THE SECRET INVASION (1964)

Cairo, 1943. Five prisoners from varying locations are brought to Major Stewart Granger, all in handcuffs: an art thief (William Campbell); an IRA demolitions expert (Mickey Rooney); a forger (Edd Byrnes); a man with multiple academic degrees who became an international crime figure (Raf Vallone, pictured); and an assassin for hire (Henry Silva) who was convicted of killing his mistress. All are offered pardons if they will take on a dangerous military mission: sneak into a prison fortress in Dubrovnik and rescue General Quadri, an Italian thought to be in sympathy with the Allies who could get his Fascist troops to turn against the Nazis. They all agree, though early on, Byrnes tries to mastermind an escape at sea which fails. Once in Yugoslavia, they get help from a band of local partisans, including young Spela Rozin (credited as Mia Massini), who uses her newborn child as a way to take suspicion away from her as she assists the men. Just as they're about to tunnel into the fortress from a nearby crypt, they are caught, put in the same prison as Quadri, and interrogated and tortured by the commandant. However, they work out a plan to escape with Quadri, using a system of keeping time by snapping or tapping their fingers once a second to keep track of time. The bust-out works, though on their way to the Italian troops, a couple of the men are killed. Once the survivors reach the Italian troops, they discover that Quadri is already dead, and the man they have is a Nazi. Will their plan be foiled, or can they figure out another way to rally the troops to the Allies?

Roger Corman directed this well-paced, nicely photographed war film; though Corman had a much bigger budget than he'd ever had before, it's still decidedly a B-film but it looks pretty darned good and the motley group of actors works well together. Granger, as usual, seems a bit above it all, and Rooney uses an Irish accent that comes and goes—it feels like in the scenes he had to overdub, he had a stronger brogue than the scenes recorded live. But those are minor quibbles. Strongest is Vallone as the most grounded of the men; Silva's wooden-faced stoicism is an asset here as the assassin described has having "dead eyes" and he getsa good scene in the last half with Rozin that changes the arc of his character. The script, despite a couple of plotholes, is solid, though Vallone is burdened with a notoriously bad line: discussing the freeing of Dubrovnik, he says, "Who will free it from us? And who will free us from ourselves?" There are apparently several similarities between this and The Dirty Dozen, which came out a couple of years later, though I haven't seen that film yet. An enjoyable wartime thriller with a couple of well done battle setpieces, and the location shooting is a plus. [DVD]