Operation Crossbow (1965) Pardon me for gushing, but I could never get enough of this particular 1960's genre.....
It all kicked off with the 1961 all-star World War 2 high adventure "The Guns Of Navarone", taken from an Alistair MacLean novel.
Who could resist the basic premise......a disparate team of Allied commandos come together to pull off a true 'Mission Impossible' that will alter the course of the war. This task requires deep, harrowing infiltration into Nazi strongholds, with danger of discovery and death lurking around every corner.
The commandos' desperate quest invariably ended up with huge fiery explosions and numerous, blazing machine gun firefights with Nazi hordes.
Oh YES, please. Keep those rat-a-tat bullets flying through the air until there's mountains to dead German soldiers piled up to the ceiling.......
Usually these major budgeted movies enjoyed a big push from the studios. But for reasons I still can't figure out, "Operation Crossbow" got tossed into theaters by MGM with little or no fanfare.
It's as if they'd already given up on it, and at some point, even tried the always futile useless gimmick of changing the film's title.....(to "The Great Spy Mission"....yikes.) I can't think of any instance where switching a movie's terse, appropriate title to something corny and obvious ever worked well.
Very odd......and a damn shame, since the film presents an ambitious, visually lavish depiction of England's stiff upper lip attempts to thwart one of Hitler's most destructive weapons - the V1 and V2 rockets that came flying over the English channel to slam into the heart of London, slaughtering innocent civilians.
And yet the film starts off with an almost documentary-like, even-handed depiction of Germany's development of the rockets, starting with their fearless test pilot Hannah Reitsch (Barbara Rutting) agreeing to pilot one of the flying bombs to correct a navigation glitch.
Back in London, Churchill's War Minister (Richard Johnson) wants the rocket sites bombed, but clashes with a cranky, disbelieving professor (Trevor Howard) who doesn't think the bombs exist. Nevertheless, three army engineers (George Peppard, Jeremy Kemp and Tom Courtenay) volunteer to go undercover and penetrate the underground Nazi lair where their largest rocket's being prepared to decimate London.
True enough, a lot of fact and fiction gets freely mingled up here.... and somewhere in the middle ,things stop cold when Peppard awkwardly finds himself stuck with the widow of the dead man he's impersonating...played by Sophia Loren. (Her brief but dramatic appearance no doubt came at the insistence of the movie's producer, Loren's husband Carlo Ponti).
But then we're off the main event (and the really good stuff), with Peppard and Kemp in the midst of the impressively vast German rocket site......and making a valiant, death-defying attempt to alert RAF bombers to the site's location.
A spectacular finish is guaranteed and I wasn't the first to notice that in its display of huge sets (very similar to Ken Adam''s work) and the film's finale apocalyptic fireworks, it resembles the climax of a Bond film.......(and since being a rabid Bond fanboy at the time I first saw, this, I didn't mind that at all....)
And let me not forget to mention that on both sides of the combatants, British and German, you can enjoy spotting dozens of familiar faces in the supporting roles......with the Germans actually using their own language for a change with subtitles.....(a rare technique for big war movies like this.)
Still and always a BQ favorite, "Operation Crossbow" stands tall as a prime example of this long forgotten genre, and still delivers everything I loved about it.....lots 'o blg blasts and dead Nazis......4 stars (****).
No comments:
Post a Comment