They Were Not Divided

There's not much evidence in this stiff-upper-lipped Second World War drama to suggest that Terence Young would go on to direct three of the best Bond movies in the early 1960s. The action is almost totally reliant on the sort of gung-ho camaraderie that was characteristic of the recruiting propaganda that filled British screens in the first days of the conflict. Edward Underdown's Guards officer and Ralph Clanton's have-a-go Yank are nothing more than caricatures, but contemporary audiences queued round the block to see their exploits as they drove the Nazis back to Berlin. They weren't divided, but they weren't very interesting, either.