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Jean-Pierre Melville began his superb feature filmmaking career with this powerful adaptation of an influential underground novel written during the Nazi occupation of France. A cultured, naively idealistic German officer is billeted in the home of a middle-aged man and his grown niece; their response to his presence - their only form of resistance - is complete silence. Constructed with elegant minimalism and shot, by the legendary Henri Decaë, with hushed eloquence, Le silence de la mer points the way toward Melville’s later films about resistance and the occupation (Leon Morin, Priest; Army of Shadows) yet remains a singularly eerie masterwork in its own right. (Criterion)
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Melville’s feature movie debut is a great radio play, but a bad movie. Why? Because it suffers from a mass of unnecessary words. We can see riders coming on horses and we hear an inner monolog with information that the riders on horses are coming. We can see a girl coming into a room and at the same time hear inner monolog about a girl coming into a room. The visual side completely lost any meaning in this movie. And to make things worse Robain is terribly stiff and unnatural. Even a simple situation like drinking his evening cup of coffee looks like it is performed by a robot – "now bend a little, take hold of the cup with your right hand, in a smooth motion lift the hand towards your mouth, have a silent sip and in another smooth motion put the cup back on the saucer. Now, repeat the whole action again." On the other hand, Howard Vernon is fantastic, the camera is great too (even though it doesn’t move from the room with the fireplace) and even the story is not bad, as it heralds Melville’s weakness for powerful topics concerning the Second World War.
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