Billed as a movie about a "top secret operation to infiltrate the Nazi's secret rocket base!" turns out to be not much more than a rather dull attempt at intrigue or something.  Probably more an excuse to get Sophia Loren on screen, in a sequence that takes far far too much screen time.

Part of the reason I watched this movie, was I had just finished watching the recent NOVA episode on the British recon photo experts and how they managed to deduce the locations and meaning of the V-1 and V-2 rocket sites.  This seemed relevant.  Well, I think I enjoyed the NOVA episode more.

Long story short, American Curtis (George Peppard) and Brit Lindemann (Trevor Howard) infiltrate the base disguised as scientists.  They (of course) manage to expose the position of the base exactly as British bombers make their run.  Of course this is at the cost of their own lives.  Making it all more dramatic I suppose.

Turns out "Crossbow" was actually the name of the over-arching operation against the German long-range weapons program, you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossbow

As a movie, well, this movie anyway.  I was pretty disappointed.  It felt more like an episode of some 2nd rate 1960's TV series to me.  Your milage may vary of course....  Giving a 4/10...  I just wasn't feeling the love on this one.

Operation Crossbow List Price: $19.97 Sale Price: $4.85 You save: $15.12 (76%)   Eligible for free shipping! Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Description

A fearsome rumor reaches Britain's World War II command. The Nazis are developing rocket technology that could rain death on London and, then, New York. Quickly, England develops a plan to send saboteurs into the sites manufacturing the rockets. Just moments after the carefully chosen commandos parachute into the drop zone, their pilot receives an urgent message. The mission may be compromised. Abort. Operation Crossbow is the partly fact-based tale of how that team succeeded against daunting odds. Michael Anderson (The Dam Busters, Logan's Run) directs, guiding a huge cast in a film that builds to a spectacular finale, yet never neglects war's unsparing personal costs. As a record of a wartime espionage incursion and as an intrigue-filled thriller, Operation Crossbow is on both counts Operation Accomplished. DVD Features:Featurette:Vintage Featurette A Look Back at CrossbowTheatrical Trailer

Operation Crossbow was one among many '60s films aiming, in the wake of The Guns of Navarone, to cash in on nostalgia for "the Good War" of 20 years earlier, plus snag a share of the spy-movie market stoked by James Bond. A decent-enough stiff-upper-lip thriller in its day, it's yet more enjoyable now. The nostalgia has deepened to include affectionate enjoyment of a fine, big cast now mostly departed, dependably hitting their marks in a jolly good yarn. The tale begins around the midpoint of the war, with Hitler aspiring to hurl a second Blitz against London using "flying bombs" and rockets. The British War Office starts recruiting officers fluent in the necessary technical fields, as well as German, Dutch, and/or French--the languages of the Nazi-occupied countries from which the Germans are recruiting technical personnel. The screenplay follows two tracks: the Germans' progress with their new aerial weaponry, and the progress of the Allied infiltrators--chiefly Yank George Peppard, chirpy Englishman Jeremy Kemp, and Dutchman Tom Courtenay--sent to penetrate the V2 project. Despite the resemblance between the Navarone caves and the underground V2 launch center, Crossbow is something of an anti-Navarone. Its heroes are resolutely small-scale, and the mission is fraught with more opportunities for horrible miscues and moral-ethical murkiness than commando derring-do. The most memorable, indeed disturbing, part of the film involves Sophia Loren as the apolitical wife of a collaborator she doesn't know has been killed (and his identity assumed by Peppard). John Mills and Trevor Howard are deliciously deadpan trading war-council flapdoodle at the highest echelon, and Anthony Quayle (the spiritual leader of the Navarone mission) does yeoman service in a tricky role. Time--or rather, the transfer to video--has also been kind to the film's thin, overlit Metrocolor and last-reel special effects, which looked feebler on theater screens. The writers include Michael Powell's longtime partner Emeric Pressburger (under the pseudonym Richard Imrie). --Richard T. Jameson

