Ill Met by Moonlight

P&P's vision narrowed. Their ambitions lowered, until they eventually were making the same films as everybody else.

A serviceable wartime adventure film, featuring some lovely location photography (albeit shot in France, not Crete) and a healthy dose of dry British wit. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but there's nothing remarkable about it either. None of the characters stand out, and the story is pretty routine. It gets you from A to B, keeps your interest in between, then you'll probably forget about it a short while later.

Viewed June 21, 2021. An offbeat wartime thriller by the kings of offbeat wartime thrillers, Powell and Pressburger. Here, they combine the style and tone of their early espionage stories with the earthy, emotionally charged portrayal of the terrain the characters must move through that's so central to films like I Know Where I'm Going! and Black Narcissus. Like a lot of the duo's films, it seems slight at first brush, and then you begin to realize how unusually packed with detail it is,

Although it lacks the drama and momentum typical to the genre, I quite enjoyed it for several reasons: the simple, almost archetypal plot, a range of colorful characters, and finally - a common theme in P&P works - the nostalgic idea of a war as a duel of skills fought by gentlemen of honor.