Triple Play.(Army of Shadows, Sansho the Bailiff and The Third Man)(Movie review)

The Criterion Collection's release of the masterpieces "Army of Shadows," "Sansho the Bailiff," and "The Third Man," by France's Jean-Pierre Melville, Japan's Kenji Mizoguchi, and Britain's Carol Reed, respectively, renews both the lustre and the relevance of classical narrative moviemaking from the middle of the twentieth century.

"Army of Shadows," from 1969, examines the travails of the French Resistance as its leaders test their own capacity for cruelty against the Nazi Occupation. Indeed, the movie's greatness lies in the fact that Melville's French rebels not only try to preserve a remnant of civic virtue but confront the meaning of actions as complex and charged as summary executions. Melville, like Joseph Kessel, on whose novel the film was based, had fought with the Free French; the film resonates with his intense personal investment, and he elicits appropriately fierce and committed performances from his actors, especially Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret.

"Sansho the Bailiff," a 1954 film that depicts slavery as a moral canker in eleventh-century Japan, is both a lament for a feudal past and a call for modern democratization. The plot ...