George Peppard: Underrated and Underappreciated actor. Though famous in his later career for his role in ‘The A-Team,’ Peppard started off as a supporting, then leading man. He starred opposite Audrey Hepburn in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and Ursula Andress in ‘The Blue Max.’
Second Screening. DVD. Kino Room ( with the carpet still pulled up, so the acoustics are off). I saw this on Encore about three decades ago. I thought it was pretty good. Now, with a thousand pages of history under my belt, I appreciated this fictional tale more.
It is an excellent 60's spy film about the war, a tale that weaves back and forth with a number of standard set ups that prove to turn out in the end. All three men (an American, a Brit, and a Nederlander) are reluctant heroes who are not too interested to drop into Occupied Holland but will if that means it helps move the war forward. All three get into tight situations, with uncertain outcomes. Like any film about the war in this time, there is a lot of focus on collateral damage. Bombs fall on London, but they fall in Holland and Germany, too.
The cast to execute this is the best in 60's casting, though they might seem second tier today. There was a six or seven year period in which it looked like George Peppard was going to rule the world. Bursting through the ceiling courting Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, he kept up a three hour confrontation with James Mason in The Blue Max, an excellent film about the First World War, before doing this. In my childhood, he was most well known for being Hannibal Smith in The A-Team and was thus relegated by most audiences as 'that guy from Breakfast at Tiffany's' which is completely unfair. Not everyone can maintain a star like status forever, not even some actors whom had superstardom for some long stretches like Nick Nolte or even David Carradine. Though it can be true that, as Eldom Terrell says 'the star that shines half as long also shines twice as bright' the fact is this is simply not true with Peppard. Like Josh Brolin, he is a five star actor turning in five star performances in perhaps three and two star films with perhaps equivalent directors and screenwriters (not to mention production department heads). The best way I can convey this is to bring up the fact that his billing in this film is AFTER Sophia Loren, who has little more than a cameo in this film and who is in a grand total of five scenes in half an hour of screen time in ONE room not including a 'pass through.' Sophia Loren was one of the biggest movies stars in the world for twenty years, and in her 60's run was put up against Charleton Heston and Gregory Peck. So that's what I mean when I say it's a shame no one gives Peppard the respect he deserves.
Side note. For Halloween 1983, I donned a grey Member’s Only jacket, spray painted my hair gray, and put tape over the end of a cigar my mom bought me so I could trick-or-treat with my friends as Hannibal Smith. When my Dad, also in the same jacket (though sized for him) took me around in our golf cart, my grade school friends were confused, asking me if I was going that Halloween as my father.
Off to his side is Trevor Howard, playing the very real Professor Lindemann, a German born British aristocrat who became the War Cabinet's primary science advisor during the war. If you're going to have a Brit in your war film from 1950-1970 in Technicolor, it must be Trevor Howard, an outstanding performer who somehow manages to bottle up his machismo so much in his costume that the effeminate upper class Posh Regina accent doesn't matter. John Mills, Jeremy Kemp, and Paul Henreid (YES, that Paul Henreid from Casablanca) round out the cast but the last man standing is an outstanding turnaround performance by Anthony Quayle. Quayle is most known for his David Lean films, but crushes it here as... well I won't tell you.
Criminally underrated actor Barbara Rutting as Pilot Hannah Reitsch
The last bit of genius casting was Barbara Ruttig. Ruttig is a German actor whose credits start in 1952 though she was old enough to act in the NS era. This means something solidly contextual to some of us still talking about Pabst and Wilder and their different chocies during that time (Sirk and Lang are others). Ruttig did some Hollywood work like this, but primarily stayed in West Germany, where she was known for as 'the Joan Crawford of Germany,' a solid pro you could always count on. Ruttig here is fierce and determined as that Fucking Nazi Bitch Hannah Reitsch, who should have been shot, or hung, or fucking strangled to death for her non-stop bullshit, even after the war, of promoting and excusing her bullshit ideology. Reitsch was such a believer, she FLEW INTO Berlin during the battle so she could say good by to the Fuhrer one last time, using the Teirgarten Axis as a runway. That is what you call dedication to a cause. Unfortunately, she survived that battle, and actually was still alive when this film was shot. Ruttig's portrayal; steadfast, unswerving, committed, is what we expect from such human excrement that walked this earth. In this way, in which she drummed up such animosity in me by her pose and intent, I must say Ruttig's performance really punches through. I cared more about her than I did about Loren, and that should say something.
Barbara Rutting as Hannah Reitsch, flanked by Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht generals at Pennemunde, Germany.
A lot of this plot interest derived from controversial historian David Irving publishing an in depth study of the V1 and V2 rocket program in the early sixties. Irving's work, which was legitimate and had solid sources, became the cornerstone of what we know of these programs today. The only thing you could accuse him of in that study was making light or excusing the tens of thousands of slave labor that went into the construction of the testing sites and launching pads. They were technically under Robert Ley working at the behest of Albert Speer and the direction of Werner von Braun. Von Braun, by the way, is not hinted to in this film as he was the head of NASA at the time trying to reach the moon before the decade was out using this very technology. That's right. A real, live Nazi in charge of one of our largest civilian bureaucracies. Not that anyone would really deep dive into this now, but all of Irving's work is suspect since he started denying the Holocaust and then famously lost his lawsuit against Dr. Barbara Lipstadt, who he said had defamed him as a 'denier.' His point was he could not be a 'denier' if no killing had ever happened in the first place. The trial was a shutout. It wasn't even close. Penguin Publishing became the hero of the historical world for fronting the cost of the lawsuit, and Irving couldn't touch a legitimate historical journal for the rest of his long life. He continued to deny the Holocaust in Italy, Canada, and Austria, all countries that had Denial laws and who subsequently deported and barred him.
Disgraced “historian” David Irving started his academic career with an impressive account of the German rocket program during the Second World War and his influential book “Hitler’s War,” which contained small amounts of controversy. When he sued Dr. Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she called him a “Holocaust Denier,” she won in court, proving by the legal standards of British Common Law the Shoah happened, and he was a liar. A racist and anti-Semite, Irving’s own writings and comments were used against him, and he has been unable to publish any academic work outside white supremacist organizations. He has been banned and deported from several countries that have Denier Laws, rare legal tools that limit Free Speech in a democracy.
I only bring this up as peripheral. The Nazi rocket program was not well known in the 60's until Irving's work, and interest in the program was at an all time high. This film was released in April of 1965. To put things into perspective: Winston Churchill died in January of that hear, when the first Gemini capsule circled the Earth on von Braun's rocket. Meanwhile, I live perhaps twenty minutes from the Johnson Space Center where Mission Control is, and Space Center Houston - the interactive museum which acts as the celebration and propaganda arm of NASA. No mention of von Braun, or Reitsch's contribution to our rocket program.
The real Hannah Reisch, unrepentant and lifetime Nazi.
Sometimes movies are not just movies. They don't ever exist in a vacuum. They mean things to some people. For those who lost thier loved ones in caves as slave labor in Germany, or in the bombed out apartment blocks in east London, this film would have hit different. Things that make you go hmmm.