For Gone With The Wind fans: There’s a lovely scene in L’armée des ombres/ Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) where two heads of the French resistance — Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse) — are in London for a meeting and they end up at the pictures watching Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939). As they come out of the cinema and onto the street, in probably the most brightly lit moment in the film, with the GWTW billboard shown in what looks like a brilliant Technicolour palette,  Jardie says, ‘For the French the war will be over when they can read Le Canard enchaîné and see this marvellous film’. Once again entertainment, bright light and brilliant colour signifying the utopian hopes of a grey, war-torn London in a film about shadows, armies and resistance to existing realities.

José Arroyo