I saw this film once about 15yrs ago, and have just seen it for the second time.
The problem going in is that it’s up against history. We focus, from the point of view of the villains mainly, on this plot to assassinate Churchill. Unfortunately, we know this didn’t happen to Churchill so we know this mission is doomed to fail from the outset. Unless you add a time-travel element to this story, in which someone goes back in time to assassinate Churchill and then someone else goes back to stop the assassination, there’s really no suspense. The Day Of The Jackal suffers from the same problem. They try to shock the audience at the end, with Captain Clark believing for a minute that Steiner has actually succeeded in his mission, but we know from history that this can’t be the case, so the audience reaction is not “oh my god he’s killed Churchill” so much as, “hang on, that can’t be right!”
Still, if you can put that aside, there’s a lot of good elements in this film. To be fair to the would-be assassins, their plan is only foiled by the most fantastic stroke of luck, one of them accidentally dying while saving the life of a child. Up until that point, there is a strong vibe of “nothing can possibly go wrong” - although of course you know something has to.
The music by Lalo Schiffrin is outstanding, and I recognised immediately the hand that penned the score for one of the two Musketeers films from 1973-4 - they were scored by two different composers, The Three Musketeers was scored by Michel Legrand, while Schiffrin scored the second half of the story, i.e. The Four Musketeers, and the two scores are remarkably close in style so I couldn’t be certain which of them it was scoring this until I saw the credit about a minute or two into the film.
There are some great lines, and the interplay between the German officers is good - Anthony Quayle and Donald Pleasance both playing real-life figures, we all know who Himmler was, but also Admiral Canaris was the chief of German intelligence during WW2. I like the way that the plan is initially conceived as humouring the Fuhrer, but elements fall into place to make it suddenly seem plausible to Colonel Radl to make a genuine attempt.
The cast are pretty decent too, Michael Caine here is a far cry from any of his other famous roles. His second-in-command is played by Sven Bertil Taube, who I know from his starring role in “Puppet On A Chain”, one of the more faithful film adaptions of an Alistair MacLean novel. Jenny Agutter is famous mainly for The Railway Children, but also appeared in Logan’s Run alongside Michael York, and an episode of Red Dwarf in the 1990s. Anthony Quayle I know from a couple of other WW2 films - The Guns Of Navarone, which we discussed on here a while back, and The Battle Of The River Plate, which was based on real historical events, he played the commodore in overall command of the four British ships - but also he was in Alfred Hitchcock’s true-life thriller The Wrong Man as the lawyer. Donald Pleasance of course needs no introduction, from Blofeld to The Great Escape, not to mention the 1970s TV movie of The Count Of Monte Cristo. And Jean Marsh is another name I know from a Hitchcock film, 1972’s Frenzy. Not one of his best, but still…
So yes, this film has its moments, but the concept is iffy going in. It’s good but it’s built on a flawed premise.
