Cinema: Gorilla Warfare

The Secret Invasion. “Achtung!” One misty midnight in the fall of 1943, the glare of a flare illuminates a tiny trawler wallowing off the coast of Yugoslavia. “Wer geht da?” the captain of a German patrol boat bellows in his bullhorn.

To this question, as every well-trained scriptwriter knows, there are four correct replies: 1) Allied commandos and/or Yugoslav partisans; 2) Sophia Loren disguised as a sack of Sicilian melons; 3) The Thing; 4) a gruesome crew of master criminals who have all been promised pardon if they will undertake a fantastically dangerous mission to knock the hit out of Hitler.

It’s No. 4 this time, and that means plenty is going to happen, none of it original. The characters, except for a regulation Blimp (Stewart Granger), are stir-type stereotypes: a bomb-tossing boyo (Mickey Rooney) from the I.R.A., a Little Caesar (Raf Vallone) with eyes that smoke like gun barrels, a twitchy-faced psychopath (Henry Silva) so hipped on homicide that he murders babies when he runs out of adults. What’s more, the plot is a weary old war horse: the villainous heroes, who fight at the start to save their own skins, fight to the finish to save the world for democracy.

Invasion has lots of action, pots of color, shots of angry granite and the golden parapets of old Dubrovnik. But customers too young to remember World War II may come home with a disconcerting suspicion that the people who won it were a bunch of crooks.