Word: crossbows
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Operation Crossbow, shifting to the European front, distorts the facts about an actual wartime crisis to fit a ludicrous tale of espionage. At the outset, the film seeks to establish its authenticity by popping in at 10 Downing Street, where Prime Minister Churchill (Patrick Wymark) asks Duncan Sandys (Richard Johnson) to head Operation Crossbow, an Anglo-American unit assigned to pinpoint and destroy Germany's V-1 buzz-bomb and V-2 rocket projects. Director Michael Anderson sedately re-creates some rather tumultuous sessions of British officialdom in 1943, reducing history to a few thoughtful demurrers from Churchill...
...generate suspense, Crossbow occasionally switches over to the Nazi side. Peenemünde, before the massive allied attack, is a hive of hard-working scientists and tight-lipped SS men, so earnest about perfecting their flying bomb that they put a cockpit in it and sacrifice four brave pilots in trials...
...everyone can safely speak English. He gets help from Innkeeper Lilli Palmer, spends an edgy night with Sophia Loren because he happens to be impersonating her dead husband. Loren's brief role seems little more than a favor to her real-life husband, Carlo Ponti, who is Crossbow's producer...
...that let out the light that serves as a signal to Allied planes. The bombardiers drop in their eggs just in time to abort an intercontinental missile called "the New York rocket," lifting off for parts unknown. In fact, Germany's underground rocket factory was never bombed. Operation Crossbow probably won't be so lucky...
...troupe performed behind a barricade of protective sandbags before armed men with the sound of artillery in the distance, but the only casualty was Jill St. John, who was given a heavy crossbow as a gift. She dropped the ancient weapon on her foot and has been limping since. At Bienhoa Airbase, Hope tried one of his oldest one-liners, explaining to troops why he had come to Viet Nam. "The Defense Department has tried everything else," he said, "so why not me?" Why not, indeed? A headline last week in the New York Herald Tribune said HOPE IN VIET...