First, all hail composer Ron Goodwin......nobody did rousing military scores like this guy. The sight of blue skies and British Mosquito planes in battle formation coupled with Goodwin's blasting trumpets and horns can make you rush out of the house to sign up with the RAF...
Next, this movie knows what we all want to see in a WW2 film.......loads of Nazis getting machine gunned, stabbed and blown up. Remember, this is back in the good old days, when the whole civilized world understood that Nazis are evil to the core.......a simple concept still easily grasped by everyone except the current, temporary President of the United States......
And key to these movies......the impossible, near suicidal mission. This one tasks our squadron of beyond courageous pilots to fly low through a Norwegian fjord and drop bombs on a huge chuck of mountain that overhangs a German rocket fuel factory. If they drop enough bombs, they literally move mountains.........and the factory finds itself between rocks and a hard place....
Our group, led by an easy-going but stalwart Canadian (Cliff Robertson) gets some first hand knowledge of their target from a freshly escaped Norwegian resistance fighter. (George Chakiris). Chakiris later returns to Norway to rally his forces to take out the fjord's anti-aircraft guns before Robertson and his flyboys arrive in force........but he's promptly captured and falls into the hands of this movie's version of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS......you know this bitch means business.....she wears a tie and keeps her black SS jacket draped over her shoulders.....
Interesting plot point here......Robertson than gets the order to bomb the Gestapo HQ in Norway before poor expendable tortured Chakiris spills the beans to Ilsa about the big mission.....thereby blowing up Chakiris and the Nazi Troll-Lady together......(ironic, cause this film features Donald Huston as an RAF Group Captain.......in "Where Eagles Dare", Huston offers the exact same "why-don't-we-just-bomb-the-hell-out-of-everyone-and-be-done-with-it" solution and gets promptly chastised by his superiors with a withering..."there are certain niceties to be observed when dealing with our allies"......in '633 Squadron', evidently those niceties don't apply to Norwegian guys...)
We finally get to what we've all been waiting for, as Robertson and his squadron fly into the fjord and a hail of lethally punishing anti-aircraft machine gun fire. Special effects are par for the era with extensive use of miniatures, animated explosions and fuzzy blue-screen compositing......but with Goodwin's pounding score and the swift editing, the sequence still thrills and stirs us......
And we'd bet our 'Star Wars' action figures that '633 Squadron's climactic battle also caught the imagination of young teen George Lucas when he first saw it.......since the sequence unfolds like a World War 2 precursor to the X-wing fighters attack on the Death Star in "Star Wars: A New Hope"...
A rousing good time and one of the BQ's all time faves......we'll fly over this one and drop 4 stars on it (****) .......superb adventure backed by a classic score.
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