During WWII, when an allied bomber is shot down over Germany, the five surviving crew are captured but cleverly escape detention after learning German secret information and knocking out a Nazi major. With the angry major in hot pursuit, aided by military personnel, Gestapo agents and Hitler-loyal citizens, the five wend their way across perilous Germany, intent on reaching the UK with the secrets they have learned.
Basically 'Errol Flynn vs. the Nazis, Round 1'
Battleground: Germany
This experience was hampered for me by a freak situation in which either my flatscreen TV or my blu player, for the first time, didn't have any audio, so, nonplussed yet equally dauntless, I just said 'what the hell', put on the subtitles and watched the film with no audio. (Later, I discovered that I could have just unplugged both for ten minutes and everything would have been normal. You live, you learn. It taught me to pay more attention to what was happening on the screen, so it wasn't an entirely wasted endeavor.)
Here, the weakness, as always, was Ronald Reagan, who makes Keanu Reeves look like a great actor. Still, he wasn't bad (it was a war film, after all, with a role he was born to play), and he and Flynn were assisted by great supporting players, such as Raymond Massey and Alan Hale, who are always 'cash money' for me IMHO. As well, you have one of the greatest American directors of the period in Raoul Walsh, so it's basically win, win, win--except if you're a Nazi.
**Pure war propaganda.**
This 1942 film is one of many films that were made during World War II, and that are themed around the conflict itself. During the war, American actors engaged in the military effort in films that sought to boost morale and incite combat, with the heroism of the Americans and British being almost the key to defeating the Axis, and the attractive Resistance girls to be their perfect romantic matches.
This film takes the heroes, a British and American flight crew, on a suicide mission into German territory: to destroy a railway junction heavily defended by guns and anti-aircraft artillery. Obviously, they are shot down and, from then on, begins an unstoppable game of cat and mouse with the German soldiers in which, virtually by miracle, they cross enemy territory, even passing through Berlin! And all this without any kind of previously organized plan, London directive or any resistance connection that could help them. Just luck and a great pair of... guts!
The film is really far from being good, or even competent. It can only be understood by virtue of the times then lived. However, it manages to entertain us reasonably if we turn off our brains. It's action and suspense from start to finish, with great actors, with Errol Flynn and a young Ronald Reagan being the great protagonists. They are good actors, and their worth is not in question, but really, there are very few real challenges for them: the film is simply concerned with showing Allied heroism and ridiculing the German military machine as much as possible.
In the same way that the production did not bet on a good script, or on good dialogues, there was also no bet on the quality of production values or effects. The cinematography is regular and works fine, but it doesn't enchant us, and the sets and costumes are more or less within what had to be done, even if it's not really brilliant. I liked, however, the cars that were used, and the car chase through the muddy fields of Holland. Hope they didn't spoil too many tulip bulbs.