Watch Orders to Kill For Free

Powerful

Overrated

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

ORDERS TO KILL looks and feels like a straightforward wartime thriller at the outset. It features Paul Massie (the Canadian actor best known for playing the lead in THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL, a role he no doubt got on the strength of his fine conflicted performance here) as an American agent who is parachuted into occupied France to take down a French traitor whose association with various resistance fighters has seen many of them die.During his early training scenes with the delightfully gruff James Robertson Justice, Massie seems like the ideal man for the job. Things are a little different in the field: he soon finds himself questioning the man's guilt, and ORDERS TO KILL becomes a very different type of film all of a sudden: an intense 'moral dilemma' movie which puts the protagonist and the viewers through the ringer.The only fault I can find with this film is that it's slightly overlong and some of the early scenes drag a little. Otherwise, it's a delight, and a surprisingly mature and brutal effort for the era. Some of the scenes are so suspenseful and disturbing that they're almost unwatchable. An exemplary supporting cast really add to the authenticity of the piece, but the whole thing hangs on Massie's shoulders and he doesn't disappoint; I think it's fair to say that he peaked early in his career and was never better than here. ORDERS TO KILL is a fine thriller without a single action scene in it to distract from the storyline.

I can recommend this little war thriller which has brains and heart behind it. Within the broad theatre of war it focuses on the moral impact of "orders" on a sensitive personality. Production values are good within the scope of the film and there are plenty of clues about the developing issue. We start to have reservations about the main character, who is clearly immature and not suited to the mission he is sent on. His behaviour is inept, but it is not hard to relate to his dilemma. The denouement winds up the story gracefully without weakening the horror of what has occurred, and in a way that the viewer does not expect, dignity is restored to the hero. I had not previously encountered the lead actor who is a little-known Canadian actor. I dislike the way he looks in this, with a neatly combed 1950s blonde quiff on which a ridiculously small beret is perched. He looks about as "French" as a bacon burger. But in a way that fits in with his feeble performance in the role of assassin. The film never goes into an examination of who was responsible for the false intelligence behind the mission. That is where the blame for the fiasco rests. But no doubt this sort of thing occurred and the people in the field never got to find out who was the author of the blunder.

This wartime tale directed by Anthony Asquith confronts full-on the essential moral dilemma of the necessity to commit murder in the cause of war. It does not take place on a battlefield, but in the starker situation of a covert assassination of a man believed to be compromising the Resistance Movement in occupied Paris. The man chosen to kill the suspected person is played by the young actor Paul Massie, aged 26. It was his first credited screen role, and he does an excellent job. For some reason, this highly talented and promising young actor never achieved the prominence in his career which he would seem to have deserved. After 1973, he only worked four times (the last time in 1996), and he died in 2011. The other film for which he will be remembered is SAPPHIRE (1959, see my review). The most powerful performance in this film was delivered by Irene Worth, as the character Léonie. Massie is sent to Paris to kill the suspect man, and Worth is his contact, with whom some very tense scenes indeed transpire. Worth's embittered intensity is very convincing and deeply disturbing. Lillian Gish appears briefly early on in the film as Massie's mother, but it is not a significant part. Eddie Albert is very good as a commanding officer, and James Robertson Justice has immense gravitas and a suitably ominous quality as the man who trains Massie how to kill an individual quietly and quickly by taking off a pair of long socks and turning them into a murder weapon. Leslie French is superb as the unfortunate Marcel Lafitte, who is wrongly suspected of having betrayed the Resistance, whereas he is not only innocent but a gentle, caring soul who loves his family and his cat and would not hurt a fly. The film is based on a novel by the American author Donald Downes, another of whose novels was filmed as THE PIGEON THAT TOOK ROME (1962). This film starts very slowly because Asquith and his writers are so keen to make their moral point that they dwell on the minutiae of Massie's recruitment and training to carry out his assignment. Today that would be sketched in a couple of minutes, but in this film it takes a long time. Once the action gets going, the film becomes very tense indeed, and finally it becomes very grim, as we face the moral dilemma. Asquith was clearly determined to make this film in this way because he was trying to examine the dilemma and drive home its insolubility. In a sense, we could call this fifties film a true existentialist film, in keeping with the prevailing philosophy of that Heidiggerian decade. It explores 'what a man must do' and the 'nausea' following his actions. It bears some resemblance to the concerns of André Malraux, who in the novel MAN'S FATE contemptuously says that anyone who has not killed someone face to face is 'a virgin'. One wonders if Jean-Paul Sartre visited the set, steeped in nausea, and whispered existential doubts into the ear of the director. Much of it is filmed on location in Paris, and there are some very fine and atmospheric location shots. This film evidently meant a great deal to Anthony Asquith, who had a social conscience which he wore somewhat on his sleeve, and we owe him the consideration of listening to his message, which after all is a very worrying one, even if we find it deeply disquieting.

As the Allies are preparing the D-Day invasion, an American bomber pilot (Paul Massie) is recruited to be sent to occupied France to kill a member of the Resistance (Leslie French) who is suspected of supplying the names of fighters to the Germans. Each part of the film, the recruiting, training and the mission itself, is expertly done. There is expert drama in both his recruitment and training under James Robertson Justice, whose expertise in these matters is brilliantly portrayed. The film shows the excellent acting of Eddie Albert who plays an American officer who monitors Massie's training and then his deployment on a night flight to be parachuted into occupied France, where he is to be on his own except for his one contact played by Irene Worth, whose part turns out to be the best one in the film. The title pretty much sums up the dilemma that faces Massie as he's the one ordered to carry out the execution.