DVD Information

Binding: DVD
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Brand: Warner Brothers
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Original Release Date:
Actors:

• Sophia Loren
• George Peppard
• Trevor Howard

Features

• A fearsome rumor reaches Britain's World War II command. The Nazis are developing rocket technology that could rain death on London and, then, New York. Quickly, England develops a plan to send saboteurs into the sites manufacturing the rockets. Just moments after the carefully chosen commandos parachute into the drop zone, their pilot receives an urgent message. The mission may be compromised. Ab

Reviews

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Related posts:

1. Operation Bikini (1963)
2. In Harm’s Way (1965)
3. 36 Hours (1965)
4. Battle of the Bulge (1965)
5. None But The Brave (1965)

First and foremost, this seems to me to be a propaganda piece, plain and simple.  The "evil" Czarists (the Whites) persecuting, pursuing, and mercilessly killing the Bolsheviks (the Reds) during the height of the Bolshevik revolution...  with a bit of a twist, the Hungarian element.  Throughout, you'll see one or more of the Red soldiers proclaim, "but I'm Hungarian!" and the Whites go, "right! off you go then!"...  instead of executing them with the rest of the Russian Reds, which seems to happen quite a bit.  A product of the Hungarian source of the film, no doubt, but its almost funny (almost) after the 3rd time or so.

If nothing else it surely demonstrates the cruelty and inhumanity of war, on both sides.  Numerous times we see groups toyed with and then executed, war crimes committed, and the choices that are made out of necessity.

But to me, it just comes across as the "evil" Whites out to slaughter the "noble" Reds, especially as the film ends, and the remaining band of Reds is slaughtered in a "last stand" charge against the Whites.  Granted that's how these things often play out, with the victors determining how history is portrayed, but in this case it is just a little too obvious.

Am I wrong? I don't know.  I just didn't care for this one all that much.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061537/
Amazon: The Red and The White (1967)

The only video I could find, not sure it really shows anything else than what I've described above....  Your mileage may vary, of course.

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Description

Banned for many years in the USSR, Hungarian director Miklos Jancso's masterful The Red and the White is a haunting, powerful film about the absurdity and evil of war. Set in Central Russia during the Civil War of 1918, the story details the murderous entanglements between Russia's Red soldiers and the counter-revolutionary Whites in the hills along the Volga. The epic conflict moves with skillful speed from a deserted monastery to a riverbank hospital to a final, unforgettable hillside massacre. The director of such Hungarian cinema classics as Silence and Cry (1968), My Way Home (1967), Jancso here creates what many believe to be his finest work. The Red and the White is a moving visual feast where very inch of the cinemascope frame is used to magnificent effect. With his brilliant use of exceptionally long takes, vast and unchanging landscapes and Tames Somlo's hypnotic black and white photography, Jancso gives the film the quality of a surreal nightmare. In the director's uncompromising world, people lose all sense of identity and become hopeless pawns in the ultimate game of chance.

Miklós Janscó takes the romance out of Russia's Revolutionary struggle in this simultaneously beautiful and brutal look at the civil war following the Bolshevik coup of 1918. Set in a remote region of Central Russia in 1919, The Red and the White follows the shifting balance of power around an abandoned monastery. The anti-Bolshevik White Army has embarked on a campaign to completely eradicate the area of Red Army soldiers, and scores of Hungarians, former Bolshevik prisoners thrust into battle, are caught in the middle. The graceful camerawork and lush, lovely landscape captured in stunning black-and-white widescreen stand in sharp contrast to the abrupt on-the-spot executions and sadistic cat-and-mouse games of the White Army, hiding behind a mask of politeness and civility as they line up their next row of victims. But Janscó's portrayal of the Bolsheviks, while decidedly more heroic, isn't much more sympathetic. The dreamlike poetry of Janscó's cinema and the surreal atmosphere of doom carries the film in place of a strong story or a central set of characters, but there is no mistaking his sympathies for the victims of the struggle--peasants and prisoners and civilians caught between collision of two armies, systematically stripped of their dignity and their lives as the battle rages around them like an evocation of hell on Earth. It's a brave stance for a Hungarian filmmaker working on Soviet soil in 1968 and it makes for a powerful film. --Sean Axmaker

