Triple Cross

The ghost of Bond is fairly obvious here. Plummer as the real life safe cracker Eddy Chapman is suitably suave and charming and Yul Brynner is his normal stiff martinet (with added monocle)and Romi Schneider is "okay" (the love scenes are mostly a dud and show little chemistry between Romi and Chris). The production design is pretty good, lots of authentic uniforms and arms, plus plenty of genuine WW2 trucks and cars, the naughty Nazis are a tad stereotypical, but the conference scenes in the Paris hotel are well produced. Perhaps an aircraft buff can identify the twin engined plane used in several sequences, it certainly didn't look German! Overall an entertaining way of passing the time with few phony heroics.

ok, it has its flaws...and it's too long but nevermind that. 'fantastique histoire..' features a stellar international cast with christopher plummer playing the amoral eddie chapman playing the enemies against each other. it's dialogue and style is quite 'tongue-in-the-cheek', quite humorous at times. one of the more light-headed yet very entertaining WW2/spy-movies. definitely worth seeing, but don't take it too seriously.

These international films were big in the '60s, and Triple Cross is no exception. It stars Christopher Plummer, Romy Schneider, Trevor Howard, Yul Brynner, Gert Frobe, and Claudine Auger.

Triple Cross is loosely based on the exploits of Eddie Chapman, a successful thief who becomes an agent for the Germans and then an agent for the English, though he keeps working for the Germans.

The story is even more fascinating because it's true, but somehow, the film falls flat. Instead of being on the edge of your seat, you relax on the couch. Its pace was somewhat slow, the editing jumpy, and the film is short on action.

Christopher Plummer is a wonderful actor, but one gets the feeling that Eddie Chapman was scrappier and lower class than he's portrayed here. The beautiful Romy Schneider is wasted.

The film is directed by Terence Young, responsible for some wonderful films: Wait Until Dark and some James Bond films, and then some not as successful, such as one of the worst films ever made, Bloodline, and another bomb, Mayerling. So one can say he was inconsistent. Unfortunate.

There are apparently two books on Chapman which are probably more interesting.

Fascinating thriller of espionage and how to survive the most impossible circumstances by simply collaborating with any criminal and make him trust you, even if he doesn't. This is no James Bond entertainment but bloody war and a true one, and Eddie Chapman existed for real and managed to trick his way through the war by selling his soul to any devil that offered a price. He was doomed from the beginning and would have passed the entire war in jail for burglary on an advanced scale if he hadn't offered himself as a spy for the Germans. There it all began.

The main character of the drama however is not Chapman/Christopher Plummer but Yul Brunner as his main employer in Germany, the Baron von Grunen, who has no illusions about the war and admits defeat when there is one. Gert Frobe is another, an honest policeman who survives by his honesty and sticking to it, even when it could be argued away. Romy Schneider is the one woman of some realism who also admits defeat and recognizes a fatal farewell and accepts it even when there is one too many. All actors are good but none outstanding, because a complicated story like this admits no stars, and the grim reality and circumstances of the intrigue play of a war like this lets no star shine through. Only in the end, after the war, when Christopher Plummer finally is able to relax at a pub home in London there is finally room for an ego when it has got through it all alive and kicking after all, – but it took many difficult twists and turns to get there.

Triple Cross tells the story of professional thief Eddie Chapman who worked as a double agent for the Germans and the British during World War II. He's charmingly played by Christopher Plummer who was at the height of his career with The Sound of Music on the horizon for him.

Chapman was some piece of work and he was only able to accomplish this whole thing by dint of the fact that he was operating on the Channel islands when World War II broke out. By that time he'd eschewed opening safes by cracking combinations, he was using controlled amounts of gelignite in his work.

Sent to prison on the Isle of Jersey, Plummer is there when the Germans take over those islands and promptly offers his services to the Nazis. After taking him up on the offer despite the stern objections of Gert Frobe, Plummer gets an assignment back in the United Kingdom. Of course upon landing there he promptly offers his services to the British and they take him up on it as well.

I love to watch Christopher Plummer on screen. He's so suave and professional in everything he does whether it's the Duke of Wellington in the film Waterloo, to Baron Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, to even the villainous hypocritical reverend in Dragnet. He's never anything, but at his best for his audience.

His handlers at the British and German ends are Trevor Howard and Yul Brynner. Howard is in the stiff upper lip tradition of his country and Brynner provides an air of melancholia for his part. It ends in tragedy for him as he's part of the bomb plot to kill Hitler in 1944.

By the way it is just that somehow Plummer was conned biggest of all in the end. To see what I'm talking about by all means catch Triple Cross.