Operation Crossbow (1965)
This fast-paced, intense action thriller makes better use of its big cast than your typical all-star production. It plugs its characters into the story with smooth logic and always with an eye on moving the narrative forward with satisfying efficiency. The film is loosely based on a real World War II incident where a group of British officers worked to uncover a German plot to manufacture an extremely deadly kind of rocket. The appealing ensemble includes a quartet of great English actors, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Tom Courtenay, and Richard Johnson, stars George Peppard as a highly-educated undercover agent, and features Sophia Loren in a small part (much smaller than the cover/poster art would have you believe) as the wife of the deceased lieutenant he is impersonating.
It’s a rousing action flick with plenty of suspense, though it may be a shade brutal for more sensitive classic film fans.
Special features include the vintage featurette A Look Back at Crossbow and a theatrical trailer.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
Harry Belafonte is lively and charismatic as a Pennsylvania coal miner who is trapped underground by the nuclear holocaust. When he surfaces to a world without people, he makes his way to New York City, looking for signs of life and a sustainable way of living. Belafonte is appealing in his early scenes, where he sings, shouts, and pleads with the universe to find him just one living soul. He’s just short of having the chops to really make this solo performance shine, but he holds his own pretty well for a third of the film.
When Belafonte finds a survivor (Inger Stevens) in NYC, the unwritten rules of society emerge again as they form a bond, but keep to the norms of race and gender. Their closeness is imperiled by the appearance of another man, this one white (Mel Ferrer). It is assumed that he will be the one to help potentially the last remaining woman repopulate the earth, though even in those times it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing a man as unappealing as Ferrer over Belafonte.
The film is most fascinating when Belafonte is on his own, struggling against a stunning backdrop of isolated settings. While his friendly arrangement with Stevens is interesting to observe, there are diminishing returns each time a new person is added and life become increasingly more conventional. Though the film didn’t have the big emotional effect on me that it seemed to be aiming for, I enjoyed it.
A trailer for the film is included on the disc as a special feature.
Many thanks to Warner Archive for providing copies of the films for review. To order, visitThe Warner Archive Collection.
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