The Secret Invasion

An army major leads a rag-tag band of convicts on a daring mission behind enemy lines. THE DIRTY DOZEN, you ask? No, THE SECRET INVASION, a solid Roger Corman programmer released two years earlier, with a talented cast led by Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney, Raf Vallone, Ed Byrnes, William Campbell and Henry Silva. Far less predictable than DOZEN, this film has some dynamite performances (Byrnes, Rooney and Silva are especially good), great action, and some surprising plot twists. See it!

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.

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.

Roger Corman got his largest budget to date and distribution through United Artists for The Secret Invasion. Even though the story is a combination of The Dirty Dozen and The Guns Of Navarone, it's all delivered in nice style.

Heading the mission is Major Stewart Granger and the time is during those days just before the Allies invaded Italy proper having already landed and occupied Sicily. He gets himself a choice team of criminals of varying kind all with certain specialties. His team includes Raf Vallone, Edd Byrnes, William Campbell, Mickey Rooney, and Henry Silva. With Granger that makes it a half a dozen.

These six are to go into occupied Yugoslavia and kidnap a popular Italian general. Remember at this point in time Mussolini had already been overthrown and the Allies were conducting negotiations with Field Marshal Badoglio to take Italy out of the Axis orbit. Command broke down in the Italian Army and Badoglio dragged his feet somewhat. So this was a move in Yugoslavia where the Italians had considerable troops.

Things didn't quite work out for Granger and the rest of his half dozen no more than they did for the Allies and Badoglio. Still the mission is completed kind of and a few actually survive to tell the tale.

Best in the cast is Mickey Rooney who adopts a nice Irish brogue as he plays an IRA man who's good with explosives. Like the rest he's fighting for a pardon if he gets back from Yugoslavia. He looks like he's having a great old time in the part. Given his last name you'd think the Mick would have played more Irish types in films. But remember he was born Joe Yule, Jr. quite Jewish.

The Secret Invasion will not be one of Roger Corman's cult classics, it had too big a budget for that. Still it's an enjoyable film, war film fans will like it.

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.