Dalle Ardenne all'inferno

The film is set in Holland 1945, last days of WWII, with two armies battling , the Montgomery powerful army and the remains of the Nazi batallions . At a concentration camp or Lager occurs two protagonists , Frédéric Stafford and Howard Ross as prisoners , get escaped. They are helped by a German guard, Michael Constantine, . The group team up with a Dutch partísan , Rollman : Adolfo Celi , to rob documents about V1 , V2 rockets and a loot of Netherland diamonds from underwater through the Nazi bowels to the vault safe-box located at the Wehrmacht headquarter . As the bunch looting or loving and they play it dirty . As they fight a dozen dirty different ways . Meanwhile, Frederick Stafford falls for a gorgeous Jew , Daniela Bianchi , married to a German general , Curd Jurgens.

Average warlike movie contains thrills , breathtaking scenes , noisy explosions , busy battles , vicious Nazis, and a spectacular caper . The film is set when the defeat of third Reich is imminent , in its ending confrontation and two armies take on each other , on the one hand the Allied Army and on the other hand the tarnishing garrisons of the third Reich. It is a middling actioner with some decent scenes , a straightforward warfare movie with lots of shootouts , a love story , a diamond caper, fights , twists and turns. Displaying a great number of extras, ships , tanks, machine guns , and soldiers with acceptable production design . In spite of some flaws and gaps , the Wartime action keeps breathless, thanks to tension and intrigue . Notable widescreen scenes , which will suffer on TV small screen and including several zooms , as usual . Main cast is passable . It stars Frédéric Stafford who played Hitcock's Topaz and two war films as Battle of Alamein by Giorgio Ferroni and Eagles over London by Enzo G Castell . Along with the beautiful Daniela Bianchi and Adolfo Celi , both of whom played James Bond movies. Support cast is pretty well formed by ordinary secondaries of the 60s and 70s such as Curd Jurgens , Anthony Dawson , Howard Ross, Tom Felleghy , John Bartha , among others . Special mention for Helmut Schneider as a nasty SS officer and John Ireland as an American pilot, captain O'Connor.

It has an attractive musical score by the great Ennio Morricone , helped by his regular collaborator Bruno Nicolai . Atmospheric cinematography in Technicolor Techniscope by cameraman Giovanni Bergamini, though a perfect remastering being absolutely necessary . Adding the brilliant matte shots and visual effects from Emilio Ruiz Del Rio and Alejandro Ulloa . This is an European coproduction among various countries : Italy , Germany , Holland , France , Spain and in enough budget. The motion picture was regular but professionally directed by Alberto De Martino . Martino was a craftsman who directed all kinds of genres, getting some sucessess such as Puma man, Holocausto 2000, The antichrist , Django shoots first , Operation Lady Chaplin , Hero of Rome, Medusa against the son of Hercules , Seven Spartans , Horror , among others.

THis film titled Dirty heroes , or De las Ardenas al Infierno, or Della Ardenne all'inferno , belongs to a numerous group of European coproductions, usually Italian/Spanish , nicknamed Macarroni combat made throughout the late 1960 and beginnings 70s , imitating American ones , often directed by Enzo G Castelari ,Umberto Lenzi, José Luis Merino and León Klimovski , including old Hollywood stars as Hell brigade with Jack Palance , Eagles over London with Van Johnson, Command attack with Michael Rennie , The Legión of no return with Tab Hunter or this Dirty Heroes with John Ireland . All of them were supported by the Italian or Spanish army that lent tanks , weapons, soldiers to make these films.

The pleasure of seeing some good and dear actors again: Daniela Bianchi, Adolfo Celi, Michel Constantin, Frederick Stafford. Curd Jürgens in the role of a good German general. Helmuth Schneider in the role of a very bad SS officer. The music signed by master Ennio Morricone with Bruno Nicolai is not great.

This film sits squarely in the phenomenon often referred to as macaroni combat, those European co-productions of the late 1960s that attempted to replicate the scale and spectacle of Hollywood's Second World War extravaganzas while simultaneously bending them toward European tastes for intrigue, melodrama, and a touch of pulp. What distinguishes this particular effort is not its originality of theme-after all, capers, sabotage, and doomed romances were staple ingredients of the subgenre-but rather the ambitious attempt to fuse the mechanics of a diamond heist with the iconography of the collapsing Third Reich. The result is a film that lingers in an uneasy space between action, melodrama, and near-parody, where technical craftsmanship alternates with stylistic excess.

