Ill Met by Moonlight
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1957)
Although he’s the main character of Ill Met by Moonlight, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor wasn’t the author of the source material – a memoir by W Stanley Moss of his experiences on occupied Crete during World War II. Both men were members of the Special Operations Executive; Captain Moss was Major Leigh Fermor’s right-hand man in the kidnap, in April 1944, of the commanding officer of the occupying German forces. This Powell and Pressburger film (their last collaboration except for two late-career curiosities[1]) tells the story of that daring escapade. Under cover of darkness, Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde) and Moss (David Oxley), assisted by Cretan resistance fighters, hijack the car of Major General Karl Kreipe (Marius Goring) and abduct its occupant. After driving through several German checkpoints, the kidnappers abandon the car and, with their captive in tow, continue their journey on foot. That journey takes them, in the course of the next few days, through the mountains of Crete, avoiding German search parties as best they can, to a cove on the far side of the island. They’re to rendezvous there with a Royal Navy ship that will transport them, and their prized cargo, to British forces’ Middle East headquarters in Cairo.
There are no subplots to speak of and, while there are setbacks en route, the narrative’s suspense doesn’t depend on numerous twists and turns of the plot. This is generated just as much by Christopher Challis’s black-and-white cinematography, not least the nocturnal sequences, and by Arthur Stevens’s editing. Such twists as there are work well. After planning to make the whole journey at nighttime, Leigh Fermor and Moss come to realise they’ve no option, in order to reach their destination in time, but to walk in daylight, too. Kreipe bribes Niko (Dimitri Andreas), a young Cretan boy accompanying the group, to betray them to a German camp on the beach; in the event, Niko sends Kreipe’s men in the direction of an ambush by resistance partisans. On the point of making contact with the Royal Navy vessel using Morse code, Leigh Fermor and Moss find themselves comically stranded: each wrongly assumed that the other knew how to use Morse.
You might expect, given Michael Powell’s usual order of priorities, to find the people in this adventure story reduced to plot components, but not a bit of it. The ingenious man of action ‘Philedem’[2], as Leigh Fermor is known to the locals (and to the German secret police), is one of Dirk Bogarde’s most charming, satisfying portraits. Bogarde’s speed of movement and delivery, his ability to suggest a quickness of mind that binds those two things, gives Philedem an engaging – to his adversaries infuriating – always-one-step-ahead quality. He may be a senior SOE officer but you feel Leigh Fermor also sees capturing Kreipe and getting him to Cairo as a terrific wheeze. David Oxley is pretty colourless as Stanley Moss but Cyril Cusack and Marius Goring are both effective. No more than you’d expect from Cusack – eccentrically excellent as usual as the younger heroes’ SOE colleague Sandy Rendel, who hasn’t washed for six months but who does know Morse code. Goring seems cartoonish in the early stages but his theatrical interpretation of the proud general gradually wins you over.
Ill Met by Moonlight is genuinely exciting and amusing (the rousing yet humorous music is by Mikis Theodorakis). It had to be in order not to be upstaged by the two-part show BFI put on immediately prior to this screening. Perhaps the BFI staff concerned can’t be expected to recognise the Shakespeare line that gives the Archers’ film its name but you’d think they could at least transcribe it properly: the programme board in the main foyer was showing a 12:40 screening in NFT3 of something called ‘I’ll Met in Moonlight’. (This obviously foxed the voice on the PA system, which announced the doors were now open for … After a brief pause he compromised with ‘Ill Met in Moonlight’.) Thank goodness, then, for curator Jo Botting, who came on stage to announce an unexpected bonus: a Q&A before the film started with two surviving members of the cast. Dimitri Andreas, a young teenager when he made his screen debut as Niko, is eighty now; George Eugeniou, who plays another member of the Cretan resistance, is ninety-two.
Eugeniou is frail and in a wheelchair but still lively enough to deplore what the British film industry did to Michael Powell in the light of Peeping Tom. Andreas, vigorously expressing the same view, was garrulous (and, likeably, admitted as much) but he had plenty of interesting things to say. He described his audition for the role of Niko, which consisted of two questions from Powell: can you whistle and can you handle a goat? Andreas could answer yes and yes and promptly got the part. Southern France stands in for Crete in Ill Met by Moonlight (convincingly, as far as this viewer could tell). Dimitri Andreas explained this was because a series of recent earth tremors on the island itself made it impossible for Powell and Pressburger to get insurance to film on Crete. After the recent ordeal of the Jess Conrad curtain-raiser for The Queen’s Guards, you held your breath for Jo Botting as the Q&A got underway. On this occasion, her elderly guests were a treat – you could tell how much she, too, enjoyed their company.
25 November 2023
[1] They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972)
[2] Or ‘Filedem’ – which means, it seems, ‘my friend Adam’ in Turkish.