Tonight We Raid Calais

The Germans are manufacturing anti-tank gizmos in Picardy, upriver from Calais. John Sutton is sent there to somehow mark the factory so that when the RAF is bombing the stuffing out of Calais, some can take a side trip and destroy the widget plant. It goes pretty well. He meets Lee J. Cobb, whose wife is Beulah Bondi and daughter Annabelle, a typical French family. He impersonates the son of the family.... but somehow the nasty Nazis find out about him, arrest the family. Sutton has largely disappeared from the screen by this point, turned into a Maguffin, so the Germans get the increasingly dimwitted Annabelle to track them down for them.

It's actually a pretty good script, with lots of moving parts, even if Lee J. Cobb is as French as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan can be. It's clearly no more than a programmer; it lacks even the recognizable, dilapidated star fronting a Fox B movie. Director John Brahm keeps up the pace, though, and Lucien Ballard uses a lot of side lighting toincrease the drama, resulting in a good movie.