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| They Who Dare | |
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DVD cover
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| Directed by | Lewis Milestone |
| Produced by | Aubrey Baring and Maxwell Setton |
| Written by | Robert Westerby(screenplay) |
| Starring | Dirk Bogarde Denholm Elliott Akim Tamiroff |
| Music by | Robert Gill |
| Cinematography | Wilkie Cooper |
| Edited by | Vladimir Sagovsky |
| Distributed by | British Lion Film Corporation |
Release dates
| 2 February 1954 |
Running time
| 107 mins. |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Box office | £132,074 (UK)[1] |
Similar to his character, Captain Hargreaves, in King & Country (1964), he was called upon to put a wounded soldier out of his misery, a tale recounted in one of his seven volumes of autobiography. While serving with the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit, he took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which he said was akin to "looking into Dante's Inferno".
In one of his autobiographies, he wrote, "At 24, the age I was then, deep shock stays registered forever. An internal tattooing which is removable only by surgery, it cannot be conveniently sponged away by time."
"Power Without Glory"He continued to act on-stage, appearing in the West End in Jean Anouilh's "Point of Departure". While he was praised for his performance, stage acting made him nervous, and as he became more famous, he began to be mobbed by fans. The pressure of the public adulation proved overwhelming, particularly as he suffered from stage fright. He was accosted by crowds of fans at the stage door during the 1955 touring production of "Summertime," and his more enthusiastic admirers even shouted at him during the play. He was to appear in only one more play, the Oxford Playhouse production of "Jezebel," in 1958. He never again took to the boards, despite receiving attractive offers.
He first acted for American expatriate director Joseph Losey in The Sleeping Tiger(1954). Losey, a Communist and self-described Stalinist at the time, had emigrated to England after being blacklisted in Hollywood after he refused to direct The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) at RKO Pictures, which was owned by right-wing multi-millionaire Howard Hughes at the time, and he was accused in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist. The director, like Bogarde, would not find his stride until the early 1960s, and Losey and Bogarde would build their reputations together.
Plot synopsis[edit]
During the Second World War, a group of six Special Boat Servicecommandos, two Greek officers and two local guides, are sent on a mission to destroy two German airfields on Rhodes. Led by Lieutenant Graham (Dirk Bogarde), the party are taken to Rhodes by submarine. They come ashore at night and have to traverse the mountains to reach their targets. At a pre-designated location, the party split and the two groups press on and succeed in their attack on the airfields. However, eight of the group are captured and only two, Lieutenant Graham and Sergeant Corcoran, make it back to the pick-up point where they are rescued by the submarine.
Production[edit]
The film was partly shot on location in Cyprus.
Cast in credits order[edit]
Cast in credits order[edit]
- Dirk Bogarde as Lieut. Graham
- Denholm Elliott as Sgt. Corcoran
- Akim Tamiroff as Captain George One
- Harold Siddons as Lieut. Stevens R.N.
- Eric Pohlmann as Captain Papadapoulos
- William Russell as Lieut. Poole
- Gérard Oury as Captain George Two
- Sam Kydd as Marine Boyd
- Peter Burton as Marine Barrett
- David Peel as Sgt. Evans
- Michael Mellinger as Toplis
- Alec Mango as Patroklis
- Anthea Leigh as Marika
- Eileen Way as Greek woman
- Lisa Gastoni as George Two's girlfriend
- Kay Callard as nightclub singer
- George Sandford as Extra (Uncredited)
Commander Michael St John
Commander Michael St John, who has died aged 93, was involved a dramatic operation on the island of Rhodes when his submarine landed part of a SBS section to raid on German airfields in September 1942; he returned a fortnight later to rescue its two survivors.
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St John’s Traveller spent the intervening period off the Libyan coast, where he sank the 1,245-ton Italian merchant ship Albachiara, before returning to find the Greek island’s hills and shoreline thick with enemy troops, while coastal craft searched the waters. He remained submerged until surprised to see the recognition signal flashed from the shore. Wondering if this could be an ambush, he replied by shining a torch through his periscope, surfaced and entered the bay stern-first, fearing enemy fire at any moment.
