FILM REVIEW OF ''MOSQUITO SQUADRON'' (1969)

“633 Squadron” producer Lewis J. Rachmil let “Girl Happy” director Boris Sagal recycle exciting aerial combat footage from “633 Squadron” for his generic World War II thriller “Mosquito Squadron,” (** out of ****) starring David McCallum and Charles Gray. This lackluster epic combines elements of 1964’s “633 Squadron,” principally the plywood built De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bombers, with 1954’s “The Dam Busters,” with a bouncing bomb designed to destroy a top secret German weapons facility. The Germans are developing the V-3 rocket, and British Intelligence has located the site in the French countryside at the Chateau de Charlon. Air Commodore Hufford (Charles Gray of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”) assigns Squadron Leader Quint Munro (David McCallum of “The Great Escape”) to bomb it with special ordinance. This low-budget melodrama set in England and France has very little to recommend it. Again, 90 percent of the shots of Mosquitoes winging their way over enemy country were appropriated from Walter E. Grauman’s classic “633 Squadron.” The prefabricated screenplay by Donald S. Sanford and Joyce Perry antes up one surprise, but everything else is formula served up without verve by Sagal.

Our British heroes are streaking toward their target, a V-2 rocket launching pad, on the French coast as “Mosquito Squadron” opens, using footage from Michael Anderson’s “Operation: Crossbow.” Incidentally, Anderson directed “The Dam Busters,” too. The British manage to destroy the missile launching ramp, but a flight of Messerschmidts jump them and blow Squadron Leader David 'Scotty' Scott (David Buck of “The Mummy’s Shroud”) out of the air. Quint Munro spots no parachute at the crash site and assumes ‘Scotty’ is kaput. Scotty’s death elevates Quint to Squadron Leader. Worse, our protagonist has lost a friend who was as close to him as a brother. Scotty and Quint grew up together because Quint’s parents died and Scotty’s parents raised him. Quint even handed off one of his former girlfriends, Beth (Suzanne Neve of “Bunny Lake Is Missing”), who wound up marrying Scotty. After a reasonable period of mourning, Beth and Quint take long bicycle rides in the country.

Air Commodore Hufford sends Quint off on a reconnaissance mission to photograph the Chateau de Charlon where the British insist that the Germans are working industriously to make a V-3. V-2 rockets are falling on London and wrecking havoc. Hufford shows Quint some film footage of a bomb that bounces on any terrain, no mean feat. In real life, the bomb was the genuine article and was called a ‘Highball’ and had been designed to use on battlewagons like the Tirpitz. Meanwhile, now that the Germans realize the British are interested in their installation at the Chateau, they drop a canister of film which shows that they have gathered British POWs as hostages against any bombing runs. The revelation that Scotty is among those prisoners comes as a quite a shock to Quint. Security prevents him from telling Beth about it. Initially, nobody wants to give the Germans a propaganda coup by killing their own men. Quint devises a way to kill two birds with one stone. Not only will they destroy the laboratory tucked into an underground facility with the ‘Highball’ bomb, but also they will breach the wall at the Chateau so the French Resistance can storm the Chateau. The closest thing to a villain in “Mosquito Squadron” is a German Lieutenant named Schack (Vladek Sheybal of “From Russia with Love”) who suspects that the Allies prisoners are plotting something when they all turn out for mass on a Sunday, especially when some of them aren’t Catholic. The suspicious Sheybal shows his villainy when shoots a Catholic priest with a machine gun. The POWs overpower their guards and fortify themselves in the chapel as the Mosquitoes appear to bomb the premises.

Quint and his Mosquito Squadron destroy the underground facility, but our hero has to crash his plane. Once on the ground, Quint runs into Scotty, but Scotty cannot remember his own identity, and he sacrifices his life heroically by blowing up a German tank with a bazooka after several others have tried and failed. A wounded Quint makes it back to England and reunites with Beth. As it turns out, Beth never learned that her late husband survived the crash only to die in France as a casualty of a combined British & French Resistance operation. There is a subplot about Beth’s younger brother who has to show the film that the Germans have dropped for the benefit of our heroes. When he threatens to spill the beans about Scotty, the authorities lock him up for the duration.

“Mosquito Squadron” qualifies as a hack attempt to cash in on “633 Squadron,” “Operation Cross-Bow,” and “The Dam Busters.” Boris Sagal made a couple of memorable movies and television shows, but “Mosquito Squadron” isn’t among them. Worse, “Mosquito Squadron” was cranked out by Oakmont Productions which ground out several cheapjack World War II thrillers, including another Sagal saga “The One-Thousand Plane Raid”, “The Last Escape,” “Hell Boats,” and “Submarine X-1.” These movies ranked as half-baked epics with neither a shred of atmosphere nor credibility. Sagal has to stage several shots on a studio set, principally the drive in the country that Quint and Beth take in his red roadster to see Scotty’s bereaved parents has our stars seated in an automobile mock-up with scenery back projected behind them. Sagal generates neither suspense nor sense of urgency. The cast walk through their roles like automatons delivering uninspired dialogue written by Sanford who went on to write the equally lackluster “Midway” and Joyce Perry who wrote teleplays for juvenile television shows like “Land of the Lost.” McCallum gets the best line in the movie when Hufford asks him about the odds of the mission succeeding: “About the same as spitting in an Air Commodore's eye from an express train, sir.” In “Mosquito Squadron,” Suzanne Neve and McCallum never generate any chemistry so it is difficult to believe that they love each other. Mind you, it is always a pleasure to watch David McCallum act, but “Mosquito Squadron” gives him very little to do.

