The Secret Invasion

This exciting and so-so war movie produced by Gene Corman packs thrills, suspense , plot twists , lots of action sequences and climatic ending , but doesn't quite hang together. Passable warfare film follows a group of convicts soldiers played by all star cast who undergoes assignment against the promise of free pardons. It deals with Major Mace (Stewart Granger) , a tough commandant , he assigns a motley team(Mickey Rooney ,Raf Vallone , Edd Byrnes, Henry Silva, William Campbell) for a dangerous mission whose aim is to free an Italian General (Enzo Fiermonte) . As Stewart Granger training an outfit of rebels and misfits soldiers for a risked assault in Yugoslavia where they contact partisans. The commando must participate in a suicidal mission, the first to wipe a Yugoslavian little town and after an assault over a strong position located on Dubrovnik , Croacia, where is imprisoned the Italian General. Each member of the squad keeps time by rhythmically snapping his fingers so the kidnap can be coordinated . They wreak havoc and kill Nazis to earn the respect of military higher-ups in an exciting final .

This low-budgeted and appropriate runtime warfare film concerns about an incredible lesson of courage set in WWII . This flag-waving film packs frantic thrills, perilous adventures, relentless feats , and buck-loads of explosive action and violence . The noisy action is uniformly well-made, especially deserving of mention the rip-roaring final scenes on the mountains and battle at Dubrovnik city . Fine location cinematography by Arthur Arling and powerful musical score by Hugo Friedhofer . Serious and rough Stewart Granger is good as leader of the motley pack together thwart the the Nazi schemes, as well as the largely secondary cast with particular mention to Henry Silva and Raf Vallone who finish developing a sincere friendship . The film belongs to Commandos sub-genre operating beyond enemy lines whose maximum examples result to be the classics as ¨Dirty dozen¨(Robert Aldrich) , ¨Guns of Navarone¨ (J.L. Thompson) , ¨When eagles dare ¨ (Brian G Hutton), ¨ and ¨Kelly's heroes¨ (Hutton) and other movies that were made during the 60s and 70s regarding wartime adventures about special forces in risked missions .

The motion picture is professionally directed by Roger Corman . After his period realizing poverty-budget horror movies as ¨Swamp woman, The beast with a million of eyes, Attack of the crab monsters , Undead¨, then came the cycle of tales of terror based on Poe as ¨ House of Usher, Pit and pendulum, The raven , Tales of terror, The masque of the red death ¨ , and meanwhile Corman made this passable war film that achieved limited success.

I want to like this more than I do. There's solidly admirable stuff at play in the script by R. Wright Campbell, but there's also opaqueness to the action, an overextended cast of characters that don't make enough of an impression, and a need for action beats whether necessary or not that keep the film from really gelling. It's another one of those films where, had Corman directed the scriptwriting process a bit differently, he might have had a special example of a new genre under his belt (the men on a mission, WWII movie). Instead, everything ends up moving too quickly to really land, only the final actions of one character getting real pathos at all despite not even being the main character. It's a thinner exercise than it should be, but it ends up moderately entertaining overall.

The Allied forces want to send a ragtag team of convicts into Yugoslavia to save an Italian general from imprisonment by the Nazis with the promise of pardons. Leading the group is Major Mace (Stewart Granger) who enlists the help of Italian Roberto Rocca (Raf Vallone), the assassin Durrell (Henry Silva), and Terence Scalon (Mickey Rooney). Where my issues begin with the film is in how none of these characters seem that well-drawn. The one who should be best drawn is Mace who has a secret about his brother having been captured by the Nazis. However, it's shrouded in mystery and quickly forgotten as the film prioritizes an action piece on a boat. It's not Corman's best filmed action sequence, and it's not helped by the fact that everything about everyone is still fairly opaque at this point.

The get to Yugoslavia and settle in. They meet locals who will help them, most notably Mila (Mia Massini), a widow with a baby. Mila and Durrell get paired together while the whole group scout out the castle that houses the German soldiers holding the Italian general hostage. It's the kind of extended section of a film where plans are to be laid out, but nothing seems that important (and very little of what gets covered matters that much in the payoff period). In fact, their whole effort to get into the base ends up being a misdirection to the audience. Frustrating.

They all get captured, and it's the earliest example of "get captured on purpose" that I can think of in movies. They get interrogated one by one, and this is where the thin characterization really hampers the film. One-on-one with a Nazi interrogator, they should be revealing themselves in ways that feed...something about the larger narrative. Usually this would at least be a sense of tension, but in more ambitious films it would be characters feeding an underlying thematic concern. Here, it just feels almost...lackadaisical.

