Better title: SCHOOL FOR SABOTEURS, a pretty good description of this WWII mission pic from Ealing Studios that punches above its modest weight. ‘Bully’ leader James Robertson Justice runs a secret unit training ‘unlikely’ types (secretaries; priests; engineers) as spies & sabotage operatives. Normally, ‘over there,’ you’re caught/you’re through. But when a top organization man gets picked up mid-op by Nazi Occupation forces in Belgium, a group of agents (some parachuted in, some already in place & working with local resistance) is sent to get him out. A super cast, including a young Simone Signoret (with a fierce accent in her first English pic); Robert Beatty (a priest who declines the emergency suicide tablet); Jack Warner (unprincipled); John Slater (a French Jew given a new unrecognizable face); Paul Dupuis (the Belgian hometown boy); and so on. Ealing regular Charles Crichton directs, getting some humor into one of his serious projects (Ealing’s signature eccentric comic British style yet to evolve), while favored scripter T.E.B. Clarke keeps us off balance by casually knocking off heroic characters when we least expect it, revealing courage as part timing/part luck-of-the-draw, and finding Quislings hiding in plain sight. Here and there, the film skips steps (from budgetary & running time issues), but this is darn clean filmmaking from all concerned.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Fun to see a very young Gordon Jackson fall hard for Signoret. The way she looks who wouldn’t? But by the end, it’s reciprocated! A tougher swallow than any of the Nazi close calls they get away with.
DOUBLE-BILL: Tough, realistically bleak WWII resistance work from Signoret in Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS/’69, a late to Stateside shores astonishment.
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