COCKLESHELL HEROES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 17

COCKLESHELL HEROES

(Columbia) G Cert. AD (1 thought) snuffing the ozone in the foyer ("This theatre is disinfected daily, etc."), how perfectly splen-did-after all those Halls of Montezuma and things-to feel that the Royal (or real) Marines are going to get a buildup for a change. A couple of hours later I was back on the side-walk in a wave of cash-customers, making the now familiar agonising reappraisal. Was that "one of the most amazing true stories in the history of human courage"? Was it a reasonable portrayal of that corps d’élite beside whom even the Guards are amateurs? That, I felt, was something I would not dare tell to the Marines, however much it deserved to be told. Tell it to the Marines indeed! If I were José Ferrer (who proéuced and directed this mélange of fact, farce and fiction) I wouldn’t dare enter Pompey, not evén disguised as Toulouse-Lautrec. Cockleshell Heroes purports to tell the story of a group of Marine commandos who, using kayak-type canoes and carrying limpet mines, travelled 70 miles up the Gironde to Bordeaux and blew up most of the enemy merchant ships in harbour there. It’s a fair story. What the film lacks is any sustained conviction in-the telling. Indeed, the one convincing element in the show is the expression of disciplined disgust which Trevor Howard is called upon to wear most of the time. It could not have been much trouble to assume. | Howard has the part of a_regular R.M. captain who has to act as administrative officer to Ferrer, a temporary Marine officer with unorthodox ideas. There is some interest in’ the clash of these two (though it is difficult to imagine the circumstance arising quite as the film shows it), but this fruitful source of drama is almost completely overlaid by farcically comic treatment of the initial training of the commandos, and once the conflict is resolved by a quite unconvincing portrayal of the canoe journey. Just as mature abhors a vacuum, and radio abhors silence, so apparently the screen abhors total darkness. at’s understandable. But it’s no excuse for showing the kayak crews paddling up-river and finally setting the Gironde orf fire in conditions of visibility which suggest high noon rather than the small hours. In many ways the Nazis may have been shortsighted, but not that way.