A routine Italian war movie ("Macaroni Combat"), set in occupied France on the eve of D-Day (but shot on location in Spain). Like most films of its type, it tells the story of a special mission behind enemy lines, carried out by a small group of commandos. In this case, they're asked to blow up a dam that is vital to the German defensive lines.
A local resistance group kills a German officer, lieutenant Hans Müller (Richard Harrison) so his twin brother Richard Benson (played by Richard Harrison as well) can take his place as the commander of the regiment defending the dam. The two twin brothers were born out of a mixed (German-British) marriage, and opted for different 'fatherlands' before the war. It all seems to work out fine until a vicious Nazi officer (played by Klaus Kinski himself) starts getting suspicious and invites Müller's sweetheart Marlène from Berlin to pay a visit to the dam ...
The movie has a good cast of genre movie regulars, but suffers from a lack of means, leading to a production that looks a little anemic compared to most other movies in this subgenre. The last 25 minutes of the movie are quite exciting but there's no action to speak of in the first hour. Director Pradeaux fills the gap with a few tension-filled moments and makes ample use of archive footage to give his film a fake large-scale look. Overall this works quite well, but scale-model used in the final reels looks pretty awful (it doesn't even look like the real dam).
If you don't like war action you can always gaze in admiration at miss Velasquez, one of the most astonishing beauties of European genre cinema of the period.
