Dir: Cavalcanti | Scr: John Dighton, Diana Morgan, & Angus MacPhail | Story: Graham Greene | Ph: Wilkie Cooper | Prod: Michael Balcon | Mus: William Walton | Ed: Sidney Cole | AD: Tom Morahan | Snd: Eric Williams | Cast: Leslie Banks, C.V. France, Valerie Taylor, Marie Lohr, Harry Fowler, Elizabeth Allan, Frank Lawton, Thora Hird, Muriel George, Patricia Hayes, Mervyn Johns
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Middle-class, middle-aged middle-England shows Gerry what for, in Cavalcanti’s blackly comic wartime thriller. When a regiment of British soldiers is billeted upon a small, sleepy village, none of its residents thinks twice about it. However, it soon becomes apparent that they are in fact a gang of German spies, here to help facilitate the impending Nazi invasion. Of course, the plucky Brits risk life and limb to get word out to the outside world, but struggle to do so against the inscrutable force of the damned Bosche’s underhanded tactics. What, in 1942, must have been a rather hard-hitting, nightmarish film, today, with enough distance from the events that surrounded it, has become something more akin to an easy-going romp. Enjoyable, then, but hardly earthshattering.
