SKI TROOP ATTACK. The Filmgroup, 1960. Michael Forest, Frank Wolff, Wally Campo, Richard Sinatra, James Hoffman. Screenwriter: Charles B. Griffith. Director: Roger Corman.

   What’s better: a bloated high budget war film that reaches for aesthetic and narrative greatness, but completely misses the mark or a decidedly downscale production that doesn’t aspire for greatness, but provides the viewer with a decent enough story and some well choreographed combat sequences?

   I ask because the latter is how I’d describe Roger Corman’s Ski Troop Attack, a movie that is by no means an outstanding combat film, but one, thanks to screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, with just enough realistic sounding dialogue to make it a perfectly watchable low budget charmer.

   Filmed in South Dakota over the course of ten days, Ski Troop Attack follows the exploits of a group of American soldiers behind enemy lines in snowbound Nazi Germany.

   On skis, the men scout out the area and eventually make their way to a railroad bridge that they intend to destroy. Leading the group is the by the book (of course!) Lt. Factor (Michael Forest) who repeatedly clashes with the hot headed Sgt. Potter (a nearly perfectly cast Frank Wolff).

   Joining them for the mission are the Southern good old boy Pvt. Herman Grammelsbacher (Richard Sinatra) and the ethnic Yankee Pvt. Ed Ciccola (Wally Campo). There’s tension among the men, of course, but none of it rises to the level of actual deep animosity. It’s more of a friendly sort, exacerbated by wartime. In some sense, what makes Ski Troop Attack watchable is that it is at its core a buddy film.

   That said, the film is unmistakably low budget, with no big special effects or gigantic set pieces. But at a running time just shy of 70 minutes, the film nevertheless sort of works as it was surely intended: as temporary escapism. Look for scene in which a completely incongruous jazz score by Fred Katz plays in the background as three of the American soldiers line the railway bridge with explosives. It’s so creatively bizarre that it actually makes this quirky film more valuable to posterity than it naturally had any right to be.

JOHN BUCHAN – The Man From the Norlands. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1936. First published in the UK as Island of Sheep by Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1936. Reprinted many times since.

   This is the last of the five books in the Richard Hannay series that began with The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Third Hostage and this, with many of the characters save for Hannay appearing in The Courts of the Morning, which figures in this book. It comes relatively late in author John Buchan’s career. Only a few more novels would follow it, but in it he shows no loss of the skills that made him the master of the thriller/adventure novel or ‘shocker’ as he preferred to call them.

   I have written about Buchan extensively in an earlier review of The Three Hostages for anyone interested in his extraordinary life of service and creativity. Here I’ll settle on discussing the final adventure of his creation Richard Hannay.

   It opens with Sir Richard Hannay, who we have not seen since the events in The Three Hostages, living in retirement on his estate, Fosse, with his wife Mary and fourteen year old son Peter John. Though the bond between father and son is strong, Peter John remains a bit of a mystery to the robust somewhat unimaginative elder Hannay (he was never meant for any kind of schoolboy, for talk about ‘playing the game’ and the ‘team spirit’ and ‘the honour of the old House’ simply made him sick), and a good deal of the novel deals with coming of age and relations between fathers and sons, real and surrogate. It also deals with a theme never far from Buchan’s mind, or that of anyone brought up in the late Victorian age and coming of age in the Edwardian period, the subject of atavism.

   Much of the best popular literature of the Victorian/Edwardian era deals with the atavistic urge whether it be Stevenson’s physically schizophrenic doctor and his ape-like unconscious, Doyle’s demon hound, Stoker’s vampire count, Burrough’s savage Ape Man, or Rider Haggard’s embodiment of the anima, Ayesha. Here, the hold the past has on one man under siege is part and parcel of the story.

   The man from the Norlands, or Northlands, meaning Denmark in this book, is Mr.James Smith, a slightly foreign gentleman with very good English who is staying nearby and has a certain air about him (he was a hunted man, in desperate terror of some pursuer and lying very low). It is Sandy Clanroyden, Lord Clanroyden, Hannay’s old pal and fellow adventurer (Greenmantle on, and hero of The Courts of the Morning), who is Buchan’s stand in for T. E. Lawrence and Aubrey Herbert, who first clues him to Smith’s identity recalling a man they both knew earlier, a Danish adventurer named Marius Haraldson. Then from another friend who also knew Haraldson in the adventurous old days in Africa, Lombard, he learns of Haraldson’s son, Valdemar, and his danger.

