writers_reign This was the first full screenplay credit - albeit shared with Richard Maibaim - for Nobby Clearke aka Bryan Forbes following an 'additional dialogue' mention on Alan Ladd's The Black Knight and essentially it's a Boy's Own Paper yarn based on events in World War Two. Once again the usual suspects are wheeled out to support Jose Ferrer and Trevor Howard, i.e. Vic Maddern, Bernard Lodge et al. It adheres like the limpets it features to the tried and trusted formula; ask for volunteers, weed out the demicks, show the rest in training, then the 'mission'. Basically what you see is what you get though as 'action' films go this is more than a tad insipid. Yana, a popular vocalist in the fifties, who began a career just as real singing was giving way to shouting off-key, has one song and one scene which serves to take your mind off the one-trick pony screenplay.

deschreiber The reviewers here so far like this film very much but seem to have various kinds of sentimental attachments to it. I don't have any--no memories of seeing it when I was young, no family, friends or acquaintances involved in the mission, no external notions from reading about it. I just watched it as a general moviegoer from the early 21st century. In my opinion The Cockleshell heroes has worn badly over the years.The first part, covering the selection of the participants and their training, has very little information in it--a tiny bit about limpet mines, a scene of soldiers climbing rock cliffs (no such landscape shows up later in the mission), perhaps one potentially interesting challenge forcing the men to use their wits to move around the countryside, but more close-order drilling than anything. Apart from the two officers and one soldier who goes AWOL to beat up a man who's been having an affair with his wife while he's away, there is almost nothing to distinguish one character from another. And there is no acting. The little tension between two officers leads only to a few moments of the two exchanging their points of view. Jose Ferrer delivers pretty much all his lines in the same tone of voice: it's a nice voice, it would be great narrating a documentary on some serious subject, but it has no emotional inflection in this movie.But what really spoils this long first section of the movie is the abundance of "cute" vignettes. A parachutist lands in cow manure, a hitchhiker gets a ride with a ridiculous fast-talking matron, the near-naked men run past a group of nuns. Tired, old tropes even for 1955, and far, far too many of them.Once the mission begins there is almost no dialogue, mostly scenes of men padding in their kayaks (called "canoes" in the movie). It's pretty dull stuff, and the director obviously thought music would be needed to keep audiences interested. But what awful music! On and on it goes, a symphony orchestra playing meaningless, vaguely military-sounding riffs non-stop, not in the least adapted to what's happening at the moment on the screen, just mindless orchestral noise that never stops. After a while I actually turned off the sound on my television to escape from the never-ending assault on my ears. And-- this is incredible-- during one supposed scene of deep thoughtfulness, when after a night of drinking an older officer is alone in a board room telling the sad story of his life to another officer, the same nonsensical orchestral tooting and shrilling continues ridiculously from beginning to end. It really should go down as one of the worst uses of music ever in the history of film making.As for action scenes, there's not much and not presented with any suspense. The climax, with explosions, is depicted with a few models in a studio.It's really terrible writing, terrible directing and an absence of acting.

dusan-22 Nice and entertaining war movie made or influenced by the Hollywood war film school of the 50s. Soft made army life and war fighting and dying adapted to the eye of the watcher of that time. Beautiful and everlasting colors of the Technicolor war film typical for war epic movie which this film definitely isn't. Good and saturated film composition, typical gags for the time of filming are pretty much watchable today. Imaginative dose of sarcasm that tends to launch Hollywood humor of that era in this UK film suits the whole idea pretty nice. Very realistic depiction of the action itself without exaggeration which is almost impossible to see in the US movies on the same topic even today. All in all, cute WWII film, especially recommended to the WWII buffs. 6 out of 10.

NineLivesBurra I loved this film. My father was a RM Commando and served during WWII. He knew most of the men chosen to carry out this mission. It follows the training and the mission of some volunteers who really didn't know what they were getting themselves into. The resultant camaraderie is poignantly shown.It was not an easy mission and every one of the men knew there was little chance of them returning. Their job was to plant mines onto the hulls of German warships in France. They were, if successful to be picked up by the French resistance and secreted safely home. Only one of the original two-man crews survived. The rest were all captured and shot by the Germans.My father always had a tear in his eye at the end of the movie as all the men were reunited, if only on screen.