Review by Dennis Marcus
Stars Eric Flynn, Petra Davies, Francis De Wolf, Martin Benson | Written by Brian Clemens
UK certification PG | UK RRP £9.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 70 minutes | Directed by Max Varnel
Possibly the most interesting thing about this film is that Petra Davies, who plays the main protagonist - a French woman by the name of Marie - doesn’t even feature on the cover of the DVD. Not sure what that means, but it is still the most interesting part of this film. At 65 minutes the film is mercifully short, but still has a pondering quality to it as obscenely little happens. This might be just because I’ve been raised in the modern world and expect fast paced tension - but it really feels like they did very little with the hour of my life that they took.
The plot itself we've seen before in many guises. The movie starts with the Germans (the Bosh!) arriving in the small French town of Mereux. Now if you weren’t very historically aware, you would realise that the Germans were very bad indeed due to the funereal music playing on their entrance (on reflection it was a fitting start to this film). The stationing of a German garrison there is clearly very bad news, so the local men swiftly form a resistance group. Their initial attack goes terribly wrong and leads to the eventual public execution of two men. The sister of one of the men (who everybody is at pains to point out is just a boy, though he looks at least 30), is invited to see the local German officer. Upon hearing of her invitation, she is enlisted by the Resistance to use her relationship to feed them information - a precursor of the Romeo agent if you will.
Suddenly the resistance is incredibly successful and it leads to great tension between her and the ‘good’ German officer she spies on, who has of course fallen in love with her. So actually the plot could have lent itself to an interesting study of a whole variety of studies - of the psychology of a romeo agent - of the relationship between the German occupiers and those that were occupied or even of the functioning of the resistance in a small town.
But the film does none of those things, or anything at all in fact that takes it beyond hammy cliché. The accents a reminiscent of a particularly egregious episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo, and the plot is quite frankly farcical. All the men in the town seem to be part of the resistance - yet suspicion never falls on them. The German officer, who does to be fair seem quite dim, doesn’t suspect that telling a French woman about troop movements is a bad idea - not even when those trains are suddenly blown up.
What makes it worse is that it is a bad story badly told and badly rendered - the film quality is poor and the music grating. These are just the melted icing on top of the crumbling cake that is this film. There are so many good war movies out there, I really wouldn’t worry about missing this one - it has nothing of note to make it worth watching.
EXTRAS None