DVD Information

Binding: DVD
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Brand: Kino International
Manufacturer: Kino Video
Original Release Date:
Actors:

• József Madaras
• Tibor Molnár
• András Kozák
• Jácint Juhász
• Anatoli Yabbarov

Features

• RED & THE WHITE, THE CSILLAGOSOK, KATON (DVD MOVIE)

Reviews

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Related posts:

1. Tobruk (1967)
2. How I Won The War (1967)
3. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
4. The Dirty Dozen (1967, Blu-ray)

The Starfighters is a Cold War airplane flick, plain (ha) and simple.  Basically it features the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in action.  If you want to call it action.  Basically they fly around, get refueled, and fly around some more....

And not much else.  Seriously.  It adds new dimension to the word "suck." I like love airplane films (see the previous review of Bombers B-52, and Strategic Air Command), but this brought a facepalm.

So its perfect fodder for Mike, Crow, and Tom to rail on.  And they do it in grand style here.  I'll shut up and let the film, and our heroes speak for themselves.

Oh, the rating I'm giving is for the film itself, NOT for the MST3K lampooning, which would get an 8 or 9 at least, because its the only thing what makes this thing bearable.

Enjoy.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058615/

Related posts:

1. Fail-Safe (1964)
2. Father Goose (1964)
3. Guns at Batasi (1964)
4. The Secret Invasion (1964)

The story follows one Bruno Stachel (George Peppard) as he makes his way from the German infantry in The Big One up to a Lt. in the Luftwaffe.  His goal? To win the holy grail of the skies, The "Blue Max" medal.

To that end he ruthlessly goes after any and every kill he can find, much to the chagrin of his fellow fliers.  Even going so far as to spend an entire day out looking for the wreckage of a plane he downed, but can't confirm.  He even manages to secure the Red Baron's plane at one point.

Along the way, he becomes a "golden boy" of the German propaganda machine, propped up as the "commoner's Richtofen", a contrast to the upper-class upbringing of his comrade.  The problem is that Stachel buys into his own hype whole-heartedly, and quickly becomes a pain and a menace to the men around him, and to the officer corps in general, led here by General Count von Klugermann (James Mason.)  He even takes his "conquest" to the next level by having a fling with the General's wife (Ursula Andress.)  Eventually, the General

The problem is not the movie, the story, or the production, all of which are quite excellent, if a bit long (clocking in at 156 min.)....  But rather Peppard himself.  He's awfully, well, wooden in this picture.  No other way to say it.  There's no feeling here, no nothing really.  He's a machine.  But he's outdone in this picture by the *real* machines, namely the aircraft and the dogfights therein.

And to that effect there are some wonderfully executed flying scenes here.  Done by real airplanes and pilots.  No low-budget CG here, folks.  It's the real deal, and it's really fun.  But like I said, the rest just sorta drags along as Stachel barely cracks a face of any kind.

Any message here?  That I'm not entirely sure of.  Having not read the book I can't deduce if there's supposed to be one, but I really can't find one.  The movie comes across as more of a classical "character tragedy" than anything else, as Stachel rises to fame, poisons that by his own doings, and pays the ultimate price for it.

All that said, it is an overall very good movie, with the one flaw being Hannibal's Peppard's seeming lack of enthusiasm.

IMDB: The Blue Max (1966)
Amazon: The Blue Max (1966)

Here's a trailer...