   The names are familiar enough to Hannay, but Troth died at the hands of his old friend Peter Pienarr back in South Africa, and the names are those from the older Haraldson’s days in South Africa. The miscreant in this case in Troth’s son, a crooked solicitor, with “an eye like a gunman” who has been making vague threats against Haraldson tryin to blackmail him over some claim against his father Troth claims his father had. When Hannay finally meets Haraldson and learns he is Smith he hears the whole story about the Island of Sheep where old Haraldson made his home, and the viable threat Troth, Albius, and Barralty pose to the fortune Haraldson made in Africa and Asia and the mysterious treasure which they covet:

   Hannay was pledged to help the older Haraldson and debts run deep. After checking in with Macgillvary of the Yard for a run down on Troth and Barralty, and a warning he’s too old for this sort of adventuring, he hides Haraldson out at Fosse, his estate where Peter John is missing a term of school after having his appendix out.

   Haraldsen and Peter John become friends, but then while Sandy Clanroyden comes to visit they discover they are being watched, and Clanroyden spots a man he knows, Jacques D’Ingraville, a French ace who was involved in the action of The Courts of the Morning, as a mercenary in a Latin American revolution in the fictional country of Olfia. It’s a significant lot of villains Haraldson is facing, and D’Ingraville is the worst of them.

   Following Sandy’s advice they decamp Fosse for the wilds of Scotland and Sandy Clanroyden’s estate there, Laverlaw, where they add Haraldson’s thirteen year old daughter, Anna, to the group to be safe after a near miss. Sandy then explains the stakes to them:

   The action now switches to Haraldson’s Island of Sheep, where Sandy’s bloody plan is set in motion, to let D’Ingraville and his bloody handed band come to them and end the threat to Haraldson and his daughter once and for all, and as Sandy says of his personal debt with the Frenchman, ‘I’m going to join him on your island, and I think that one or the other of us won’t leave it.’

   Now with the issue clear at hand the siege begins. Peter John and Anna will prove their mettle on their own and bring a much needed rescue with them, and I think the handling of Anna disproves the old line that Buchan could not write women, Haraldson will reclaim his Nordic heritage turned from timid scholar to berserker believing his daughter lost, and a good bloody time is had by all in the rousing finish which again emphasizes the atavistic theme of the book with the arrival of the rescue led by Peter John and Anna, the ancient Viking Grind, as the fishermen are known who once came to the Island of Sheep to pay tribute to the Haraldson family.

   If Man from the Norlands is not the classic the earlier Hannay books are it is still a rousing adventure thriller filled with incident and Buchan’s glorious way of describing weather. action, chase, and the wilds. The suspense is steady, the odds high, and the chances desperate, and that is all you can ask of any thriller. It provides a splendid final outing for Hannay, and it is only a shame we never get to see Peter John in action on his own in later books. The American edition of the book even had a dust wrapper by the magnificent N. C. Wyeth.

   Of course the attitudes of the book are dated, and though Buchan is much less given to that sort of nonsense than the other Clubland writers, H. C. ‘Sapper’ McNeile and Dornford Yates being the primary ones, it still must be faced. There is ample evidence Buchan recanted many of his own earlier statements, and he did revise his works late in life, but he is too good a writer to have his characters speak falsely, and Hannay is, after all, a rough colonial South African. And, like all Buchan novels you may want to soak in a warm tub and relax when you finish, because Buchan is the most exhausting of adventure writers seldom pausing in the relentless movement and incident to let you breathe.

   But the father of the modern spy novel here lets out all the stops in a first rate adventure with just the right mix of mystery, suspense, and action. The opening may be a bit slow for readers not used to storytelling from the past, but once Buchan hooks you his hold is powerful. The mystery of the treasure also has a satisfying irony to it for both villains and heroes. Few series characters make their final bow in a book this good, and the climax when Haraldson reclaims his Viking heritage is blood and thunder at its most glorious and a prime example of Buchan’s gifts as a storyteller par excellence. It is also an elegaic work in that there hangs over it a sense from Buchan and from the character of Richard Hannay that this is the end of an era, the last of the great adventures.

