Ill Met By Moonlight

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last September, and it's taken me a while for me to get around to all of his movies that I put on the DVR. But we're getting close to the end of them, with one that I haven't mentioned yet being the World War II movie Ill Met By Moonlight. (TCM had it on the schedule as Night Ambush, but that was the title on the original American relese and, according to Wikipedia, the original US release was cut by about 10 minutes. The print TCM ran was the running time of the British version, and had the title card Ill Met By Moonlight.)

A bit of opening narration tells us how Crete is an ancient island in the Mediterranean Sea, but that in World War II it was occupied by the Nazis. Some of the Cretans joined the underground, but they were also joined by some other islanders, those being from the island of Britain. One of the Brits is a man named Maj. Patrick Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde). Fermor was a real pesron, as was W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), who wrote the book on which the movie was based. Fermor is also known by the code name Filedem. He could speak Greek, well enough to fool the Nazis, although he believes he's got enough of an accent that it would give the game away if the Nazis' Greek collaborators heard him.

Fermor tells Moss about German general Kreipe (Marius Goring), who is the head of the German paratroopers stationed on the island, presumably for running operations all over the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the British who were still in control of Egypt at the time. Fermor has heard that the plan is to ambush Kreipe, kidnapping him and taking him to a cove where a small British ship is set to anchor, taking Kreipe to Egypt. It sounds like a daft plan but then there were a lot of odd schemes that actually did happen during the war. And this is one of them.

In any movie, there is a buildup to the actual operation, as the people carrying it out prepare a meticulous plan. In Ill Met By Moonlight, however, that planning stage seems a bit shorter compared to some other movies in the war movie, or the heist genres. Eventually, the time comes for the operation. The kidnapping seems to go OK, but then they have to get him out of the mountains to where they're supposed to rendezvous with the ship. There are a ton of Nazis looking for Kreipe. And he's got an injured arm to boot, making the operation more complicated.

Ill Met By Moonlight was the final film together for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and unfortunately it's not quite as good as their earlier works. To be fair, however, many of their earlier collaborations are widely considered outstanding films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or The Red Shoes. Ill Met By Moonlight is competent enough, but something about it feels like it could have been better. I can't help but wonder whether Powel and Pressburger didn't have as much of a budget as they would have liked.

Not that Ill Met By Moonlight is a bad movie by any means; it's just that it's another of those movies that isn't as good as it might have been.