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Warner boys versus Keystone Krauts, "the first invasion to hit Germany since Napoleon." The Polish saboteur's final missive is not ignored, to finish blowing up a Nazi railway bridge is the RAF mission with a crew of jokers and vets. The British leader perishes with the downed bomber, survivors include the Aussie lieutenant (Errol Flynn) and officers Canadian (Arthur Kennedy) and "half-American, half-Jersey City" (Ronald Reagan). (Powell and Pressburger's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing runs parallel, the motley allies reappear in Rossellini's Era Notte a Roma.) Capture and escape, rinse and repeat toward the Dutch border, with a detour at a chemical plant for "a little constructive destruction." The bookkeeping Canuck bristles at the mention of "fun," Raoul Walsh however is not one to let patriotic gravitas get in the way of kinetic gags. The elder member of the bunch (Alan Hale) enlisted after losing his son at Dunkirk, he's also prone to nailing their rigid captors with stealth spitballs. "Decent instincts but also an iron fist," declares the SS Kommandant (Raymond Massey), he's swiftly discomposed by the power of slang, cp. McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon. ("The iron fist has a glass jaw," snaps the future chief of state at the monocled martinet crumpled under the desk.) They ride Göring's private train ("Good enough for Göring, almost good enough for me!") and get shooed off by a blustery Sig Ruman, their strudel dinner with the German resistance segues into a rooftop shootout. Jocular figures sneaking around brutalist architecture, a Rupert Brooke verse or two, the pure exhilaration of a chase seen through a bullet-cracked windshield. "Is it a rule of the game that you Yankees always win?" The closing view is resumed in Objective, Burma!, of course, and there's Walsh's transposition to the Everglades in Distant Drums. With Nancy Coleman, Ronald Sinclair, Albert Bassermann, Patrick O'Moore, Felix Basch, Ilka Grüning, and Elsa Bassermann. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |