Review: Paratrooper/The Red Beret

Concerning the Parachute Regiment in the Second World War, Alan Ladd plays a Canadian training to be a paratrooper with the Brits (Canada being part of the Commonwealth, the film’s cheap way of not earning heat with Ladd’s casting as the hero). He rubs his superiors somewhat the wrong way, and indeed is very cagey about his past. Susan Stephen is cast as the spunky parachute-packer who takes an interest in him. Leo Genn plays his commanding officer, Harry Andrews is a proudly Scottish RSM, Stanley Baker is a reckless instructor who doesn’t take too kindly to Ladd’s showing him up. German actor Anton Diffring appears in a small part as a fellow paratrooper, a strange bit of casting for the usual portrayer of arrogant Nazi villainy.

 

Aside from some of the worst rear-projection work I’ve ever seen in a film, and one dodgy performance from a surprising source, this 1953 Terence Young (“Dr. No”, “From Russia With Love”, “The Jigsaw Man”) WWII flick is reasonably watchable. Ladd and Genn are fine, and there’s some quite good action in the latter half, especially for a B-movie from the early 50s. I also haven’t seen too many films on this particular subject (paratroopers), so there was an interest in that regard.

 

Points off for the following opening disclaimer, one of the worst I’ve encountered; “This story tells of one small part of the war - The story of those men who joined the Parachute Regiment - Men from many different countries and creeds, who were to find themselves one day in a parachute training establishment. Only in the telling and in the spirit of the men themselves do history and fiction meet - even if we dare not show in this film what some of these men did in fact and in real life achieve. For nobody would ever believe it.” I mean talk about a cop-out! Basically, they’re trying to make excuses for the fact that they’ve taken dramatic license, but why draw such attention to it like that?

 

The usually excellent Stanley Baker drastically over-pitches his cameo role, for which he has also been unconvincingly dubbed. I’m not sure if his character was meant to be psychotic or not, but that’s the vibe I was getting from him. He was also set up as being more of a big deal in the film than his character ultimately turned out to be. He’s taken out of the picture rather jarringly. What the hell? Stephen, meanwhile, is alternately dull and positively goofy as the love interest. Diffring’s part is so small he might as well not have bothered. Harry Andrews, in his film debut, plays the kind of barking RSM character he would perfect over the years (most memorably in “The Hill”, wherein he ferociously stole the show from some fine company). It’s not a bad performance like Baker’s is, but he’s a little too campy, I almost expected him to ask anyone if they had any problems with marching UP and DOWN the SQUARE! Except that, unlike in that famed Monty Python sketch, Andrews is attempting to affect a Scottish accent, to not terribly great effect.

 

Overall, this is better than “Hell Below Zero”, the other film I’ve seen from Ladd’s excursion to the UK, but pretty mediocre nonetheless. Ladd would fare better back home the same year, with “Shane”, considered a Western classic. The screenplay is by three people who have done much better work elsewhere: Frank S. Nugent (“The Quiet Man”, “The Searchers”), Sy Bartlett (“The Big Country”, “Twelve O’Clock High”), and Richard Maibaum (Just about every James Bond film from “Dr. No” to “Licence to Kill”), from the book by Hilary St. George Saunders (whose other works had previously been brought to the screen in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound”, for instance). The film is probably most notable for the number of James Bond alumni who worked on this film (some 9 years before “Dr. No”), including the aforementioned Maibaum, producer Albert R. Broccoli, stuntman Bob Simmons and cinematographer Ted Moore (“Dr. No”, “A Man for All Seasons”).

 

Rating: C+