User Reviews

Stellar performances by Peter Falk and Susan Strasberg in this WW2 drama of a suicide mission by four convicts parachuted into Germany to do a heist of important enemy plans. Falk falls for Strasberg. Simon Oakland is also very good.

This episode, the first I watch for this TV show, is actually a war drama. Four convicts are sent behind enemy lines, in Germany, during WW2, for a mysterious mission. Four criminals as "candidates" for a kind of suicide mission. One of them is a notorious safe cracker. The mission may change the course of war. It sounds familiar, I know. We have nothing exceptional here, but watch out for Peter Falk, Simon Oakland and Susan Strasberg.

Surprisingly, I found the actor's performances rather good for this kind of TV stuff, good directing indeed. Not a corny material, on the contrary.

Directed by David Lowell Rich, one famous TV series maker

Fine acting lifts this drama from "Chrysler Theatre", unfairly compared to "The Dirty Dozen" (that earthy novel written two years later that became a classic action movie). In reality it resembles a "Combat!" tv episode, one that emphasizes dramatics, omitting the weekly quota of gunfire and explosions.

Peter Falk is excellent casting as the tough guy convict whose street-smart roughness hides a sentimental heart, and Susan Strasberg channels (and even looks just like) Audrey Hepburn as the empathetic German romantic interest.

It's structured as a caper, with Falk and three other convicts answering to military officer Simon Oakland to steal from a Leipzig bank vault the plans for an advanced German rocket that might win the war for the Axis powers. The thrills, action and scope of a motion picture are lacking, as this was a weekly TV episode, but instead the personal performances hold up well. And the bittersweet, emotional ending still is moving.