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The "Blue Max", a coveted medal for achievement in flying, is ruthlessly sought by Peppard, a poor-boy german soldier who climbs out of the trenches and into the aristorcratic air force. He is met with prejudice by the other contestants, wealthy snobs who

The Blue Max is highly unusual among Hollywood films, not just for being a large-scale drama set during the generally overlooked World War I, but in concentrating on air combat as seen entirely from the German point of view. The story focuses on a lower-class officer, Bruno Stachel (George Peppard), and his obsessive quest to win a Blue Max, a medal awarded for shooting down 20 enemy aircraft. Around this are subplots concerning a propaganda campaign by James Mason's pragmatic general, rivalry with a fellow officer (Jeremy Kemp), and a love affair with a decadent countess (Ursula Andress). As directed by John Guillermin (who later made The Battle of Britain in 1969), the film's main assets are epic production values, great flying scenes, and stunning dogfights. The weak point is the sometimes ponderous character drama, not helped by Peppard, who is too lightweight an actor to convince as the driven antihero. Clearly influenced by Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1958), The Blue Max is a cold, cynical drama offering a visually breathtaking portrait of a stultified society tearing itself apart during the final months of the Great War. --Gary S. Dalkin

DVD Information

Binding: DVD
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Brand: PEPPARD,GEORGE
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Original Release Date:
Actors:

• George Peppard
• James Mason
• Ursula Andress
• Jeremy Kemp
• Karl Michael Vogler

Reviews

Related posts:

1. What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966)
2. Cast a Giant Shadow (1966)
3. The Battle of Algiers (1966)
4. The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966)

To my knowledge this is really the only mainstream movie about the Vietnam War, made during the Vietnam War.  What's interesting though is the tack this film takes on the situation.

On the one hand, it seems to be some what of a propaganda piece as to "why we're fighting this war."  Of course it wasn't the case at all and we know that now, but between the obligatory "red menace" bit and the "they want us here" bullshitsiness this aspect just comes across as, well, bad.

On another hand, its interesting from a cinematic perpsective.  Starring AND directed by (in part) John Wayne, and co-starring war movie staple Aldo Ray, the entire picture feels like it was meant to mirror the classic war movies of the 40's and 50's.  It's just a vibe you get.  From the pacing, the writing, the action scenes....  It's like somebody said, "Hey! Let's make a formula WWII picture, only about Vietnam! Yeah!"  And the even stranger part is, that it sort of kind of works.  Almost.

Then there's the elusive third hand.  The fact that even in '68, they actually *did* get a lot of stuff right.  Much of that I think comes from the apparent access the military gave them.  The flight lines at (presumably) Da Nang or a reasonable fascimile, the aerial prisoner pickup, the spy in the ranks, the precursor to the AC-130 (a little help here?), and of course the forward firebase and the brush clearing, etc. etc. etc.  Not bad stuff.

And the obvious fourth hand, the WTF stuff.  The strange spring loaded booby traps, the blatantly bogus trail patrols.  The stuff they threw in to try and support the 2nd hand points.  And who can forget the scene where they actually used a sound reel from the westerns' shelf, complete with the attacking Indians whooping it up...

Oh, the plot! Well, to the film's detriment, its rather long.  They could have (should have) made this half the movie they did.  Once the firebase fight was over, and the reporter got his taste of what the war is (supposedly) about, that should have been it.  No, we've got to go on a politically motivated prisoner hunt.  OK, maybe that part might actually be more accurate than we'd like to admit, but it really makes the film twice as long as it needed to be, and takes away a lot from the first half.  A lot.

Acting? Well, its 1960's war movie fare.  Wayne and Ray are themselves, as are most of the supporting cast.  George Takei is oddly cast as the South Vietnamese commander, but still manages to do a fair job, considering how little truth would have been known, at least I'm guessing.  I dunno, I guess I really can't flaw anyone here.

