During the German occupation of France, a cultivated Wehrmacht officer (Howard Vernon) is billeted in the home of a French uncle and niece, who respond to his attempts at conversation with total, unbreakable silence. Jean-Pierre Melville's debut feature is a spare, elegant act of resistance—an adaptation of the clandestine novel by Vercors that is at once an examination of dignified defiance and a meditation on the impossible longing that grows between enemies. Melville made it outside the official French film system, and its influence on the French New Wave was immense.