Ill Met by Moonlight

What may not be widely known to movie fans is that at least two, or possibly three members of the cast of Ill Met by Moonlight, were former serving British Army Intelligence Officers. Dirk Bogart served as a British Intelligence Officer during WW2 on mainland Europe and in particular in Germany. His job was to round up Nazi Concentration Camp Guards. Bogart was at Belsen CC on day one of liberation. The movie, although based upon a novel by the same name, is not a fiction, but based upon actual events which took place in Crete involving SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) Officers and Greek Army Officers and local Cretan Royalists. The plan was to capture a German general and smuggle him out to Cairo. This was in effect an SAS operation which was highly successful. The movie came too close to reality for comfort and I believe that UK SIS wanted to protect former members of the Cretan Resistance as well as it's own serving officers who had taken part in the operation. To this end, I think SIS saw to it that the movie was dominated by one of their own, Dirk Bogart.

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With Crete resistance deftly trying to undermine the occupation of the German army, a cunning plan is prepared that will undermine them by pulling off a daring coup from right under their noses. With only a handful of Cretan resistance fighters, Major Fermor and Captain Moss attempt to kidnap the head of the German army on Crete – Major Kreipe. With considerable ease they pull off the kidnapping but they still need to get off the island with their polite but dangerous quarry.

On one night last week I decided to sit down and watch two films that I had taped – both by the legendary Powell and Pressburger (the other being The Canterbury Tale). I sat down to Ill with reasonable expectations as it was to have been their final film together and I had hoped that they would have gone out on a bang by giving the overworked (at the time) genre of war movies a real boost. Based on a real mission (from Captain Moss' memoirs) this film is a good example of the genre but, other than that, there isn't a great deal to recommend it for. The plot is interesting even if they have stripped away a great deal of detail from the story and replaced it with some humour and some stiff upper lips but it has nothing extraordinary about it that would make it stand out from the crowd. The film has a couple of laughs in it but mostly it is a rather serious film – in a way this is not a bad thing as it avoids the usual flag waving quite well and focuses on being a solid story as opposed to a morale booster.

Other reviews have commented on the beauty of Crete's landscapes as filmed here but as far as I am aware the film was made in parts of mainland Europe but I take the point – the film, mostly external shots, looks great throughout. Aside from the landscapes though there is nothing that really makes it stand out as a Powell & Pressburger film – in fact perhaps the extraordinary thing about the film is how unextraordinary it was; if I hadn't known that it was from the Archers then I would never have guessed. The cast match their material with a fairly ordinary series of performances.

Bogarde seems very relaxed in the lead and he is enjoyable even if it would not even register on the radar of his best performances. Oxley is not as good as he has a straighter role to allow Bogarde to carry himself with more of a swagger without off-balancing the film; he is a bit flat at times but mostly he does well. Goring plays it very well and he is an enjoyable sportsman in contrast to the feeble Nazi's that the genre would throw up during the war. The Greek support cast are not as heroic as I think their real lives deserved but they are used well for comic effect.

Overall this is a solid entry into the genre that tells it straight with some humour and a good steady pace – nothing special but it avoids the flag waving that the genre often falls into. However, when you are talking about a Powell and Pressburger film then, although I enjoyed it, one has to feel a bit of regret that such famous names ended their famous partnership with a film that is regularly called 'ordinary'.

On the Greek island of Crete during WWII, British agents are assisted by local partisans fighting the Nazi occupation. One night on a beach, they welcome Major Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO (Dirk Bogarde) and Captain Bill Stanley Moss MC (David Oxley) of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). They come up with a plan to kidnap German commander Major General Kreipe (Marius Goring).

It's a British war movie based on real people. The Italian locations look great and seem pretty close. There is a bit of espionage and some action. Mostly, it's collegial cat and mouse stuff. I would have liked to see the big ambush. The movie should follow Niko after the gold coin until the ambush happens. It's missing the big action finish.

This must be the worst film by Powell and Pressburger. Powell describes its failures so well (in his autobiography MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, page 364) that one need not dwell on all the details. The biggest problem is the flip, arch, schoolboy attitude of the characters. Powell complains of Bogarde, and claims that his performance effected the others, but the script and direction can't escape blame. One of the strong moments in the much more interesting non-fiction book this is based on is when the author realizes that it's not just fun and games but all for real when the general's driver gets killed. This moment of realization is not in the film. The travel across the island with the general is much too long, and there is no evolution to the relationship between the general and his captors, which makes it very tedious. Goring is a weak-sister general; perhaps Powell's first choice of Curt Jurgens could have made a difference. But the greatest disappointment is the use of hackneyed dramatic structure, particularly in the final scenes. Whether Powell and Pressburger were good or bad, they were always original. But the sequence where the general tries to bribe the boy is so familiarly presented that every step of its structure is obvious from the start. Ditto the scene when the general leaves his hat, where we're given a clue in the dialogue that the British are on to this ruse. The scene is baldly inserted to give some sense of danger to the trek. Then there's the "I don't know Morse code, do you?" routine at the end, which is lazily resolved by Cusak coming up out of nowhere with no particular explanation. These, and other tired script devices are taken, unadorned, straight out of Saturday matinée westerns. I can forgive the lack of pacing, but not this. The photography is stunning, even though the "on-location" isn't Crete. And despite Powell's disparaging remarks about VistaVision, it really enhances the black and white.

Think of `The Guns of Navarone', but with these differences:

(1) The band of adventurers genuinely like each other.

(2) Their mission is not to blow anything up. Rather, they plan to kidnap a German general and take him to Cairo. It's a publicity stunt. But it soon ceases to be a MERE publicity stunt: demonstrating German vulnerability may be as important as creating it.

(3) We get a good look at Crete - and NOT just because of spectacular scenic photography. We really feel at home on Cretan soil. Michael Powell, who had a talent for finding out-of-the-way composers (he also introduced Ralph Vaughan Williams and Brian Easdale to the cinema) has this time found Mikis Theodorakis, whose score is strongly flavoured but friendly to the ear.

With all this, `Ill Met by Moonlight' is an unusual venture by Powell and Pressburger, in that it isn't unusual: it's another World War II mission story, and there have been dozens. It IS more civilised than most. It tells its simple story neatly and cleanly; it's sweet, unpretentious, and disappointing only in that, since it was Powell and Pressburger's last official collaboration, it would have been nice to go out with a bigger bang.

The title is a line from `A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Its relevance is not obvious, at any rate not to me. Am I missing something?