   As Lombard, a character who was pledged to the elder Haraldson, but had settled into a soft life and was drawn by Hannay back into a life of adventure, says late in the book: ‘The Norlands are a spiritual place which you won’t find on any map. Every man must discover his own Island of Sheep. You and Clanroyden have found yours, and I’m going to find mine.’

   Buchan, the man and writer always sought his own Island of Sheep, and in a sense found it in duty and not peace. It is a theme he returns to in his next to last book, the even more elegaic Edward Leithen adventure Sick Heart River, and which dates back to his political novel Lodge in the Wilderness. It is fitting that in their last adventure Richard Hannay and Sandy Clanroyden have finally found their Island of Sheep. It is fine place to say goodbye to them.

CALLING DR. DEATH. Universal Pictures, 1943. Lon Chaney [Jr.], Patricia Morison, J. Carrol Naish, David Bruce, Ramsay Ames, Fay Helm. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

   This is the first in a series of six films based on the very popular 1940s radio program, Inner Sanctum Mystery, all of them starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Unfortunately it’s a perfectly ordinary murder mystery, with none of macabre overtones that I remember of the radio series.

   I’m also not sure that Lon Chaney was the right person to cast as the star of all six — not based on his role in this one. Can you see Lon Chaney as a noted neurologist who uses hypnotism as one of ways he helps his patients? I tried and I just couldn’t do it, no matter how nicely he talked, softly and eloquently and dressed up in a suit.

   As far as the story is concerned, it turns out that even noted neurologists can have marital problems, and when his errant wife turns up dead, he’s an obvious suspect. His alibi? He has none. What’s worse, he has a total blackout for the time of her death. Although another man, his wife’s lover, is accused of the crime, he is hounded by a dogged police inspector (J. Carrol Naish), who does not believe the official version of the case.

   What can Dr. Steele do but find the real murderer himself, aided by his lovely assistant (Patricia Morison)? Don’t forget that Dr. Steele is a master hypnotist. Can he hypnotize himself? Well, of course he can.

   The problem is not the relatively hokey plot. It’s the fact the real killer is obvious from reel one onward. No surprise ending for this one, alas. I’ve always been a big fan of the radio series, since I was eight years old, but this first film I found disappointing.

SKYJACKED. MGM, 1972. Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, James Brolin, Claude Akins, Jeanne Crain, Susan Dey, Roosevelt Grier, Mariette Hartley, Walter Pidgeon, Ken Swofford, Leslie Uggams. Based on the novel Hijacked by David Harper. Director: John Guillermin.

   Sometimes films with all-star casts, no matter how stellar, end up falling a bit flat. That’s the case with Skyjacked, a Hollywood disaster film about a deranged American soldier (James Brolin) suffering from post-traumatic stress who hijacks an American airliner.

   That’s not to say that there aren’t some genuinely tense moments in the movie, or that Charlton Heston doesn’t give a solid, eminently believable performance as the airplane’s captain. It’s just that, despite the presence of veteran actors and actresses such as Brolin, Yvette Mimieux, Walter Pidgeon, and Claude Akins, the whole production ends up feeling rather languid, as if all the characters were going through the motions, behaving in the most stereotypical manner possible. (See, for instance, the pregnant woman who goes into labor mid-hijacking, and the laid back African-American jazz musician who ends up seated next to the overwrought hijacker).

   From what I can tell, however, Skyjacked was the first major Hollywood production where an airline hijacking was central to the plot. In that sense, the movie was the template for things to come. Unfortunately, it’s now all but impossible to watch this John Guillermin-directed work without one’s mind drifting and thinking about Airplane (1980), the Paramount comedy that successfully mocked and played homage to the numerous airline disaster movies such as this one that Hollywood churned out during the 1970s.

HOLLY ROTH – Too Many Doctors. Random House, hardcover, 1962. Avon, paperback, no date stated.

   As the few of you who read my reviews know, I am infamous for my dubious entries in categories. But since Dr. Owings says, albeit late in the novel, that traveling by ship is a vacation before his new assignment in Hong Kong, I am placing this novel in the holiday category.

   Shortly after the M. S. Tilburg sailed from England for its various ports of call, Elizabeth Smith falls — or was she pushed? — down a flight of deck stairs, suffering various injuries, including a concussion and amnesia. Neurosurgeon Max Owings, who may be fleeing England because of an accusation that he refused to treat a little girl, is asked to consult in the case.