He was expecting the men to return in collapsible canoes, and was astonished to hear a stream of basic Anglo-Saxon being shouted out of the darkness. Two naked figures were then hauled from the water over Traveller’s foreplanes: Major “Dinky” Sutherland and Marine John Duggan, who had been hunted, hungry and thirsty, for several days. They had swum a considerable distance before being spotted from Traveller which, as soon as they were recovered, St John crash-dived to avoid a patrol boat speeding into the bay.
While he manoeuvred to avoid a depth charge attack, Sutherland and Duggan were revived with tin mugs of rum. St John recalled that both men were so skeletal that it was difficult to find clothes to fit.
When in 1953 Lewis Milestone directed They Who Dare, Dirk Bogarde reprised Sutherland’s exploits on Rhodes, and Harold Siddons played St John.
Traveller was lost two months after the operation when it was under the temporary command of another officer while St John was in hospital on Malta suffering from dysentery: he never got over the loss of his 70 comrades.
Michael Beauchamp St John was born on May 13 1915, the son of a soldier. He described himself as a mongrel Briton who could trace his ancestry back to the Normans via the longest line of undischarged bankrupts in England. After being brought up between Oxfordshire and Aberdeenshire, he went to Dartmouth in 1929.
St John joined the fleet as a midshipman in the cruiser Dorsetshire just after the Invergordon Mutiny, and served in the Home Fleet and on the South African station before being appointed to the submarine service in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was a junior officer in the submarine Pandora on the China Station, as he recounted in his Tale of Two Rivers (1989). It described his family history and life in the pre-war Navy, when a young man could sign chits for anything, anywhere ashore, and expect to be billed at the end of the month.
When the war began St John was first lieutenant of the elderly training submarine L26; on completing his “perisher” in 1940, he returned to take command of the boat in dry dock during the blitz of Plymouth. After running aground in fog off the Isle of Mull, he was lucky to be exonerated. “We consider this young officer to have benefited from his salutary experience and he is to be congratulated on successfully salvaging his vessel,” pontificated the Admiralty. St John also rescued escaping airmen by rendezvousing at night with a boat in the Brest fishing fleet.
His first war patrol was in Tuna, which fired a full salvo of torpedoes at long range on the battleship Scheer. All missed, leaving St John wondering what his career might have been if they had hit.
At the end of the year St John reconnoitred the coast of Norway and despite blizzards and wildly rolling seas, placed Tuna off Vaagsö as a navigational beacon for Operation Archery, one of the first commando raids under Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s combined operations organisation. The raid took place on December 27 1941, causing significant damage to factories and warehouses, sinking eight ships and feeding Hitler’s paranoia about an invasion of Norway. It also helped divert German surface ships from the North Atlantic convoy routes.
After the loss of Traveller in December 1942, St John took command of the submarine Parthian, in which he was awarded a DSC for bravery and skill in attacking coastal shipping and German warships in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 1945 he commanded Otway and then took Totem to Fremantle, Western Australia, where his war ended.
While returning home across the Pacific the ship was presented with a small totem pole by Micmac Indians in British Columbia. It was said that to sail without the totem pole would result in the loss of the ship, and when the original was stolen another had to be carved quickly. When the Israeli Navy bought the submarine they left the totem pole behind, and Totem was lost with all hands on passage between Gibraltar and Haifa.
St John was set to be promoted captain, but his appointment to command the cruiser Ceylon was cancelled when the Navy was divided into a “wet” and “dry” list. Declaring that he was not going to sit behind a desk, St John left the Navy in 1955 to join National Employment Mutual.
He enjoyed country life, especially shooting, and in retirement recorded more than 100 audio books for the blind.