Now, I'm complaining a lot, but the film is...fine. It's functional. The action when it pops up is professional and cleanly filmed. The actors are all doing their jobs decently well. The greatest part of the film is how it looks, though. This might be Corman's best looking, naturalist (I prefer the surrealism of House of Usher) film. I complained while watching Atlas, another film Corman made in Europe, that he used sparely the great outdoor scenery. That's definitely not the case here. He uses as much as he possibly can, giving the film not just a larger budgetary feel, but the colors are sumptuously deep and he gets some great shots of the coast and the village on it. Really, I've always felt that Corman had a visually pleasing filmmaker hiding away in his cheap productions, and it's always a joy when it comes out.

The single best part of the film is in the ending. I don't want to spoil it, but it involves mistaken identity, guilt, and self-sacrifice from a minor character that has a shocking punch. It's not just the choices the character makes, but it's how Corman treats the moment with a shockingly deft hand. It's quiet and then loud in just the right measure to have the full impact. It's really good.

However, while it was enough to get me to perk up by the end, it wasn't enough to save the film as a whole for me. Too much of what came before was thin and honestly a bit confused. If Corman ever made a film that needed an extra 30 minutes to draw things out, it's The Secret Invasion. What he ended up making was mildly entertaining, good looking, and with a solid finish, but it really needed more.

A compendium of cliches, culled from many years of war dramas, and action pictures of other types: there was little that was fresh or original when this film was made, and absolutely nothing of the sort left for a viewer now. The assortment of superficial characters have turned up, singly or jointly, in Westerns, crime stories, prison picture and the like for many decades. Conflict and tension are nowhere in evidence. Battle scenes are noisy and lengthy, if you go for that sort of thing. Where else will you find characters struggling through rugged terrain, wounded, surrounded by explosions and other violence, yet emerging (dead or alive) with every hair in place (see Stewart Granger and Edd Byrnes, in particular)? The scenery is beautiful, in keeping with the astonishingly clean look of a picture about unsavory characters on a grubby mission. Here is a movie that deservedly has been all-but-forgotten.

Although producer/director Roger Corman is known for his "economical" pictures, this World War II actioner belies its $600,000 budget (small by conventional Hollywood standards, but an epic for Corman) and is a well-acted, tightly directed, enjoyable not-quite-so-little picture. The story of a group of misfit Allied soldiers sent to rescue an important Italian general who has been imprisoned by the Nazis, Corman makes good use of the Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, locations and a cast consisting of much better actors then he usually got, especially Mickey Rooney, Stewart Granger and Henry Silva (in an outstanding performance as a taciturn, deadly killer who isn't quite as cold-blooded as he seems). Even Edd Byrnes is far less annoying than usual, and turns in a good job. The action scenes are very well handled, the picture looks much more expensive than its budget would indicate, and it actually garnered some of the best reviews of Corman's career up to that time, and deservedly so. It's a good one (and compares favorably to "The Dirty Dozen," which it preceded). Check it out.

The Secret Invasion (1964)

** (out of 4)

Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney, Edd Byrnes, Henry Silva and William Campbell play convicts who are given an opportunity for parole but to do so they must cross into enemy territory and rescue an Italian general who is being held hostage during WWII. By that description you'd think this Roger Corman film was nothing more than a rip-off of THE DIRTY DOZEN but it would be important to check the dates because this one here was actually released three years before the more popular film. With that said, if THE DIRTY DOZEN was a reworking or remake of this then it was certainly needed because while this film might look good it offers very little else. I was a little surprised to see how flat this movie was but I think it lacks any real emotion and a lot of this is due to the screenplay. The screenplay gives us five characters that we're supposed to care for yet not one of them grows on the viewer to where you care about their situation or really if they live or die in the end. Going on this mission with five characters that you really don't like pretty much stops this film in its tracks. Even worse is that most of them are pretty annoying and this is especially true of the Rooney character. I'm guessing he was meant to give some comedy relief but it's never funny. Silva comes off the best out of the five convicts but it's too bad he wasn't given more screen time. Stewart Granger plays the man leading them into battle but he can't really bring any added excitement to the material. For such a low budget movie the battle scenes at least look very good with the various gunfights and explosions. I also thought the cinematography was impressive but in the end this here just isn't enough to save the film.