May 31 movie: Operation Crossbow. How remiss am I about posting? I'm just now writing up the war movies I watched during All! War! Movies! Memorial! Day! Weekend! on TCM. That's how remiss I am. Memorial Day Weekend is probably my favorite annual movie event on TCM. They always show a lot of great movies. But this year it was a bit of a disappointment. No 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, no Stalag 17, no Since You Went Away. Still, there were a couple of good ones, including this.
George Peppard stars in a pretty decent spy thriller about the Allied attempts to sabotage German bomb development. It drags a bit in the middle, but the final sequence is really exciting. And there were a lot of excellent actors in supporting roles as the British officers planning the mission, the Dutch resistance, the evil Nazis, etc.
This is no Guns of Navarone (another favorite that TCM didn't show) but it's pretty good. The impression I got from my dad is that they portrayed the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket fairly realistically, but the stuff about the Allies destroying the super-rocket in production was total fiction. Actually the Nazis simply didn't get it to work before the war ended.
There are some interesting details about this movie: for one, everyone speaks the language they should be speaking, with subtitles when necessary. No scenes with the Nazis talking to each other in English with German accents. (This linguistic convention drives me crazy, and used to happen in all war movies. Some still do it even now.) Even Peppard speaks German when he poses as a German rocket scientist to infiltrate the rocket production facility. His German isn't that bad, although he speaks as little as possible. I guess he was the silent type of rocket scientist spy.
Also, Sophia Loren got top billing even though she was only in the movie for about 20 minutes. At the time they didn't think Peppard could open a movie of this size. Loren's husband was one of the producers so they wrote in a small, fairly pointless role for her and promoted her as the star of the movie.
This film is a lot darker than most earlier (and even many later) war movies I've seen. For instance [spoiler] just about all the principals get killed. The impossible getaway is usually a key element of WWII capers like this, but Peppard doesn't even try to escape after fulfilling his mission. The rest of his team is already dead, and he just sits down and waits to be bombed along with the Nazis. [end spoiler]
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