Recalling late in life the distressing experience of writing to the next of kin of the dead, St John warned that while heroism and comradeship are worthy qualities needed to face danger and conquer fear, succeeding generations would do well to remember that, in his opinion, there was no glory in war.
Michael St John who died on January 23, married, in 1944, Pamela Guinness, only daughter of Sir Arthur Guinness; she survives him with their son and two daughters.
The Purple Heart
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Purple Heart (disambiguation).
| The Purple Heart | |
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Theatrical poster
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| Directed by | Lewis Milestone |
| Produced by | Darryl F. Zanuck |
| Written by | Jerome Cady |
| Based on | story by Darryl F. Zanuck (as Melville Crossman) |
| Starring | Dana Andrews Richard Conte Farley Granger Kevin O'Shea Don "Red" Barry Trudy Marshall |
| Music by | Alfred Newman |
| Cinematography | Arthur C. Miller |
| Edited by | Douglas Biggs |
Production
company | |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release dates
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Running time
| 99 min |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $1,500,000[2] Clive Fisher's obituary in "The Independent" on May 10, 1999, praised Bogarde as "a major figure because, wherever they were made, his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self-portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned, a stylization of his private being, not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British audiences about the tensions of the time, about connivances and cruel respectabilities of England in the Fifties and Sixties." |
The Purple Heart is a 1944 American war film directed by Lewis Milestone. The film stars Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Farley Granger, Don "Red" Barry and Trudy Marshall. Eighteen-year-old Farley Granger had a supporting role.
The Purple Heart is a dramatization of the "show trial" of a number of US airmen by the Japanese during World War II. The film is loosely based on the trial of eight airmen who took part in the April 18, 1942, Doolittle Raid. Three were executed and one died as a POW.[3] This film was the first to deal directly with the treatment of POWs by the Japanese and ran into opposition from the US War Department which was afraid that such films would provoke reprisals from the Japanese.[4]]
Plot[edit]
In April 1942, after a raid on Japan, eight American aircrew made up of the crews from two North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, are captured. Capt. Harvey Ross (Dana Andrews), becomes the leader of the captives. Initially, the men are picked up by a local government official who is a Chinese collaborator in a Wang Jingwei controlled section of China. The Chinese official delivers the Americans to the Imperial Japanese Army to be put on trial at the Shanghai Police Headquarters. Although international observers and correspondents are allowed to witness the trial, the commanding officer, General Mitsubi (Richard Loo) refuses to allow Karl Kappel (Torben Meyer), the Swiss Consul to contact Washington.
At the start of the trial, Lt. Greenbaum (Sam Levene), an attorney in civilian life (CCNY Law 1939), declares the trial is illegal, as the men are in the military service of their country. When the senior officer Captain Ross refuses to answer the demands of the sly General Mitsubi to reveal the location of their aircraft carrier, the general decides to break the men. The airmen endure harsh interrogation and torture from the Japanese guards with Sgt. Jan Skvoznik (Kevin O'Shea) left in a catatonic state with a permanent head twitch. In court, the men see the pitiful state of Skvoznik. Lts. Canelli (Richard Conte) and Vincent (Don "Red" Barry) rush the Japanese general, quickly felled by rifle butts and are returned to their cell. Canelli, an artist suffers a broken right hand and arm. Vincent ends up in a catatonic state much like Skvoznik. Sgt. Clinton (Farley Granger) returns seemingly unharmed, but the Japanese have ruptured his vocal cords, and he is unable to speak. The Japanese have a listening device in the cell when Greenbaum (Sam Levene) repeats what the speechless Clinton writes. If anything happens to Lt. Bayforth (Charles Russell), he will tell all. After being tortured, Bayforth returns with his hands and arms useless, covered in black rubber gloves.
In the face of his captives' unshakable resolve and the realization that the Japanese are doomed to destruction, the sadistic General Mitsubi ultimately chooses to shoot himself. The systematic torture and abuse the airmen endured while in captivity, and their final humiliation of being tried, convicted and executed as war criminals is unveiled to the world.
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