Code Name: Emerald

It's April 1944. The Nazis are desperate to capture an "Overlord", the code name for the few Allies who knew the time and location of the planned D-Day invasion. The Nazis have a plant inside British intelligence. His code name is Emerald. It's Gus Lang (Ed Harris) who was recruited back in 1934. The British already know this and has him as their man. He gives the Nazis a boat transporting fake Overlords. Col. Peters (Patrick Stewart) gives them a boat full of sacrificial lambs and the Nazis narrow the focus on young American Lt. Andy Wheeler (Eric Stoltz).

I am not sure why Gus would return back to Paris. The movie gives the excuse that the British had tasked him to tracking down Emerald. It seems very unlikely that the spy hunter would go behind the lines to do it. The Brits would have different spy hunters for the two sides of the line. It would be more reasonable for a new character to do the interrogation trap. Ok! Forget all that. This is a rather static drama inside the prison. Outside the prison, he wouldn't make contact with the resistance. That would be too risky with little to gain. A lot of this feels wrong. No matter which way Gus Lang goes. There is some flaw in the logic.

As the Allied prepare to hit the Normandy beaches, the Germans try to find out where they will strike. In a complicated gambit, spy Ed Harris helps the Germans capture Eric Stoltz, who is supposed to know where the attack will take place. Then Harris shows up in occupied Paris to help get the information from him. However, he is actually a double agent.

One of the problems with making a fictional movie about a settled and familiar piece of history is that the audience knows how it all came out. There is thus no dramatic tension on the larger issues. Instead, we need to care about what happens to the individuals we see on the screen. And while they are all fine actors, their characters are mere sketches, and their dialogue not particularly interesting. While Max von Sydow and Horst Buchholz try their hardest, they are merely nasty Nazis here.

There is an attempt to liven things up with some good scenery shots around Paris. With Freddie Francis in charge of the camera, this succeeds. However, we are supposed to focus on Harris and liaison/love interest Cyrielle Clair, and they're shot in the distance and medium-long shots in these sequences.

"Code Name Emerald" is one of my favourite war films. Obviously it never actually happened (unless it's on one of those "not to opened until..." type files, which would be found to be empty at the designated date), but it could have. The depicted rehearsal for the landings did actually take place on the south coast of England, and was somewhat of a disaster, and in which there were quite a number of American GIs killed. If one "Overlorder" (i.e. someone familiar with the plans of the forthcoming D-Day landings, code name "Operation Overlord") had been captured at that time, imagine the panic of the top brass. Three years of meticulous planning gone up the Swanee.

In this movie one was, which is the basis of the story. The nasty Nazis have got their Teutonic hands on an Overlorder a certain young "Lootenant" Andy Wheeler (Eric Stoltz). The good guys have to either rescue him or kill him before he blabs. End of plot. But will poor Andy live or die? What could have become a "Boys Own" piece of hokum, turned out to be quite an interesting cleverly crafted movie, nicely underplayed by good experienced actors, with Ed Harris at the fore. War film critics of a purist nature will probably pick holes in it, and find mistakes all over the place, but I found none. Mind you, I enjoy the movie that much, I've probably never looked for any.

Like certain other film genres, such as the Western, the musical and the historical epic, the Second World War film was out of favour in the eighties. There were occasional exceptions, but apart from John Boorman's "Hope and Glory", which concentrated on the British Home Front rather than military action, I cannot think of any really great examples from the decade. There were to be no eighties equivalents of "The Dambusters" or "The Great Escape".

The central idea of "Code Name: Emerald" owes something to "Where Eagles Dare". An American officer with knowledge of the invasion plan for the D-Day landings has been captured by the Nazis. (In "Where Eagles Dare" the captured man was a general; here he is a lieutenant. Were such junior officers in fact entrusted with such vitally important secret knowledge?) In the earlier film, a group of commandos were sent to rescue the general from a redoubt in the Bavarian mountains. In "Code Name: Emerald", however, the Allies have a more subtle plan. Gus Lang, an American officer in Britain, is acting as a double agent, pretending to be a traitor working for German intelligence, whereas in reality he is being used by the Americans to feed the Germans with false information. ("Emerald" is the code name given to him by his German handlers). Lang is sent to Paris, supposedly to defect to the German side, but with secret instructions to find out whether the captured officer, Lieutenant Andrew Wheeler, has revealed anything under German interrogation.

Like "Hope and Glory", "Code Name: Emerald" has little in the way of military action. It is essentially an espionage drama of the sort popular throughout the Cold War, but transferred to a wartime setting and with the Germans rather than the Russians as the villains. Like most such dramas, it has a complicated plot where the heroes never know whom they can trust and which of the other characters might turn out to be a double, or even a triple, agent. An added complication is that the villains do not know whom they can trust either. One of the Germans is secretly working for the British- but which one? What lifts the film above the level of the average war film, or for that matter the average spy drama, is the depth of characterisation. Unusually, the German characters are not all stereotyped as one-dimensional villains. Admittedly, Helmut Berger's Ritter is a Nazi fanatic, but Horst Buchholz's Hoffman seems charming and urbane and Max von Sydow's Brausch is a Prussian officer of the old school, who loves the Fatherland but has little time for its rulers. That fine actor Ed Harris makes Lang a believable individual rather than a mere plot device. (Harris has been able to perform a similar service for other otherwise mundane thrillers, such as "The Rock", in which he not only makes the villain, General Hummel, believable, but also makes his motives, in part, understandable).

There is nothing particularly deep or original about "Code Name: Emerald", but it is professionally produced and acted and makes for enjoyable watching. 7/10

A double agent is dispatched to try to recover one of the 'Overlords' - the small group of people who knew when and where the Allied invasion would land. Ed Harris was a good choice to play the seeming turncoat. His intensity makes him hard to read while the viewer is jerked back and forth trying to figure out where his loyalties actually lie. Most of the film's running time is taken with the cat and mouse game of Ed trying to manipulate his objective's Nazi captors is pretty interesting, especially when one realizes that he is playing for the highest possible stakes: the success or failure of the biggest undertaking of the entire war. Then, when the action kicks in late in the picture, for once a big chase sequence has a dramatic purpose and isn't just there as a mindless diversion. Ed has to outwit and outrun the whole Nazi war machine in Fortress Europe, or the invasion is doomed.

Everything has a rather old fashioned feel to it, probably since this was just the type of movie that got made over and over in the late 40s and early 50s, but the production looks good and the period detail is convincing. Nothing here felt completely original, but it is a well enough made movie to be entertaining in itself.