   Meanwhile, back in England, a psychiatrist has been murdered, the ship’s former doctor who died en route to England has been found to be full of poison, and another dead man with a stethoscope in his pocket has been fished out of the Thames. The Tilburg’s present doctor is too good looking by half and not quite competent.

   Reluctantly is how I started this novel. Amnesia is one of my least favorite subjects in mysteries. Roth, however, is a delightful stylist who also depicts interesting and amusing characters. I wasn’t well pleased with the conclusion, but it didn’t spoil my reading experience.

Bibliographic Note:   Bill didn’t mention this in his review, but the detective who is assigned this case is Inspector Medford, presumably of Scotland Yard. The reason he should be noted is that he appeared in one earlier novel, that being Shadow of a Lady (Simon & Schuster, 1957).

THE WHITE GORILLA. Fraser & Merrick, 1945. Ray Corrigan, Lorrain Miller, Charles King and Francis Ford. Written, produced & directed by Harry L. Fraser.

   Dammit, I felt like watching a Killer Ape movie, and this time it was The White Gorilla, made in 1945 and 1927. No, that’s not two versions, it’s actually one movie made nearly twenty years apart.

   To better understand The White Gorilla you need to know something about its auteur, Harry L. Fraser, who also worked under the names Arthur Borris, Wayne Carter, Harry P. Christ, Harry S. Christ, Harry C. Crist, Harry P. Crist, Harry Crist, Miller Easton, Weston Edwards, Harry Frazer, Clint Johnson, Harry O. Jones, Harry Jones, Timothy Munro, Monroe Talbot, Munro Talbot, Victor von Resarf and Edward Weston. Those who profess to enjoy the films of Ed Wood need to take a look at Fraser’s oeuvre and recognize him as the spiritual father of bad movies. Fraser worked in film from the silent days to the 50s with only the faintest glimmer of talent, and most times not even that, but he brought his films in on time and under budget, which kept him gainfully employed at studios where they wanted it done Tuesday.

   According to Fraser’s memoirs (I Went That-a-Way, Scarecrow, 1990) it took three and a half days in 1945 to film White Gorilla, and looking at it today, one can only wonder how he spent three of them. Most of the footage shot in ’45 consists of Ray “Crash” Corrigan sitting around a cardboard mock-up of a Jungle Trading Post telling Charles King and Francis Ford what happened to “the Rogers safari.” Every so often we flash-back to scenes of Crash walking through the woods behind somebody’s back yard, which is supposed to be the African jungle, looking off-screen and seeing… well, whatever grainy old footage of wildlife happened to be handy at the time, including tigers and new world monkeys.

   But it gets better. As Crash continues his story, the movie flash-backs to old footage from Perils of the Jungle, shot in 1927. And this footage is so blatantly mis-matched as to provoke disbelieving laughter from anyone who sees it: the actors are all made-up in classic silent-movie style, with rouged lips and eye shadow, they mime their parts with pre-talkie emphasis, and they seem to move at the wrong speed. So we get these 1945 shots of Ray “Crash” Corrigan standing in somebody’s shrubs, saying voice-over, “…as I watched, the lions surrounded Rogers’ camp…” and then we cut-away to the hilarious footage of what he’s supposedly watching. And of course, since all this was filmed eighteen years earlier, Corrigan can’t interact with anyone in the Rogers safari, so he – or the writer — has to keep coming up with excuses like, “…with no ammunition, I could only watch helplessly while the natives…” or “…with the river between us, I could only watch helplessly while the crocodile…”

   Well, he’s not the only one watching helplessly, but White Gorilla gets better still. Sometimes we cut away from Crash to more recent footage, filmed that same weekend, of someone in a white Gorilla outfit lumbering through the woods. Eventually the guy in the white Gorilla suit runs into someone in a black Gorilla suit and the two mimic fighting for a few minutes. Then the camera simply seems to lose interest and we cut back to Corrigan or to the silent movie for a few chapters till the refrain starts in again: someone in a white Gorilla outfit lumbering through the woods, running into someone in a black Gorilla suit, whereupon the two mimic fighting for a few minutes, till the camera loses interest and…. It’s like being caught in a time warp. I have it on good authority that Crash played at least one of the battling apes, so this film was quite a stretch for him dramatically.

