Operation Crossbow

One of the movies I watched off my DVR over the weekend was Operation Crossbow.

By 1943, Nazi Germany was losing World War II after defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. Without the ability to win with conventional forces, they were going to have to turn to something unconventional, which would eventually be the V1 and V2 rockets. At the start of the movie, they're doing research at their facillity at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, when British intelligence picks up aerial images of strange activity going on there.

British command back in London tries to figure out what's going on, but experts like Professor Lindemann (Trevor Howard) disagree with more political men like Duncan Sandys (Richard Johnson) who wants to bomb Peenemünde. Eventually, Sandys' views prevail, and the British divert some bombing runs toward the facility at Peenemünde. It causes damage, but also causes another problem for Britain when the Nazis decide they're going to move as much of their research underground, and make mobile launching platforms for the V1 and V2.

The only way the British are going to be able to figure out what the Nazis are doing is to get first-hand information out of the Nazi facility, which is going to be difficult, since it's not as if the British can get a hold of anyone there what with the war going on. Instead, they're going to have to send in spies who can play the role of engineers, which considering that they need people with real scientific experience (otherwise their lack of knowledge will be discovered even more quickly than Paul Newman's in Torn Curtain) as well as a damn good command of the German language. Eventually, the British assign three men: Lt. Curtis (George Peppard), Capt. Bradley (Jeremy Kemp), and Henshaw (Tom Courtenay) to parachute into Belgium and from there, get themselves hired at the the Nazis' underground facility.

Now, in order to do all this, they have to take on the identities of real people from occupied countries who have died but whose deaths won't be noticed by the Nazis what with all the confusion going on. Since these are real people, that poses its own set of problems, starting when a woman (Sophia Loren) shows up at the hotel where Lt. Curtis is, and claims to be the wife of the man Curtis is impersonating. Henshaw's man, meanwhile, is wanted for murder in Germany.

Two of the men do get into the underground Nazi facility for the climax, although even then it's not so straightforward since one of them has to work as a janitor since his academic credentials aren't quite clear. But they're able to discover that the Nazis are trying to come up with a weapon that can reach New York (I don't know if the Nazis ever seriously tried that), forcing the British and Americans to act quickly.

Operation Crossbow is surprisingly subdued for a 1960s World War II movie. A lot of the movies in the genre have a lot more action, but this one is rather slower developing until the climax. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with that, just that it's different than what you might expect. Also, some of the characters have unexpected story arcs, which is actually a bit refreshing. There's a solid, if not great, movie lying beneath the surface of Operation Crossbow.