Operation Crossbow (1965) on Netflix
British Intelligence learns that Germany is building rocket weapons. Lt. John Curtis and two engineers take the identities of dead men and are sent to infiltrate the German rocket works.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.6/106,312 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Winston Churchill worries about reports of a German flying bomb and asks Duncan Sandys to look into them. Scientific adviser Professor Lindemann is skeptical, but reconnaissance and intelligence persuade Sandys that the weapons are real, and Bomber Command strikes the rocket site at Peenemunde. Germany shifts production to an underground factory and works toward the more powerful V-2, recruiting engineers from across occupied Europe. British intelligence sees a chance to get inside, and selects three volunteers, an American, a Dutchman and a Briton, all engineers fluent in German or Dutch. Trained in haste, they are handed the papers of dead men and parachute into occupied Europe. Lt. John Curtis takes the identity of Erik van Ostamgen, and Nora, the wife of that dead engineer, comes looking for her husband at the hotel.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Operation Crossbow (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sophia Loren was put into the film to help sell tickets, courtesy of her husband Carlo Ponti, who produced it. Despite her lead billing she only appears in the hotel sequence.
- George Peppard took the part because MGM held his contract and refused to release him until he made this film. He then signed a fresh deal with the studio for one film a year for three years, starting with Crossbow.
- The German rocket works were built as the largest sets ever put up at MGM British studios, with stages 6 and 7 knocked together into a single set of 30,000 square feet.
- Director Michael Anderson said he researched the film like an FBI man on a murder case, flying to the United States, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany because the story follows the Nazi effort to get the V rockets flying as closely as the Allied effort to bring them down.
- Anderson insisted the German characters speak subtitled German rather than accented English. Paul Henreid argued against it and wanted heavily accented English instead; the approach was judged not to have worked, and many of Henreid's scenes were cut.
- Wernher von Braun, the man who actually designed and developed the V-2 rocket, is nowhere in the film, his later role with the US military and NASA having led to the Saturn V that carried the Apollo missions to the Moon.
SPOILER
Shots of the rocket factory being bombed were recycled years later by Battlestar Galactica, which used them for the interior of a burning spacecraft.
