Ill Met By Moonlight [Night Ambush] **** (1957, Dirk Bogarde, Marius Goring, David Oxley) – Classic Movie Review 776

Michael Powell’s 1957 film Ill Met By Moonlight [Night Ambush] with his long-term writing-producing-directing partner Emeric Pressburger is a stirring, old-style war adventure, telling a rattling good yarn, set in Crete in 1944.

In the story, adapted from W. Stanley Moss’s Wartime Diary in Crete, partisans on Crete, led by British officers, plan to kidnap the island’s German commander from under the nose of his army and smuggle him to Cairo to shame the occupying Germans, dodging an intense air and land search.

Ill Met By Moonlight is hugely boosted by rousing performances from Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring as the dashing British officer Major Paddy Leigh-Fermor and the German General Karl Kreipe he captures on Crete to take to Cairo.

Other considerable assets in the movie are a fine cast of supporting players, Christopher Challis’s atmospheric black-and-white widescreen cinematography, Mikis Theodorakis’s vigorous score, Alex Vetchinsky’s eye-catching production designs and the tense, committed work on the direction.

It may be a surprisingly conventional, old-fashioned style of film from the audacious Powell and Pressburger, below the standard of their classic work, but it is very entertaining and worthwhile nonetheless.

Christopher Lee as German officer at dentist’s.

David Oxley as Captain W Stanley Moss MC, Cyril Cusack, John Cairney, Laurence Payne, Wolfe Morris, Michael Gough as Andoni Zoidakis, Christopher Lee as German officer at dentist’s, Roland Bartrop [Rowland Bartrop], Brian Worth, Paul Stassino, Dimitri Andreas, George Eugeniou, Adeeb Assaly, Theo Moreas, Takis Frangofinos, Peter Augustine, John Houseman, Phyllis Houseman, Andreas Malandrinos and David McCallum are also in the cast.

Michael Gough as Andoni Zoidakis and Marius Goring as the German General Karl Kreipe.

Powell and Pressburger’s screenplay is based on the book Ill Met By Moonlight: The Wartime Diary in Crete of W Stanley Moss about a real-life incident in World War Two. The title is a line from William Shakespeare’s comedy play A Midsummer Night’s Dream but its relevance is not obvious. ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania’ is the Fairy King Oberon’s first line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Major Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO OBE is also known to the Cretans and the German Secret Police as PHILEDEM.

Christopher Challis, who died on 31 May 2012, aged 93, worked on more of the great British writing-directing team’s films than any other cinematographer. His finest achievement was on their The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 776

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