Macaroni Kombat with Hitchcock star Frederick Stafford and BAFTA AWARD nominee Curd Jürgens
In the second half of the 1960s, the Roman film industry increasingly made war films about the events of the Second World War. This is how this Italian-French-German co-production came about by Alberto De Martino (1929-2015), who will also be shooting "The Mafia Boss" and "The Man with Icy Eyes" in the near future, each with GOLDEN GLOBE nominee Antonio Sabato in the lead role. It was produced by Edmondo Amati (1920-2002), and Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai contributed the music.
Two US soldiers (Frederick Stafford as Joe "Sesam" Mortimer and Howard Ross with reddish hair) manage to escape from a Nazi prisoner of war camp in the Netherlands. Their destination is the city headquarters of Amsterdam, where they suspect not only documents important to the war effort, but above all diamonds. They get support from the Dutch resistance (Adolfo Celi as partisan Luc Rollman). They are hunted by Wehrmacht General von Keist (Curd Jürgens, 1915-1982) and the SS henchman Hassler (Helmuth Schneider). The beautiful general's wife Kristina von Keist (the Bond beauty Daniela Bianchi, born in Rome in 1942), who is forced to help by Mortimer because of her past, also plays a crucial role. Of course she can't resist the attraction of the charm stud for long...
This war film, which is well worth seeing, rushes from one action to the next and wants to be both a crime thriller and a comedy. Sometimes that's asking too much, but the breathless actionism ensures that you don't have to think or get bored.
What is interesting is how differentiated the Nazi opponents are shown. While Helmuth Schneider (1920-1972), who was employed at the Deutsches Theater in Göttingen in the early 1950s, plays the brutal Nazi man, Curd Jürgens is portrayed in a much more differentiated and sympathetic manner as the general. The cast, which also includes John Ireland and Michel Constantin, is very exquisite. What's particularly great is the interaction between the main actors: Daniela Bianchi and Curd Jürgens are convincing as a married couple in difficult times, and Frederick Stafford (1928-1979) and Howard Ross (who turned 80 in January 2021) make a good buddy team.
Successful war film with an action-packed plot!