   White Gorilla, in short, is one of those films so jaw-droppingly awful as to be truly fun to watch, and I recommend it to anyone who can approach it in the proper spirit. While we were watching it, I happened to mention to my wife that the writer-director had written a memoir, and she responded, “Because those who forget the past have to repeat it?”

BRETT HALLIDAY – Murder Is My Business. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1945. Dell #184, paperback, mapback edition, no date stated [1947]. Reprinted many times thereafter, including Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2010.

   A post-war adventure for PI Michael Shayne, or if not, it takes very close to the end of the hostilities. It’s a complicated affair, involving possible enemy spying and/or the luring of American soldiers based in the area of El Paso, Texas, across the border into Mexico in order to pump them for secrets they may have picked up in passing. There’s also a silver mine involved, and competing claims of whether a vein has run out of not.

   It also involves a gent that Shayne had run into before, not in a friendly fashion, who is now running for mayor, and a broken love affair involving that same gentleman’s daughter. The plot’s a mixed bag of false trails and two dead bodies, one stripped naked for reasons no man (nor Mike Shayne) can figure out why, plus a gun, a murder weapon, shot three times, although the aforementioned daughter claims she only fired it twice.

   Everything ties together at the end, I believe, but as a plot for an otherwise smoothly written murder mystery, it’s all a bit too much. But take another glance at the words “smoothly written.” As a wordsmith, Brett Halliday in the 1940s was one of the best. Even though Shayne was far off his New Orleans stomping grounds at the time, this one goes down nice and easy.

TRANCERS. Empire Pictures, 1984. Tim Thomerson (Jack Deth), Helen Hunt, Michael Stefani, Art La Fleur, Telma Hopkins, Richard Herd, Anne Seymour. Written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo. Director: Charles Band.

   Opening lines:

   A corny bit of voice-over narration, perhaps, but it does two things exceedingly well. Not only does it set the scene of the story to follow, and but it also sets the tone, that of an overtly tongue-in-cheek sci-fi time travel tale in which Whistler intends to wipe out the City Council in 23rd century Angel City by traveling to the past (1985) and killing off their ancestors. (No, Whistler is not dead.)

   Jack Deth’s job: stop him. And thanks to the help of a punk rock girl named Leena (a very young Helen Hunt) who helps him find his way around Los Angeles, long ago destroyed by The Big One in his world, he does exactly that.

   After watching a short bit of a black and white PI rerun on TV:

   If Trancers was made on a low budget, it doesn’t really show. There are no expensive special effects to drive up costs, most of the players did not require large salaries, and everyday locations were all that were needed. That and a huge sense of wonderfully goofy fun, taking lots of elements from other bigger budget movies and mixing them all together into a film that no one should walk away from with a frown on their face.

PostScript: A cast and crew reunion was held last month in a store in Burbank. I’d have loved to have been there:

LENORE GLEN OFFORD – Clues to Burn. Duell Sloane & Pearce, hardcover, 1942. Mercury Mystery #186, digest paperback, abridged, 1953.

   After the Electrical Dealers’ Convention, at which Bill Hastings discussed Priorities and Coco was an Electrical Widow, the two of them were looking forward to a quiet time on Sally Dudley’s rustic island — coal-oil lamps and outdoor plumbing — in a remote part of Idaho. Little did they know that others would show up to strain the food supply and the festivities and commit murder.

   Having investigated an earlier murder, Coco is eager, for the most part, to find out who killed the woman no one seemed to know. But, as the book’s title states, there are clues to burn — a bloody fingerprint, footprints, cigarette papers, etc. Is the murderer playing games with Coco, or is the shrewd killer planting, if such a thing can be done, red herrings?

   A fine husband-and-wife team in an amusing and richly clued — but which are real? — mystery.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   There was one earlier adventure of Bill and Coco Hastings, that being Murder on Russian Hill (Macrae-Smith, 1938). Besides writing six other mysteries, four of them with mystery writer turned amateur detective Todd McKinnon, Lenore Glen Offord was the mystery book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle for over 30 years.

LISA. 20th Century Fox, 1962. Stephen Boyd, Dolores Hart, Leo McKern, Hugh Griffith, Donald Pleasance, Harry Andrews, Robert Stephens, Marius Goring, Finlay Currie, Geoffrey Keen, Jack Gwillim. Screenplay by Nelson Giddings, based on the novel The Inspector by Jan de Hartog. Directed by Philip Dunne.

