Count Five and Die

It takes some time before the action gets going in this film, but when it starts it never ceases to accelerate in intrigue, suspension and drama. Annemarie Duringer is prominetly leading the film by her very suave and susceptible character, most amiable but with an abyss of hidden agenda. Nigel Patrick is perfect as usual, almost too perfect, while Jeffrey Hunter is a bit of an outsider in this game, can't really handle his business nor himself, and he has to pay for it. It's very dark and almost claustrophobic in the insistency on scenes in labyrinthine insides, and only rarely you go out into dark streets för some following or spying or bullets. The title "Count Five and Die" gives away the whole drama - as a spy sent out on a mission you are given a cyanide capsule in case you get caught, and when you swallow it you count to five and die. It's very easy but not really and actually rather complicated, as you don't always reach that capsule in time...

It reminds very much of Anthony Asquith's "Orders to Kill" a few years earlier, it's the same kind of problems of innocence and the wrong people getting caught up in the wrong game, and above all the doom of destiny is there hanging around more people than anyone bargained for.

...but there are no subtitles and the sound is horrendously unclear, so at least I, with poor hearing, can only grasp about a quarter of what's going on. I can tell Nigel is temperamental and fussy, that the broad is hot but probably a Cherman spion, and that J Hunter shifts his mood and personality every 3 minutes -- may be using an egg timer. He gets her prize, and speaking of eggs I am expecting her to go preggers now and complicate the plot, which, when you can't hear what's going on, sounds like it is a planning meeting for a vacuum cleaner manufacturer convention. Why does a Nawzi spy care about vacuum cleaners -- do they use the cannisters for bomb casings?? If only I could hear this damn movie, I might goose the stars to 8. Sadly, yours truly, perplexed and looking for plot spoilers to tell me what is going on, BlueF86

"Count Five and Die" is a very good wartime espionage film. However, I'll be honest, it starts off slowly and only gets interesting later in the movie. Fortunately, it ends quite well and is worth seeing.

In this film, an American (Jeffery Hunter) and Brit (Nigel Patrick) are in charge of a spy mission in which they are to deliberately misdirect the Germans by convincing them that the upcoming invasion of the continent will be in Holland. It all takes place in London and the key is their feeding the false information to Nazi agents in the city.

As I said before, this is a very slow film at the beginning. Fortunately, the picture improves and really becomes quite taut and intelligent towards the end. Not a great film like "The Man Who Never Was" (which covers much of the same material) but well worth your time...and patience.

OSS Major Jeffrey Hunter is seconded to Colonel Nigel Patrick. They seem to be running a film company. In reality they're working on the Normandy invasion. Their unit leaks information like a sieve. It's meant to. They're trying to convince the Germans that the invasion will take place, at least in part, in the Netherlands. If the Germans believe this, they'll station divisions far from the actual invasion. Among the people they think is a German spy is Dutch Annemarie Düringer. Has she caught onto the game they're playing?

Even though the War years kept warning us about German propaganda and German spies -- who seemed to wander about the landscape without anyone noticing what they were doing -- there seems to be little doubt that the British played both games much better. At least some of the claims about German atrocities were not believed because they seemed to be repetitions of what had been said during the Great War. It was only after the war that the exploits of British Intelligence like this and THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS began to surface, and even longer for it to turn out that Ian Fleming was an insane operations runner.

It's a standard but well executed espionage thriller, even though it takes almost a third of its length to start moving.

If I understood correctly from the film's dialogue, when one inserted a cyanide pill in one's mouth to escape torture and avoid spilling the beans, one counted to five and croaked. Alas, reality is different, it takes longer than that and, according to experts, it amounts to an excrutiatingly painful death.

Of course, during WWII spies would carry those capsules as a matter of course and in this case Annemarie Duringer, the beautiful German agent who has infiltrated a joint English-American decoy unit dedicated to providing false info to the Germans about the D-Day invasion, becomes suspicious when she notices that the agents are not being issued with the capsules.

Very good acting from the always reliable Nigel Patrick. Jeffrey Hunter plays the part of a US Army captain who does not trust Patrick, and makes some decisions that ultimately prove very costly, but he is not an actor of Patrick's ability. Rolf Lefebvre, as the chief spy in the German group, also delivers a top grade performance, as does Duringer.

Frankly, this film is entertaining and honest enough that I do not care whether it accurately reflects history. I also find it odd that some regard it as dated. Why? WWII ended in 1945, how could it not become dated if, since then, we have had the Cold War, the independence of many countries, the emergence of widespread terrorism, and many other developments. The clock never stops ticking and change has been constant in these modern times, so I find unfair and even petty this insistence on most old films being "dated".

COUNT FIVE AND DIE rates no masterpiece but, in spite of the low budget, it is a sight better and more faithful to history than the bulk of current CGI-driven movies. 7/10.