MartinHafer
During WWII, Hollywood made hundreds of films aimed at solidifying the public's support for the war. Some of these were extremely well made while others often made the Japanese or Germans seem semi-human and rather stupid. These less well made and less realistic films often were, in spire of themselves, quite entertaining...but also very obvious in their aims. When I saw "Secret Mission" I realized that the British, too, could make ridiculously unrealistic propaganda films....and while the Nazis aren't quite as cartoonish as some of Hollywood's Nazis, they were incredibly stupid...so stupid you wonder how they ever took over most of Europe!!The story involves some British spies as well as one French one (James Mason of all people) who sneak into France in order to survey the area before an upcoming invasion. The Nazis are uniformly dim...having very lax security and falling for pretty much every lame attempt at subterfuge! The Germans are SO dumb that it really takes away from the movie...and doesn't show how efficiently evil they really were!So is it any good? Well, it's not terrible...not that this is a glowing endorsement! Overall, despite some very fine actors (such as MIchael Redgrave, Herbert Lom and Roland Carver), a relatively dull offering...one that is watchable but not much more.
Leofwine_draca
SECRET MISSION is a routinely-plotted WW2 propaganda movie, made in Britain and set in occupied France. The plot is about a hodge podge of British spies and French resistance members who enter France in order to find out information about the enemy's local resources so that a secret invasion might take place.This is one of those films which offers up a little bit of everything. There's romance here, some humour, suspense, and action too for the gung-ho crowd. What I liked most about it was the fact that the heroic characters have greater depth than normal by genre standards, so you end up caring about their plight. James Mason in particular stands out as a sympathetic fellow. The film starts off a bit slow but gets better and better as it goes on, building to a truly satisfying climax.
max von meyerling
I'm sure that viewed during the war it was taken seriously but viewed today, with a critical eye, and I don't mean an aesthetic eye, its absurdity is what is called camp. It was only watching this film that I realized that the British TV series 'allo! 'allo! (1982-1992) was a broad parody. The central characters are two veddy veddy British chaps in trench coats wandering around in and out of the woods. Always in their trench coats. There's the cafe run by a Cockney in a beret always at odds with his wife. All we need is for the local flick to drop by and say "Good moaning". Even though people took this seriously at the time it boggles the mind to think people could really believe espionagewas actually conducted this way. For fans of the TV series this is a must not miss. I just wonder how stoned Croft and Lloyd were after seeing this film on TV 30+ years after having seen it in a West End cinema and realizing how absurd it all was and how they didn't notice 30 years before.
robert-temple-1
What a low level things sometimes fell to during the War! To think that such a worthless exercise as this could even be contemplated, much less filmed! James Mason is supposed to be a Frenchman named Raoul, but his French accent is something a ten year-old in a school play would find embarrassing. Thank goodness he dies before the end, none too soon! Michael Wilding is even more ridiculous. He plays someone who owns a cafe in Normandy, but he speaks with a Cockney accent and acts like a clown. As for Roland Culver, he ambles through this film as if he were on a golfing holiday, occasionally wrinkling his brow in order to suggest he may have thought of something, and once in a while uttering a platitude to remind us that this is a talkie (or perhaps to wake the audience up). What passes for a plot is about some jolly chaps going off to Normandy from Britain, to be beastly to the Germans and find out how to win the war by discovering where some things are which might be blown up, dontcha know. Their idea of hiding from the Germans is to leap behind a false bush and leave their legs showing. The dunderheads in helmets who rush by with fixed bayonets are unable to see legs showing behind false bushes, so that's all right, then. This film would disgrace the word 'travesty', if I were to attempt to use it, so I will use the word 'rubbish' instead.
AD