FILM REVIEW OF ''RAID ON ROMMEL'' (1971)

Admittedly, Henry Hathaway's "Raid on Rommel" (**1/2 out of ****) isn't the masterpiece that Brian G. Hutton's "Where Eagles Dare" was for Richard Burton, but this low-budget World War II epic about an unlikely British commando unit operating behind Nazi lines in North Africa doesn't qualify as a complete bust. Veteran television writer Richard M. Bluel serves up a predictable but entertaining screenplay for the most part. Sure, better movies about the British North African campaign have been made going back as early as "The Desert Rats of Tobruk" (1944) and then in the 1950s came Hathaway's own "The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel" (1951), followed by Robert Wise's "The Desert Rats" (1953), Nicholas Ray's "Bitter Victory" (1957), Terence Young's "No Time to Die" (1958), Arthur Hiller's "Tobruk" (1967), and one of the very best and most grim: Andre de Toth's "Play Dirty" (1969). "Raid on Rommel" deserves neither Oscars nor special recognition of any kind, but it is an amenable way to spend 99 minutes.


Indeed, "Major Payne" producer Harry M. Tatelman plundered the Universal Studios' stock footage archives for all of the exciting action footage from Hiller's "Tobruk" and "Ride to the Hangman's Tree" editor Gene Palmer seamlessly incorporated it into "Raid on Rommel." I would even argue that the action footage fares better in "Raid on Rommel" than in Hiller's "Tobruk." "Tobruk" was a "Guns of Navarone" clone with Rock Hudson as a Canadian and George Peppard as a German Jew fighting against the Nazis. Mind you, recycling footage in Hollywood is an age-old, time-honored practice. For example, every low-budget caveman or lost continent movie that came out of Hollywood in the 1950s exploited footage from "One Million B.C."


In "Raid on Rommel," Burton is cast as Captain Alex Foster. British Intelligence riddles a Nazi half-track with machine gun fire and Foster climbs into it and drives off into the desert seemingly oblivious as to his destination. Later, a Nazi convoy ferrying sick P.O.W.s discovers Foster and picks him up. Initially, Major Hugh Tarkington (Clinton Greyn of "Robbery") knows that Foster isn't suffering from heat exhaustion, but he warns him that he wants to know his orders. Foster reveals his mission to Tarkington, only to learn that he has stumbled onto the wrong convoy. Instead of seasoned commandos at his disposal, he has the sick and the injured. Boy, is Foster upset and Tarkington isn't inclined to help him. Eventually, Tarkington changes his mind.


Meanwhile, Foster manages to make something of the men at his disposal thanks largely to Sgt. Maj. Allan MacKenzie (John Colios of "Scorpio") and the British overpower their Nazi captors and disguise themselves as the enemy. Talk about improvising! On their way to Tobruk, Foster and MacKenzie give their men a boot camp in firing mortars and rappelling down ropes by slinging them to the sides of the personnel carriers. Along the way, they pick up a civilian and a beautiful woman and use them as a part of their masquerade. Our valiant heroes enter Tobruk, meet Rommel at his headquarters where Foster learns the whereabouts of a fuel depot, and then they blow everything to hell and gone. The scene at Rommel's headquarters is especially neat because Tarkington gets into a polite argument with a cultured Rommel about collecting postage stamps, thereby giving Foster—disguised as a Nazi officer—time to study secret German maps.


No, "Raid on Rommel" is not the most historically accurate World War II film by any stretch of the imagination. However, few films produced about historical events are faithful to history. If you see a movie to get the facts straight, you're a misguided soul. Hollywood doesn't specialize in history lessons; movie makers want to entertain us first and then second strive for accuracy. During the last half of the 20th century, all World War II movies contained historically inaccurate equipment. American 'Cold War' army tanks usually masqueraded as Nazi Tiger Tanks and vintage Navy propeller driven fighters doubled for Japanese Zeroes. As far as that goes, most filmmakers ignored the fact that Nazis spoke German and Hitler's madmen uttered their lines with obvious ersatz accents. These problems became conventions largely because American audiences couldn't speak the foreign dialects and subtitles were confined to foreign art films. "Raid on Rommel" contains one of the most obvious conventions of World War II movies that "Catch-22" changed. During one scene, an Allied P-40 Tomahawk fighter attacks the Nazi convoy that Foster has joined. The enemy manages to hit the fighter and it streaks off, pouring smoke, and crashes behind a sand dune with a fireball explosion rolling heavenward to mark its demise. Of course, the producers no more than the owner of that vintage plane were about to destroy it for this inconsequential movie. In "Catch-22," you actually get to see a plane crash nose first into the side of mountain!



Meanwhile, the significance of "Raid on Rommel" is undoubtedly lost on today's audience. In 1951, Hathaway helmed an ahead-of-its-time World War II biography "The Desert Fox" and portrayed Rommel (James Mason) in sympathetic terms. In fact, Hathaway's portrait of Rommel proved too sympathetic and most film critics scourged Twentieth Century Fox for this depiction. A couple of years later to set the record straight, Mason reprised his role as Rommel in "The Desert Rats" and he was not accorded the sympathy that outraged critics in the Hathaway gem. Read the major reviews of "The Desert Fox" in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times and you will see for yourself that Hathaway stirred up controversy.

Yes, "Raid on Rommel" is a potboiler of sorts, probably memorable to World War II fans more for Hathaway's brief but sympathetic Rommel scene and for—according to one Burton biographer—Burton's sober performance. He didn't drink a drop while he was acting, but then crusty old Henry Hathaway, who never gave any actor a break, probably kept his eye on the Welshman. The performances are standard and one of the most respected Bavarian actors who specialized in playing German officers—Wolfgang Preiss—plays Field Marshal Rommel.