   An unusual adventure story/thriller in that despite the tension and real suspense, there are few real villains in the story and many small flawed but human heroes instead.

   The place is Holland in 1946 and Peter Jongman (Stephen Boyd) and Sgt. Stollers (Donald Pleasance) are Dutch policemen tracking a suspected ex-Nazi, Thorens (Marius Goring), who they believe is part of a white slavery ring offering to smuggle refugees to America and Canada but actually selling them to brothels in South America. They intercept Thorens on the boat train to Hoek and London while he is transporting one Lisa Held (Dolores Hart), a concentration camp survivor, and Jongman follows them to London.

   In London Jongman is angered to learn from his policeman friend (Jack Gwillim) that Scotland Yard can do nothing so he confronts Thorens himself. There is a struggle and he knocks Thorens down. Outside the flat he meets Lisa and learns she is a concentration camp survivor Thorens offered to transport to Palestine. Jongman offers to take her back to Amsterdam and she agrees having nowhere else to go, and along the way decides to help her get to Palestine, but once back in Amsterdam he learns from his superior (Geoffrey Keen) that Thorens was killed and he is wanted for questioning and the girl suspected of murder.

   But Jongman has a secret that plagues him and decides to risk everything to get the girl to Palestine, setting off an international manhunt along the way.

   Based on a novel by bestselling novelist Jan de Hartog (The Captain, The Key, etc.) Lisa is unusual in that it concentrates on small human acts of kindness and humanity rather than villains or villainy. There are villains, Thorens played briefly but menacingly by Marius Goring, the unseen, for the most part, Nazis from the war, and a ship of modern pirates they encounter along the way, but they play relatively small roles.

   In a quiet and subtle way Lisa is about kindness and regret in the face of the horrors of the war. Jongman is haunted by having stayed as a policeman during the Occupation and his failure to save a Jewish girl he loved that he had believed the Germans would leave alone if he cooperated. Saving this one girl is his chance at redemption. Lisa herself, a survivor of Nazi medical experiments, is dead inside and has to be reborn through the love that develops between Jongman and herself, and the simple kindness they encounter along the way, Palestine is a dream of new life to her among others wounded as she was since she believes she can’t survive among normal people, but the journey will transform her into a living breathing woman again.

   At each turn the two encounter good people who help them along the way; Jan (Finlay Currie( the river master who knows every smuggler in Holland and has known Jongman since he was a young policeman on the River Police; grumpy old Captain Brandt (Leo McKern), the barge captain who helps smuggle them out of Holland; Sgt. Stollers, too good a policeman not to be ahead of Jongman at every stop and too good a man not to risk is career to save him; Van der Pink (Hugh Griffith) the canny Dutch smuggler in Tangier; Roger Dickens (Robert Stephens) the humane British agent whose job; however much he hates it, is to stop them from entering Palestine and see Jongman goes back to England to face the law; and, Captain Ayoub (Harry Andrews) the Arab gun smuggler who also smuggles Jewish refugees into Palestine.

   It’s a strong movie. The scene where Lisa relives the horror of her ordeal in the medical experimentation camp is powerful stuff, and there are more than enough setbacks and tension to engender suspense while the romance that develops between Jongman and Lisa is affectingly played by Boyd and Hart as simple and human. This was Hart’s last film before she became a nun, and supposedly her favorite of the ones she did.

   This is an intelligent and ultimately heartwarming film about redemption and sacrifice, survival, decency, and hope. It isn’t political and it doesn’t beat the viewer over the head about the horrors that lay behind it, but deals with them in a straight forward manner, both the horrors men can perpetrate upon each other, and the small kindnesses and moments of human decency that sometimes redeem them.

   No one should be surprised McKern, Griffith, and Andrews steal the thing whenever they are on screen. All three were veteran scene stealers by the time this film was made. Boyd was a more than capable leading man whose ability to play a villain as well as a hero enriched his performances, and Hart, in her few roles, had a short but remarkably strong career.

   The film is richly shot in color in Cinemascope on location across Europe and in the Middle East with a rich score by Malcolm Arnold; add to that brief but strong performances by Donald Pleasance, Robert Stephens, Finlay Currie, and Marius Goring, and Lisa is a strong and affecting film that does exactly what author Jan de Hartog intended of his novel, to give people hope in the face of the horrors of the past.