Yeah this is getting a little long winded.  I guess I'm trying to convey that The Green Berets is somewhat of an enigma.  Its great and terrible all at the same time, if that makes any sense.  Historically interesting, cinematically interesting, but ultimately dating itself severely...  I still have to give it 7/10.  I just can't help it.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063035/
Amazon: The Green Berets

Here's the trailer, if you hunt around, you'll find more....

Related posts:

1. Hell In The Pacific (1968)
2. The Battle of El-Alamein (1968)
3. Hell Raiders (1968, TV)
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The fun starts when a Russian submarine runs aground on a tiny Massachusetts island.  They send a party ashore, led by Lt. Rozanov (Alan Arkin) to commandeer a boat to get them free again.  They run into Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner) and his family, and the chaos (and supposedly the hilarity) ensues.

Basically you've got a film trying to be a comedy, trying to thumb its nose at the entire cold war, and really doesn't succeed at either.  The ending makes for a few typical Hollywood "feel good" moments, as forced and clumsy as it is.  The cast, with Reiner and Arkin, plus Jonathan Winters, Brian Keith, Eva Marie Saint, and a few other familiar faces, really never seems to gel to me.  Like they had somewhere else to be.  The Rozanov and Whittaker characters especially just seem to be going through the motions.  Rozanov particularly.  Maybe its an attempt at deadpan, I dunno.

What it really is, though, is a good look at how rumors get spread, changed and completely blown out of proportion.  By the end the entire island is up in arms, organizing, fighting amongst themselves, and ready to start world war 3!!  I'm sure there's a sociology course that could use this as class material, as the handful of Russian sailors turn into a crack brigade of paratroopers, backed by the Russian Navy and everything else....

Apart from a few gags pulled from the "this should make em laugh" jar, I just didn't find The Russians are Coming all that funny.  And that was the point.  Once again, The Netflix/Roku Instant Watch pays off though, with excellent delivery.

Here's a few clips, enjoy:

Related posts:

1. What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966)
2. The Blue Max (1966)
3. Cast a Giant Shadow (1966)
4. The Battle of Algiers (1966)

As the Japanese rout the Allies from the South Pacific in the early days of WWII, George Tweed (Geoffrey Hunter) managed to escape the invading Empire on Guam, and was able to hide out until the Allies eventually returned.

What could have been a harrowing tale of survival ends up being, well, just meh.  From the greatly exaggerated stereotypes of the natives and the Japanese, to the incredibly forced love story between Tweed and one of the natives....  There isn't much to do but sit back and roll your eyes waiting for something really interesting to happen.

The actual invasion scenes aren't very well executed.  His initial escapees are all eliminated save for George, but not very compellingly...  I don't think I'll go on.

You might give No Man is an Island a go if you've got nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon... but frankly I dont' think I'd do it again.

Related posts:

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3. Wake Island (1942)
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The transfer is good.  I won't go so far as to say great, because I think it could be digitally cleaned up a lot more than this.  There is a lot of film grain, which isn't necessarily bad, sure its what was there, but I think we can do better.  It's clean, and there aren't any scratches lines or blemishes really.  The audio isn't anything spectacular either.

And the extras on the disc mirror those of the two-disc DVD edition, which leads me to believe that this might just be a repackaging of that, and that we're not *really* looking at a full-HD 1080p transfer.  Hard to say.  There are a lot of extras on the disc, the usual 'making of' features, the trailer, Marvin's final role in a Marine Corps training film, and the 1985 TV sequel, Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, which reunites Marvin, Borgnine, and Jaeckel in a ho-hum rehash.

If you've got Blu-ray, by all means shell out for The Dirty Dozen on BD.  If not, I don't believe you'll be missing a whole lot by just going with the 2-disc edition.

This rating and review only covers the Blu-ray version of the movie, my full review of the glorious Dirty Dozen goes into more detail about the movie....

