(Night Ambush)
Country: GB
Technical: bw/Vistavision 104m
Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Marius Goring, David Oxley, Cyril Cusack
Synopsis:
Allied soldiers on Crete work with partisans to kidnap a German officer and bundle him off to Cairo in an attempt to score a propaganda victory over the occupiers.
Review:
Powell and Pressburger's last collaboration is a muted affair, not without the customary shafts of humour, but downplaying the action and heroics of its contemporaries, such as Kwai and Cockleshell Heroes. The reasons are clear: this is a long way from the propaganda objectives of 49th Parallel, and we again get a humane German in the person of Goring. The British commandos are enthusiastic 'amateurs' but also impeccably polite Englishmen, the scenery handsomely filmed in VistaVision, the Cretan cast somewhat less muted than the rest. As with A Canterbury Tale, we get a sense of souls passing through millennial places, and who are sensible enough to know it; it is affable, even jovial, but perhaps just too much like fun: Five Cigarettes to Knossos, as it were.
(Night Ambush)
Country: GB
Technical: bw/Vistavision 104m
Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Marius Goring, David Oxley, Cyril Cusack
Synopsis:
Allied soldiers on Crete work with partisans to kidnap a German officer and bundle him off to Cairo in an attempt to score a propaganda victory over the occupiers.
Review:
Powell and Pressburger's last collaboration is a muted affair, not without the customary shafts of humour, but downplaying the action and heroics of its contemporaries, such as Kwai and Cockleshell Heroes. The reasons are clear: this is a long way from the propaganda objectives of 49th Parallel, and we again get a humane German in the person of Goring. The British commandos are enthusiastic 'amateurs' but also impeccably polite Englishmen, the scenery handsomely filmed in VistaVision, the Cretan cast somewhat less muted than the rest. As with A Canterbury Tale, we get a sense of souls passing through millennial places, and who are sensible enough to know it; it is affable, even jovial, but perhaps just too much like fun: Five Cigarettes to Knossos, as it were.
