of a train, in his second film, “Les Enfants Terribles” (1950), with Jean Cocteau, whose novel, about the near-incestuous rapport of a brother and sister, was the superheated source of the movie. Nine years later, Melville assigned himself a far weightier role, as a journalist, in “Two Men in Manhattan,” his billet-doux to New York, complete with a suitably blowsy score. The film made explicit a debt to America—or, at least, to a vision of America that had possessed Melville since his childhood days of moviegoing, in Paris. He liked barge-size American automobiles, and regularly wore a Stetson.