SUICIDE MISSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 21

SUICIDE MISSION

(North Sea Films-Columbia) G Cert. F you are making a film on a shoestring (as the economists put it), the shoestring should be long enough to allow you reasonable freedom of movement. Having too little money can sometimes be almost as much of a handicap to the film-maker as having too much, but it would seem that when North Sea Films embarked on Suicide Mission they’d got the ships, they’d got the men, and they’d got just enough money, too. And by Jingo, they (or more precisely their director, the New Zealander Michael Forlong) didn’t do at all badly with them. In fact, Mr Forlong did remarkably well. Suicide Mission, which is a faithful abridgement of David Howarth’s best-seller, The Shetland Bus, is admittedly not on the scale of The Cruel Sea, and it does not attempt to probe deeply into the personalities of the tough, taciturn Norsemen who fought sub-Arctic storms through the long North Sea winters to keep the Norwegian resistance armed and supplied. But it’s as good as any of the other R.N. semi-documentaries of the war at sea, and a lot better than some-more convincing than Cockleshell Heroes, say, and more worthwhile than The Sea Shall Not Have Them. I'd go farther-I would say that the storm at sea in Suicide Mission is a more exciting and a more authentic seascape that you will find in any of these others-The Cruel Sea not excepted, That alone is a fair measure of achievement for an old boy of the National Film Unit. That the authentic atmosphere is an indirect consequence of a measure of budgetary austerity detracts not one iota from the credit due to the director. Mr Forlong had apparently no large-scale studio tanks (perhaps no large-scale studio) in which he could mock-up sequences in reasonable comfort and under controlled conditions, To photograph a storm at sea he had to go to sea in a storm-and in a fishingboat at that. But as the film eloquently demonstrates, he flinched at nothing to get the effects he desired, and what we see is a North Sea storm from zero alti-tude-great grey-bearded rollers laced with foam breaking over the bulwarks, slopping decks being squeegeed by sheer wind pressure, the jar and stamp of the little diesel, the horizontal lash of rain and spray. There are not, you might think, many camere-angles aboard a 70foot fishing-boat, but Mr Forlong has got all of them, and each adds its quota

> ; of meaning to the picture. No one who sees this record will doubt that on the Shetland bus-route it was, as David Howarth put it, a wholetime job merely to keep alive. For a star, the film has Leif Larsen, one of the wartime skippers on the busroute, and a number of others from the sea-borne section of the Norwegian "underground" (as well as a sprinkling of actors) also take part, most of them competently. The film has its conventional excitements, too- brushes with quislings and hair’s-breadth escapes from Nazi security forces. But the battles with wind and sea and winter darkness are the most exciting of all.