Ill Met by Moonlight (1958)

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This story, which i found a lot better than everyone else who has posted, is neither the final film from The Archers, or what was left of them, the two principals (see 'They're a Weird Mob' of 1966 and 'The Boy Who Turned Yellow', 1972), nor their worst film, nor Pressburger's alone, as some have claimed. I can't see how this film, which is neither predictable nor unsuspenseful, can be graded lower than the Graf Spree/River Plate disaster, which includes a big scene in it wherein the main characters sit around a table and describe the end of the German warship rather than show what they're describing because the producers ran out of money! THAT is pretty ignominious, compared to this minor little thriller that is, i just remembered, also NOT Dirk Bogarde's worst film! He made a few clunkers in the '60s nowhere near as interesting as this story of the people of Crete, under immense duress due to the presence of the uninvited English army, which was bombarded throughout the story by Germans who were also piling up large numbers of collateral Cretan damage in the process. It's a wonder the Cretans didn't throw the Brits out just to save their own necks. Now, that is the situation underlying the several subplots we see played out, an astonishing one most of the other reviewers seem not to have caught.A far more memorable war romance than most Powell-Pressburger aficianados apparently think it.

even allowing for the fact that Ican take or leave Powell and Pressburger either as a team or working individually this is still pretty ho hum. It's not just that it's yet another true-life adventure torn from the annals of World War II - and boy, were they glad to get rid of it - it's more that it's exciting or engrossing enough to stand out from the others; it's not even that apart from Bogard and a badly miscast Cyril Cusack the only British actors involved are definitely minor league in the shape of Michael Gough and Wolf Morris, it's more that no two actors - and that includes Marius Goring - are able to give the impression that they are in the same film or often in the same scene. All in all it's something of an unintentional Greek tragedy.

This must be the worst film by Powell and Pressburger. Powell describes its failures so well (in his autobiography MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, page 364) that one need not dwell on all the details. The biggest problem is the flip, arch, schoolboy attitude of the characters. Powell complains of Bogarde, and claims that his performance effected the others, but the script and direction can't escape blame. One of the strong moments in the much more interesting non-fiction book this is based on is when the author realizes that it's not just fun and games but all for real when the general's driver gets killed. This moment of realization is not in the film. The travel across the island with the general is much too long, and there is no evolution to the relationship between the general and his captors, which makes it very tedious. Goring is a weak-sister general; perhaps Powell's first choice of Curt Jurgens could have made a difference. But the greatest disappointment is the use of hackneyed dramatic structure, particularly in the final scenes. Whether Powell and Pressburger were good or bad, they were always original. But the sequence where the general tries to bribe the boy is so familiarly presented that every step of its structure is obvious from the start. Ditto the scene when the general leaves his hat, where we're given a clue in the dialogue that the British are on to this ruse. The scene is baldly inserted to give some sense of danger to the trek. Then there's the "I don't know Morse code, do you?" routine at the end, which is lazily resolved by Cusak coming up out of nowhere with no particular explanation. These, and other tired script devices are taken, unadorned, straight out of Saturday matinée westerns. I can forgive the lack of pacing, but not this. The photography is stunning, even though the "on-location" isn't Crete. And despite Powell's disparaging remarks about VistaVision, it really enhances the black and white.

Think of `The Guns of Navarone', but with these differences:(1) The band of adventurers genuinely like each other.(2) Their mission is not to blow anything up. Rather, they plan to kidnap a German general and take him to Cairo. It's a publicity stunt. But it soon ceases to be a MERE publicity stunt: demonstrating German vulnerability may be as important as creating it.(3) We get a good look at Crete - and NOT just because of spectacular scenic photography. We really feel at home on Cretan soil. Michael Powell, who had a talent for finding out-of-the-way composers (he also introduced Ralph Vaughan Williams and Brian Easdale to the cinema) has this time found Mikis Theodorakis, whose score is strongly flavoured but friendly to the ear.With all this, `Ill Met by Moonlight' is an unusual venture by Powell and Pressburger, in that it isn't unusual: it's another World War II mission story, and there have been dozens. It IS more civilised than most. It tells its simple story neatly and cleanly; it's sweet, unpretentious, and disappointing only in that, since it was Powell and Pressburger's last official collaboration, it would have been nice to go out with a bigger bang.The title is a line from `A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Its relevance is not obvious, at any rate not to me. Am I missing something?