Le cri des marines

It's not often you get a "war mystery" film, and of course when you do, you are usually dealing with spies.

In this case, the mystery is about a German spy dressed up as an American soldier during World War II. He has forged papers, and his goal is to make it to a town where a resistance member is kept. This resistance member is a liaison between all the groups, and obviously knows connections to each. He would be a great prize.

We see the command given to the spy, but not his face, and we are then taken to a site where American soldiers have been whittled away from their individual units, and eight join up, including the by the book lieutenant and the veteran sergeant.

This is a top mystery and a top war film. It combines both elements, and it's difficult to say why without spoilers. Suffice to say that the characters are very believable, the action very credible, and the spy is exactly the type of person who would be seen as most successful.

There is incredible eye candy with a couple of Italian women, one of which is guaranteed to make any young man fall in love/lust. This woman wears boots and possibly inspired the Nancy Sinatra song.

The title lets you know that when they are whittled down to four, they will find the spy (or he will succeed and exit). I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the ones who die before this are given high drama to their deaths, although the first is a wounded man who never lasts long enough for the high drama. With each casualty, our director succeeds in making you feel more and more empathy for them. The last American who dies is given the most tragedy, as we see him to be the possible hero.

This is a lost gem, and easily the best of the war mysteries. Tons better than the blockbuster big budget bits of propaganda that are more famous.

The film occupies a rare niche in WWII cinema: the war mystery built around infiltration, suspicion, and the gradual erosion of trust within a small unit. Where most war dramas of the time aimed for sweeping battle sequences or grand strategic narratives, here the scale is purposefully tight. The story unfolds entirely in the open-fields, hillsides, dusty roads-less out of stylistic intention than necessity, yet this enforced minimalism works to the film's advantage. The absence of interiors strips away visual distractions, leaving the men permanently exposed to the elements and, more crucially, to one another's gaze. It turns the landscape into a stage where suspicion has nowhere to hide.

The cinematography embraces this constraint with workmanlike but effective framing. Medium and wide shots are dominant, letting the viewer study group movements and interactions, while occasional close-ups punctuate moments of doubt or tension. The war here is not seen in panoramic spectacle but in the shifting body language of soldiers who are forced to march, camp, and fight together while knowing that one of them is actively working against them. This dynamic puts the film in thematic company with Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and Man Hunt (1941) in their infiltration tension, but unlike those, this one refuses studio-bound artifice, relying entirely on real daylight, uneven ground, and unpolished movement to convey authenticity.

Performances are pitched with restraint. The lieutenant's precise, almost inflexible command presence collides with the sergeant's lived-in pragmatism, creating a believable chain of command under stress. The supporting soldiers avoid caricature, each marked by small, repeated habits-how they carry a rifle, adjust a strap, react to an order-that invite the audience to read too much into their behavior, exactly as the characters themselves are doing. The script offers no obvious tells, ensuring that suspicion shifts naturally from one man to another, tightening the dramatic knot. Even the brief appearances of civilians-most memorably the Italian women-are not throwaway diversions but tonal spikes, adding unpredictability to a journey otherwise defined by military rhythm.

Action is brief, sharp, and grounded. Gunfire is handled with convincing, unembellished sound; skirmishes are messy rather than staged, with the camera sometimes allowing events to play out just beyond perfect visibility, a technique that increases the sense of uncertainty rather than delivering choreographed thrills. The score is used sparingly, allowing silence and ambient noises-boots on dirt, wind, the distant pop of small arms-to occupy the tension, a choice more common in European war films of the period than in their more demonstrative American counterparts.

As a product of 1961, the film carries a dual sensibility: its wartime setting is rooted in the camaraderie and duty emphasized in earlier decades, but the infiltration plot and the distrust it breeds point toward a more modern, Cold War-inflected paranoia. In that sense, the "enemy within" theme resonates with contemporary fears of espionage and subversion, even while dressed in the uniforms and weaponry of 1944. It is not propaganda, nor is it cynicism; rather, it is an exploration of loyalty under the most personal form of threat-a knife in the back from the man walking beside you.

What emerges is a lean, tightly focused entry in the WWII war mystery subgenre, one that uses budgetary constraints not as a hindrance but as a way to strip the story down to suspicion, endurance, and the slow realization that in wartime, trust is as fragile as life itself.

A US Army unit patrols in Italy during the war. Little do they know that one of them is a German spy, trying to assassinate an Italian partisan. But which one of them is it?

It's a dreadfully cheap movie, directed by Alex Nicoll, who also has a leading role. It was one of the movies he made in Europe before returning to America to direct the Tarzan TV show. The print I saw looked awful, which did the camerawork of first-time cinematographer Gastone Di Giovanni no favors. There's a narration at the beginning for the English-speaking audience who was unaware of the army being in Italy during the Second World War. It's credited to Paul Frees, who seems to be doing an imitation of William Conrad narrating the Rocky the Flying Squirrel cartoons.

Although it's an interesting idea for a movie, the execution is poor.