Related posts:

1. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
2. The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988)
3. The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987)
4. The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985, TV)
5. Play Dirty (1968)

The plot?  To be quite honest, I couldn't quite discern one.  Not that it matters anyway.  What you've got is the mis-adventures of one Ernest Goodbody (Michael Crawford) as he ineptly leads his men into the North African desert.  I think.  I say "I think" because they continually flash around to the same group of men in Europe during the war, and some rather strange and unsettling dialogue between Goodbody and his German captor (which happened during this European "campaign") as the Nazis prepare to blow up a bridge in advance of the Allied push....

But like I said, none of that matters.  What you end up with is a non-stop series of nonsensical skits and visual images which, I suppose, are meant to present some kind of anti-war sentiment.

There's Gripweed (John Lennon, yes, that John Lennon) who seems to be in a dope induced state the entire way.  There's the guy who keeps showing up dressed in all manner of bizarre (there's that word again) getups, from blackface to officer-parody.  There's the coward who's spending the entire journey in his skivvies...  When the men get killed, they turn into these pastel-painted ghosts, which continue on with the squad...  Aw heck, why bother, really, like I said none of it matters.

Yet for its total lack of direction and story I found myself really enjoying it.  If you're not the type to "get" "British Humor(tm)" then you may as well forget it.  The endless slapstick, the oddball voicings, the one-liners....  I found myself just wondering what else they'd come up with.

And at the end, it sort of becomes clear, as an aged Goodbody stands almost alone with the sole remaining squadmate at a reunion.  All of this has been his "retelling" in a senile and celebratory way of "how he won the war."  Which of course he actually didn't, and he knows it, but he has to tell himself that to make sense of the absurdity that he remembers.

At least I think I get it.  I'm giving it seven stars nonetheless.  Maybe if I were back in '67 after dropping a tab or two I might get How I Won The War even more.  Maybe that's the point?

Related posts:

1. Tobruk (1967)
2. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
3. The Dirty Dozen (1967, Blu-ray)
4. The Red and the White (1967)

The first is the 1969 eye-candy epic, Battle of Britain.  You can read my original review of Battle of Britain here.  As such, I won't go into the plot or any of those details, as you can read it on that article, but rather these Blu-Ray reviews will focus more on the format, and what it gives you that plain-old DVD does not.

The problem with Battle of Britain on BD is that there isn't anything which truly sets it apart.  Matter of fact there is *nothing* on this disc but the film, which I was sorely disappointed at.  No extras of any kind, save for the remastered 5.1 audio, and a DTS-HD track which I couldn't enjoy since my receiver can't handle it....

But the 5.1 audio remaster is quite impressive, most notably where it comes to the soundtrack.  The remaining sound effects I really couldn't tell any major difference in, save for a few deep-bass explosions.  A big huge flaw though, is that the German is *not* subtitled by default.  You have to switch on the subtitles for these scenes, and switch them off again during the English sections... a big faux-pas on the disc producers' behalf.  Maybe it was just my player, but I'm thinking not.

And the picture was absolutely wonderful, albeit a bit grainy, which is no fault of blu-ray.  The details of the aircraft (the real stars of the film) came through beautifully, down to every rivet and stain.  However, the so-so special effects were even more obvious, especially the composited explosions, "duplications," and models.  If ever a film deserved to get a Lucas-ish "Special Edition" this is the one.  I could see some noise and dirt in a few places, but for the most part it looked fairly clean, and the colors didn't appear faded.  I should say that I am not that anal about artifacting and the like as some are, and I just didn't notice any.

I'm still miffed about the lack of extras on the disk, but the incredible picture and 5.1 remix somewhat made up for it.  If you've already got Battle of Britain on DVD, you'll probably be content with it.  But if you really want to go that extra mile in terms of picture and sound, then Blu-Ray is where its at.

Related posts:

1. Battle of Britain (1969)
2. The Battle of El-Alamein (1968)
3. Battle of the Bulge (1965)
4. Where Eagles Dare (1969)
5. The Bridge at Remagen (1969)