It’s a shame that when we think of war films, our minds instantly gravitate to titles like The Longest Day and Full Metal Jacket. Those are fine pieces of cinema, but Leon Morin, Priest is more universal. Even in the bleakest of Total Wars, World War II, most of the world’s population experienced the conflict indirectly, on the home front, with jobs converted to the war effort and strict rationing. In the past 100 years, most casualties of war have been civilians under occupation. In many ways, then, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1961 drama, his first foray into this particular conflict, is the ultimate war film.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, in the immediate wake of his rise to stardom in Godard’s epochal Breathless, plays the eponymous cleric; but Leon Morin is not the film’s protagonist. The main, point-of-view character is instead Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a widowed Communist office worker whose Jewish husband died fighting the initial Nazi military thrust into France in the spring of 1940. Barny lives in a small town in the foothills of the Alps, and the initial Axis forces who occupy her village are the harmless Italians. Soon, however, the Nazi stormtroopers replace Mussolini’s ramshackle troops and suddenly Barny’s world is turned upside-down. Barny is a Communist, her daughter is half-Jewish and her best friend, for whom Barny clearly has same-sex physical attraction, is also Jewish. All of them are at risk of suffering the heavy jackboot of Gestapo repression.
At a loss, Barny enters a Catholic Church on a lark and seeks a priest for confession, choosing the young Morin. She abuses Catholicism in the confessional booth and tries, unsuccessfully, to provoke Morin. The priest handles her belligerence with aplomb, peppering her with difficult religious questions. Fascinated by Morin—and also physically attracted to him (duh! – he is played by Belmondo in 1961 after all)—Barny continues meeting with Morin. They continue discussing Catholicism and what it means to believe. Eventually, Barny hatches a scheme to save her daughter and a few other half-Jewish children by having Morin baptize them as Catholics.
Like the best of mid-career Bergman (think Winter Light), Melville here combines a genuine, profound religious longing and exploration with a story of illicit romance. Barny has two forbidden infatuations, one with a woman and another with a priest. But Melville goes further than Bergman—Sweden, after all, was never occupied by the Third Reich, with their Totenkopf-wearing Jew-hunting psychopaths—and brings questions about collaboration and resistance into his film. The Catholic Church, as an institution, rolled over and played lapdog for the hateful fascist death cult after the 1929 Lateran Treaty, and so did most of French society. What kind of priest is Morin, though? And what about Barny’s friends and co-workers? Her Jewish friend basically gives up on living after her brother is sent to a concentration camp, while another co-worker becomes an enthusiastic Nazi, spouting the so-profound-it-is-written-in-crayon nonsense that the Hitlerite true-believers called a worldview. What about Barny herself? What does it mean to be a lapsed-Catholic Communist with a half-Jewish daughter during war time?
Leon Morin, Priest is among Melville’s best films. It is certainly the one that poses the hardest questions back to a French society that, in 1961, was only beginning to grapple with its recent past of Nazi occupation and collaboration. Because war and occupation are evergreen themes, the film continues to interrogate viewers today; of course, for those of us here in the United States, we are the awful occupiers rather than the hapless occupied. The same was true of France in 1961, fresh off the Algerian War where French troops used the tortures they had learned—on the receiving end—in Gestapo dungeons to make occupied Algeria scream. The early ‘60s saw a massive boom in thoughtful, religion-inflected European romantic dramas and this, with its devastatingly banal ending, is among the best of those, too.
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