Inferno na Normandia

Peter Lee Lawrence plays a theatrical actor whose mission is to infiltrate and destroy a German flamethrower installation at Normandy Beach before the allied attack there. His mission is only partly successful, but he is able to join up with a squadron of paratroopers sent to finish the job and guides them to the installation. Hell in Normandy climaxes with fairly standard fast-paced war action.

Lawrence was 23 when he starred in this film, and his promising career would be tragically cut short six years later by his suicide. The rest of the cast mixes American and continental European actors and actresses, mostly of the spaghetti western genre. The acting is generally good, though Guy Madison seems a little uncomfortable with his sad-sack paratrooper captain at times. Erica Blanc is excellent as a brave and intelligent member of the local resistance.

Brescia's Hell in Normandy is a cleverly plotted and well-directed military action-adventure centered on events preceding the allied victory at Normandy during World War Two. The film is fictional and makes no pretense at engaging the realities of the battle. But it does remain mostly within the constraints of plausibility. The cinematography is very good - hardly unexpected from an Italian film. But the script is horrendous. The writer included several token American idiomatic clichés - probably at the insistence of the cast - but did way too much exposition through dialog. The version I saw was dubbed. Perhaps the dialog is better in Italian? Recommended for war film fans only.

I like to watch at least one film from the '40s, '50s or '60s of a weekend, and by preference a war film. Often, it will be one I remember watching many years ago on TV, so there's a kind of nostalgic added-value.

Sometimes I can't find one I remember watching, or have even heard of, so I cast around to find something to fulfill this craving. This weekend's search produced this one.

It's ... OK. It's not good enough to have engaged me fully, nor leave a lasting impression, but not bad enough to give up watching once I'd started.

My feelings may be somewhat marred by the version I got hold of being dubbed. I'm not a fan of that, prefering instead to hear 'natural' voices and read subtitles. Actually, though, that was one thing that scored quite highly for me. The dubbing was pretty good, so I didn't spend much of the time being distracted by lips moving completely out of sync with what was being said.

On the whole, though, I wish I'd chosen something else.

It's a spaghetti World War II film rife with all of the elements of a spaghetti World War II film. I was just wondering if every World War II motion picture produced in Italy in the late 1960s was required to feature a female in the movie and on the poster to make people go see it. I also have to wonder if the cast ad-libbed the script all the way through it. Okay, never mind the last one. No one would ever use the kinds of lines that are used in these films, except the writers, obviously, at least until they graduated from high school.

Most of the outdoor shots were too dark to see what was going on. It's also pretty amazing that the people firing the machine guns were able to hit anything with the way the would wildly wave them back and forth while firing. Of course the Germans could rarely hit anyone as usual, so I guess there's that.

A bunker on Omaha beach presents a serious problem for the planning of D-day, and a few daredevil agents are sent out to investigate it to prepare for its demolition. Some paratroopers are sent in time for D-day to accomplish the operation, when D-day is postponed one day, while the paratroopers already have jumped and are lost behind German lines without support. Naturally, they go ahead with the operation anyway, led by Guy Madison in German officer's uniform, who is very elefgant in it. The film is full of action, there is nothing wrong with the excitement and suspense, but the direction seems a bit unprofessional at times. You have to remember that this is an Italian version of the D-day hullabaloo, you could call the film "D-day Italian style", and naturally the Germans are as wicked and naughty as ever, real monsters, with one notable exception. The film is perhaps enough for an evening's entertainment but blows over like so many other ordinary war action reels without leaving anything behind except perhaps a relief that it's over.

Poor Guy Madison was reduced to picking up "coffee and dough-nut" money making second rate Itailian stinkers during the 1960s and early 1970s. I saw this film in Italy and it was the non-dubbed version. Surpringly, I thought Guy came across very well dubbed in! I'm joking! Seriously, Guy looked stiff and unhappy here. He plays a Captain in the U.S. Army who leads a group of doomed paratroopers on a "deadly" mission. Nothing much to the whole thing. Nice uniforms, some stock black and white film on World War II, a bit of action, and really nothing else. If you look hard enough, you can find "cult" actor William Conroy playing a German soldier in yet another of his countless uncredited roles in Italian made 1960s films.