I saw this on its release and remembered only a few of its features. Let's see. I remembered Ron Goodwin's stirring martial score, Maria Perschy's slightly unorthodox beauty, George Chakiris's Hollywood hair do and no-can-do performance, and, most of all, the sleek and noisy power of the half-dozen or so De Havilland Mosquitoes sailing through the fossate Fjords of Norway to bomb hell out of the plant making fuel for Nazi V-1 rockets.
Cliff Robertson is the squadron CO and gives a professional performance. Most of the other faces are familiar from British films of the times, as is the make up of the squadron itself. Robertson is an American, and there are New Zealanders, Australians, Norwegians, and a bearded and beturbaned Sikh.
Chakiris is the Norwegian liaison officer with the squadron. Perschy is his sister. When Chakiris returns to Norway to organize a resistance effort against the German flak guns surrounding the fuel plant, he's captured and tortured by the Gestapo. Robertson puts an end to his pain by demolishing Gestapo headquarters and Chakiris along with it.
This mission -- along with the final suicide run against the plant -- are likely to strike some viewers as coming directly from a comic book, yet Mosquitoes were used more than once for just such precision bombing. They were queer airplanes. There was nothing quite like them. Rather than metal, they were built of plywood and fabric and on many missions went unarmed because their top speed was enough for them to outfly most pursuers.
Yet the flight scenes, which should be exhilarating, are flawed because of the obvious model work. When an airplane explodes, it pops into fragments that look like cardboard. And the scenes in the cockpit showing the pilot and navigator are static and give a distinct impression that we're looking at a mock up. Oh, it's not Plan Nine From Outer Space, but it's noticeable and tends to spoil our involvement in events.
The director is Walter Grauman. The screenplay is by Howard Koch and James Clavell, both famous names. No one would argue that the plot is logically worked out. The bombing of Gestapo headquarters is from "13 Rue Madeleine." The pilots drinking beer and carousing in the Black Swan is spavined. Robertson and Perschy fall into each other's arms on the first date. We never discover how the Germans learned that the Norwegian resistance planned to attack the anti-aircraft gun emplacements at a particular time. Every one of the Mosquitoes is lost on the final mission and the best the Wing Commander, Harry Andrews, can come up with is, "You can't kill a squadron." (Oh, no?)
On the whole it resembles a cross between "The Dam Busters" and "The Guns of Navarone" without the gloss of either. Still, there are few dull moments and the thing zips along with plenty of zest. And those Mosquitoes -- stunning airplanes for their time, versatile and with a maximum speed of more than 370 miles per hour. Admirable in every way except for that nugatory romance.
Cliff Robertson is the squadron CO and gives a professional performance. Most of the other faces are familiar from British films of the times, as is the make up of the squadron itself. Robertson is an American, and there are New Zealanders, Australians, Norwegians, and a bearded and beturbaned Sikh.
Chakiris is the Norwegian liaison officer with the squadron. Perschy is his sister. When Chakiris returns to Norway to organize a resistance effort against the German flak guns surrounding the fuel plant, he's captured and tortured by the Gestapo. Robertson puts an end to his pain by demolishing Gestapo headquarters and Chakiris along with it.
This mission -- along with the final suicide run against the plant -- are likely to strike some viewers as coming directly from a comic book, yet Mosquitoes were used more than once for just such precision bombing. They were queer airplanes. There was nothing quite like them. Rather than metal, they were built of plywood and fabric and on many missions went unarmed because their top speed was enough for them to outfly most pursuers.
Yet the flight scenes, which should be exhilarating, are flawed because of the obvious model work. When an airplane explodes, it pops into fragments that look like cardboard. And the scenes in the cockpit showing the pilot and navigator are static and give a distinct impression that we're looking at a mock up. Oh, it's not Plan Nine From Outer Space, but it's noticeable and tends to spoil our involvement in events.
The director is Walter Grauman. The screenplay is by Howard Koch and James Clavell, both famous names. No one would argue that the plot is logically worked out. The bombing of Gestapo headquarters is from "13 Rue Madeleine." The pilots drinking beer and carousing in the Black Swan is spavined. Robertson and Perschy fall into each other's arms on the first date. We never discover how the Germans learned that the Norwegian resistance planned to attack the anti-aircraft gun emplacements at a particular time. Every one of the Mosquitoes is lost on the final mission and the best the Wing Commander, Harry Andrews, can come up with is, "You can't kill a squadron." (Oh, no?)
On the whole it resembles a cross between "The Dam Busters" and "The Guns of Navarone" without the gloss of either. Still, there are few dull moments and the thing zips along with plenty of zest. And those Mosquitoes -- stunning airplanes for their time, versatile and with a maximum speed of more than 370 miles per hour. Admirable in every way except for that nugatory romance.