Visually, the production embraces the widescreen scope of Techniscope, a format that Italian cinema of the era deployed to inflate spectacle despite modest budgets. The compositions are broad, accommodating not only the numerous extras, tanks, and machinery lent by European armies, but also elaborate matte shots and miniature work that, while occasionally artificial, succeed in creating a sense of scale absent from many contemporaneous productions. Yet the film is not free from the pitfalls of its visual strategy: the frequent use of zooms-so fashionable in European action cinema at the time-dates the film considerably, lending certain sequences a televisual quality. The Technicolor palette, rich in deep reds and fatigued greens, creates atmosphere but also highlights the artificiality of costumes and sets, particularly when the narrative moves from muddy exteriors to brightly lit interiors that could just as easily belong to a spy thriller.

The score, a collaboration between Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, stands as one of the film's most enduring qualities. Its alternation between driving, martial rhythms and melancholic interludes offers tonal complexity that the images themselves sometimes lack. Yet, the music also underscores a tension in the production: while the narrative oscillates between gritty war film, caper adventure, and romance, the score stitches these disparate elements together, often with more coherence than the editing manages. Without it, many sequences would collapse under the weight of their abrupt tonal shifts.

Performance-wise, the international cast provides an eclectic range of deliveries. Frédéric Stafford carries the central role with stoic resolve, though his acting style-more suited to espionage thrillers-sometimes undercuts the desperate realism of wartime peril. Daniela Bianchi, with her elegance and restrained presence, lends glamour but little psychological depth, functioning more as symbolic figure than as a fully developed character. Adolfo Celi and Curd Jürgens bring gravitas, yet both remain trapped within archetypal roles that the script never allows to expand. The most memorable performance arguably comes from Helmut Schneider, whose SS officer manages to embody menace without resorting to cartoonish excess, a rarity in this cycle of films. Still, compared with American ensemble works like The Devil's Brigade (1968) or the semi-satirical Kelly's Heroes (1970), the acting here feels more mechanical, as though the actors were primarily deployed for their marquee value rather than for the nuances they could bring to their roles.

The action choreography alternates between exhilarating and muddled. Large-scale battle scenes impress with their abundance of extras and hardware, yet the staging often lacks clarity, relying heavily on quick cuts and noise rather than spatial logic. The underwater vault sequence, however, remains notable for its originality, representing the moment when the film most successfully marries the war genre with caper conventions. Elsewhere, though, the prolonged climax suffers from bloat, with narrative threads stretching beyond their capacity to sustain tension.

Historically, the film emerges at a time when European co-productions sought to capitalize on both the popularity of Hollywood war films and the growing international market for Italian genre cinema. By 1967, the political and cultural climate in Italy was one of both reflection on the Fascist past and unease about the present. The film channels this through its ambivalence: it flirts with solemnity in depicting occupation and resistance, yet it simultaneously indulges in escapist thrills, glamorous stars, and the fantastical premise of a diamond heist amid the ruins of Europe. Rather than confronting history directly, it reprocesses it into spectacle, a move typical of its subgenre, which preferred to deliver excitement over authenticity.

As part of the macaroni combat lineage, it is more polished than many of its peers, thanks to Martino's professional if uninspired direction and the contributions of top-tier technicians. Yet, its hybrid nature-part war film, part heist adventure, part melodrama-prevents it from achieving the tonal consistency of more focused works. It is precisely in this hybrid quality, however, that the film's peculiar charm lies, a testament to an era when European cinema was unafraid to borrow, imitate, and experiment, even at the risk of incoherence.

The script writers and produces of this movie seem to have focused on the misnomer that it was the US Armed Forces that liberated the Netherlands.

Whilst there may have been some US presents in the Amsterdam area to my knowledge it was the Canadian Armed Forces that actually liberated the Netherlands.

Canada is not the United States of America!

The Dirty Heroes Completely the worst war movie I have ever seen !!!!! talk about stereotypical,the Germans are all terrible shots and seem to be eager cannon-fodder, as they make little or no effort to take cover, dying in a hail of rounds screaming comic book "aieeeeeeeeeeee's" and thats not to mention the "ve haf vays of meking you talk" SS officer...oh my god !!! Another scene that really must be seen to be believed has Captain O'Connor flying over German lines in a reconnaissance plane which,is suddenly and miraculously transformed into a heavy bomber dropping its payload from wide-open bomb bays and pulverising the Germans beneath, before once more instantaneously reverting to being a small reconnaissance plane again. Since when did Recce planes carry bombs and what about the flagrant disregards of any orders !!!! Imagine if Monty had said " Oh Bugger Alamein, I'll attack Cairo instead...

In summary all I can say is avoid at all costs a complete waste of my time, wooden, NSF acting, terrible production costume design a blatant attempt to jump on the Dirty Dozen bandwagon and the only reason I kept watching was to see if it could get any worse !!!!...

(Talking of worse, the Italian and original title of the movie refers to the Ardennes-since when has Amsterdam, Holland, where the film is set, been anywhere near the bleedin Ardennes?...oh lord)