The gang starts off in good spirits, convinced that the job will succeed and they’ll all come out of it alive and well. But once they get going, all sorts of obstacles present themselves, the men argue and fall out among each other as their fears and weaknesses are exposed. The job, in a fashion, is completed, although some of the men are killed or captured in the process. Now, comes the second act: the getaway or the getaway as you are hunted down. The gang becomes increasingly desperate and relations among the surviving members become taut as capture or death seems imminent. Finally, you are caught or killed, though perhaps the strongest morally or physically will survive, albeit traumatised, empty, spiritually destroyed.
I say this is a regular plot for a heist film, but it also applies to They Who Dare, a Second World War movie made in 1954, which purports to tell the true story of the joint Greek commando and British Special Boat Section raid on Axis airfields on Rhodes in 1943.
Operation Anglo, as it was known, was led by Captain David Sutherland and its aim was to undermine Axis air dominance of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. In the film, Sutherland is played by Dirk Bogarde, himself a veteran of World War II, a British Army officer, whose experiences – particularly as a liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – left him with a lifelong loathing of Germans.
Lewis Milestone, a legend of Hollywood, who made what is regarded by many as the greatest war film of all time – All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – directed the film.
Yet, despite the auguries all being good, the film is a terrible disappointment and failure. Both Milestone and Bogarde hated the script when it was presented to them and Bogarde says he only agreed to do the movie for the opportunity to work with Milestone, forced out of American because of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and who Bogarde trusted to fix the script.
But the script couldn’t be fixed and Milestone’s attempts to give the film the All Quiet on the Western Front treatment by turning it into an anti-war film, traducing the motives of the Bogarde/Sutherland character and the usefulness of the mission, especially when it was known that the Germans were prone to exact brutal reprisals against the Greek civilian population for acts of resistance or sabotage, are unconvincing.
The film’s portrait of the Greek fighters and guides on the mission with the British commandos is also problematic. Despite Sutherland in his memoir – He Who Dared – heaping praise on the Greeks who he served alongside or aided the British in their operations in the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘They guided us, they fed us, they sheltered us and they died for us. No one in the SBS will ever forget this’ – the film has them as feeble-minded, over-emotional and more of a hindrance than a help to the mission.
Regarding the disappointing outcome of the film and the poor reception it received from critics and audiences – the press dubbed the film How Dare They – this is what Bogarde had to say in his memoir, Snakes and Ladders:
‘He [Milestone] made a cut of his version of the film and flew off to America; the producer made his cut and between the two of them we were a catastrophe. But it had been great fun and marvellous experience. And Millie taught me one of the greatest lessons to be learned in the cinema. “You can make a good script bad; but you can’t ever make a bad script good. Never forget that.” I was to be constantly reminded of his words for years to come. It is a lesson very few have bothered to remember.’