Pierre Melville (qv) thought that it would be  impossible to get regular Frenchmen to provide the proper marching  movements. He ended up casting dancers to correctly provide the  march steps he wanted from the soldiers. This shot was originally  the last in the film and prints were sent to theaters with it in  that place. After the first showings, Melville decided the scene was  better placed at the start of the film and it was physically spliced  into the new position. This apparently resulted in several missing  frames in the negative. These frames were restored from another  source when the 2005 digital restoration was accomplished.