They Who Dare: a heist film gone wrong

Here’s a classic heist movie scenario: a group of disparate men, from varying backgrounds, at different stages of their careers, with complex personal motives, are brought together by a determined, perhaps monomaniacal, leader, whose dedication to the mission he’s devised is challenged by having to keep those under his command in check and focussed on the purpose.

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.’

Ill Met by Moonlight: Crete, Cyprus and foreign occupation

Powell and Pressburger’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) tells the story of the celebrated kidnapping by British SOE officers and Cretan resistance fighters of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete in 1944. 

Ill Met by Moonlight has many faults and Michael Powell – the greatest British film-maker, who, along with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger made a string of brilliant films, often on Second World War themes, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Matter of Life and Death, The Battle of the River Plate – in the second volume of his autobiography Million Dollar Movie describes the film as ‘bad’ and ‘our greatest failure’.

Powell berates the script, the casting – he thought Dirk Bogarde ‘a picture-postcard hero in fancy dress’, far too whimsical to play Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor (though, apparently, Leigh-Fermor liked Bogarde’s depiction of him as a latter-day Lord Byron) – the absence of women in the film, the location (he couldn’t shoot in Crete or Cyprus so ended up having to make the film on the French-Italian frontier), the decision to shoot in black and white rather than colour, his own direction, and laments the outcome which, he says, was like a Ministry of Information documentary rather than a piece of entertainment.

‘Nobody was cultivating what my friend Robert De Niro describes as an “attitude”. The script was underwritten and weak on action, the gags were unoriginal, and the surprises not surprising… The direction concentrated so much on creating a Greek atmosphere that the director had no time, or invention, for anything else. The performances of the principals were atrocious. Marius Goring as General Kreipe wouldn’t have scared a rabbit; David Oxley as Captain Stanley Moss was the rabbit; while as for Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, it’s a wonder that Paddy didn’t sue both Dirk and me.’

Still, Powell says, he was pleased that he managed to convey the patriotism, bravery, fierceness and fidelity of the Cretan rebels. It’s a fair enough point – even if at times the film does patronise the Cretans and they can come across as a little childish and overly susceptible to their emotions.

The way the British like to portray themselves in war films of this period is also interesting and is perhaps why the elegant Bogarde is such a mainstay in them. In Ill Met by Moonlight, Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss are shown as unfailingly gracious, brave without being foolhardy, restrained, cool, calm, understated, self-deprecating, eccentric, humorous in the face of adversity, humane, cunning – all qualities lacking in the rigid, overbearing, brutal, bombastic, boastful Germans. A great deal is made in the film that even though Moss and Leigh-Fermor are officers in the elite special services SOE, they are essentially amateurs, men who joined up to serve from ordinary life, without pretensions to be professional soldiers, in love with glory and conflict.

It’s also quite odd to note that the film was made in 1957 at the height of the EOKA struggle in Cyprus to end British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece. The conflict in Cyprus is why the film could not be made in Cyprus or Crete, much to Powell’s disappointment. The film makes clear what the Cretans are heroically fighting for – to rid themselves of foreign occupation – and either Powell and Pressburger were completely oblivious that they were, in fact, making a good argument on behalf of the Cypriots and against Britain’s occupation of the island or they were quite conscious of the metaphor they were putting forward: of a Greek island, straining under the yoke of foreign rule, and the patriotic locals taking to the mountains to shake it off.

As a film, as a work of art and entertainment, Ill Met by Moonlight is flawed, but it was a success at the box office and you have to wonder if the depiction of Greeks fighting for their freedom against foreign occupation was lost on the British audience. No doubt, they would’ve balked at any suggestion that the British occupation of Cyprus smacked of the Nazi occupation of Crete. Certainly, the British public had no sympathy for Cypriots taking up arms against Britain, attacking their soldiers with guns and bombs. Nor would we expect such understanding. Invariably, the general public will support their boys, no matter the virtues of the cause they’re fighting for or against.