resistance, The Resistance, Resistance: in books and movies.

That afternoon the city wore its habitual color -- grey skies, grey stone -- triste if you were melancholy, soft and inspiring when life went your way.

He didn't want to be in love with her because it was possible that some night he wouldn't come home and she would never see him again and he knew what that would do to a woman who loved you.

--Alan Furst, A Hero of France (Random House, 2016)

Although I think Furst's recent novels, mostly about the French Resistance, are rather elegant and well-written I still prefer his earlier, more intricate and complex works, such as Night Soldiers (1988) and Dark Star (1991).  Turner Classic Movies recently showed Alfred Hitchcock's short film Aventure Malgache, about the Resistance in Madagascar, at that time (1944) a French colony.  The film takes place in 1940 and the French Resistance seeks the support of England.  This film was never shown in France because it had too much humor and showed too much division among the Resistance to be effective propaganda (the communists did not join until Hitler invaded Russia); it's a beautifully directed film, using French actors who were in exile in England.,

The French Resistance is what we know in this country, from movies mainly.  A Hero of France has fascinating details about how English airmen who crashed in France were spirited out of the country and the risks taken by the French, as well as the attempts by the Germans to infiltrate their operation, desperate for assistance.  Something one in this country knows much less about is the Korean resistance to the Japanese occupation, from 1910 to 1945.  Kim Jee-woon's film, Age of Shadows (2016, not to be confused with Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, 1969, about the French resistance, of which Melville was a part) has some intense wide-screen action scenes (in a village, on a train, in a train station) but, as in many action films these days, it seems as though the director did the second-unit action and an assistant did the personal relationships and the narrative.   I found the constantly shifting alliances confusing and my lack of knowledge of Korean and the Japanese occupation of Korea didn't help, though there is little written in English on the subject.

My favorite film about the French Resistance is John Ford's serious comedy When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950), in which soldier Dan Dailey spends a week-end in WWII France accidentally and aids the Resistance.  They confirm he is an American by asking him about Joe DiMaggio and the Yankees (something that might not work in today's less baseball-centric America).