Amsterdam - Operazione diamanti

The Germans have invaded Holland and are in the process of occupying Amsterdam, some of them masquerading as Dutch fighters called Fifth Columnists. The British dispatch British Army Intelligence Officer Tony Britton with Dutch diamond men Alexander Knox and Peter Finch to get the industrial grade diamonds out of Amsterdam before Hitler can get them for use in machine processing for weapons production. Eva Bartok drives the trio from the dock into Amsterdam after being prevented from committing suicide and then sticks around to assist in the mission. Based on a true story this is well made with great acting and very suspenseful. Beautiful on ___location filming in and around Amsterdam. The movie so effectively puts the viewer into the frightening situation the Dutch were facing that it plays as good as a documentary. Highly recommended!

Unseen Nazi jackboots are marching into Holland in the darkest days of WWII and Churchill's government is worried about all the industrial diamonds lying around in Amsterdam that could be used for the German war effort. Being British, we're obviously not going to rely on Frenchy to nip across and spirit the city's entire stock away before the invading hordes arrive so we send a rather colourless secret agent in the form of Tony Britton, the son of an Amsterdam diamond merchant (Peter Finch) and another chap who just seems to be along for the ride (Alexander Knox, who looks worrying dispensable throughout but somehow manages to emerge from the entire escapade unscathed).

Our unlikely heroes hitch a lift to Amsterdam from a distraught Eva Bartok who has just witnessed her boyfriend's boat being bombed by the Luftwaffe and is about to drive into the harbour waters to look for him. At first they fear she might be a fifth columnist, but she turns out to be a plucky heroine, picking up the machine gun of a fallen resistance fighter to sullenly strafe the enemy at one point.

Operation Amsterdam is one of those films that deserves to be better known because it's really quite good. The ___location photography of an eerily near-deserted Amsterdam is effective, and the tension is ramped up quite nicely until the whole thing seems to run out of steam in the final reel as our heroes make their getaway. The problem is that nobody is really aware that they are in fact getting away because their exploits haven't yet been uncovered. Anyway, when the film isn't testing our heroes it's commenting on the unenvious position in which the City's diamond merchants – many of whom are Jewish and only too aware of the treatment meted out to their creed by the Nazis. One old chap tries to bargain a place on the boat back to Britain for his sick, elderly wife but is gently rebuffed.

Perhaps the film's main weakness is the suspicion that something wasn't quite right during post-production. Midway through, the film seems to take a disconcerting leap forward, and suddenly there's little Melvyn Hayes sitting in the back of a car with our fellows. Now where did he come from? A neighbour of hero number three's mum, apparently (so that's why he tagged along), although we're never see this mother-and-son reunion – even though you suspect the scenes were filmed.

'Operation Amsterdam' is one that had gotten away from me. I thought I'd seen just about every WWII movie that ever was. So when I came across it on DVD, I felt nicely piqued.

And when I watched it, I felt nicely surprised, decently entertained.

The plot isn't terribly exciting, the script could have benefitted from a wee bit of polishing, but the production works well because tension is strung taut and relaxed, and strung taut and relaxed again and again throughout the film.

Peter Finch and Alexander Knox are two Dutch diamond experts who sail in a British destroyer with an English secret agent: destination Amsterdam. Mission: come out, before the Nazis surround or take the city, with the Dutch inventory of industrial diamonds. Object: deprive Nazi war industry of the tool-cutting, metal-shaping worth of those diamonds.

In the haunting desertion of orderly Amsterdam streets, the intrepid trio meets with Dutch diamond merchants, scampers in and out of the clutches of Dutch fifth columnists, mucks in with Dutch resistance fighters, and warily accepts guidance throughout from a Dutchwoman whom they cannot, at first, trust (played with restrained charm by Eva Bartok). Some of the diamond merchants are, as they've always been in Amsterdam, Jews. The point is made about Nazi persecution of Jews and about the dilemmas many Jews faced when the Nazis occupied their countries, but in 'Operation Amsterdam' the points are made unsentimentally - which highlights the stark panic, fear, and despair many Jews felt in that baleful time and circumstance. Indeed, throughout the film characters are beset by choices, choices they must make because time, as the story development lets us know clearly, is running out for everybody in the Netherlands.

It's the storytelling and the actors' understatement - nothing is James Bondish about these ordinary characters finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances - that make the story absorbing, believable. Abetted by the unsettling counterpoint between carnivalesque Dutch pierement (organ grinders) music - happy music playing in a bleak city, over throngs of departing refugees, during the agents' tense search for and gathering of the diamonds - and by terse snare drumming, the story keeps ratcheting up its grip on the viewer, holding tight tempo with the agents' mission and their dedication to accomplishing it.

The only serious flaw in the film's visuals owes to most of the deserted street shots having to be filmed immediately after dawn (else Amsterdam's population would be thronging its thoroughfares). This yields a bit of a crazy quilt mix of shots having long shadows intercut with shots having midday, short shadows - supposedly happening in the same instant. Otherwise, the camerawork and editing jive nicely with the unfolding of the plot.

Also ramping up the tension is the script's bareness: one really must think a lot - sometimes too much - about what's going on, about what's coming next, but the need to think that way lends the viewer a heightened sense of uncertainty, danger, and dread. It also helps that the scriptwriter avoided the worst cliches of the genre: the scenes of Eva Bartok and Peter Finch are treated as bare-bones, wartime heartbreak rather than as apocryphal "we fell in love in battle" nonsense.

Generally, props are first-rate, except for Dutch soldiers and resistance fighters toting German MP-40 machine pistols which were in short enough supply in the 1940 Wehrmacht, and for a few 1950's-era military trucks. The other weaponry is all true to period: Dutch army M1895 Mannlicher rifles, Luger pistols, period revolvers and such. Also, Dutch uniforms and personal gear are precisely from the story's 1940 time-frame. The only other minor quibble is one found in quite a few late-50's and 1960's WWII films: a four-seater Messerschmitt Bf.108 touring aeroplane stands in for the later, design-derivative Bf.109 fighter (See 'Von Ryan's Express', and 'The Longest Day' for more examples of this substitution - which was necessary since there were then no restored, flyable Bf.109E aircraft.).

'Operation Amsterdam' hasn't dated nearly as badly as have so many other WWII films made in the twenty years following the war because it sticks to its story, because it tells its story without frills, excursions into moralizing, or distracting subplots. Though it didn't benefit from a larger budget, as did 'The Counterfeit Traitor' which was filmed in the same era, 'Operation Amsterdam' delivers the goods.

Summed up: Agents voyage to Amsterdam to deprive Nazis of diamonds, return to us with a minor gem of a movie.

OPERATION AMSTERDAM is a strong WW2 movie with a great premise: a team including a Brit and two Dutch are sent into Amsterdam just as the Nazis are invading the country. They've been tasked with retrieving a priceless cache of diamonds from the city's jewellers and thus preventing them from falling into German hands. Along the way they must contend with German mines, bombing, Fifth Columnists, and the German soldiers who have already begun arriving in the city.

It's one of the strongest backdrops I can remember seeing in a film and the suspense goes through the roof from the outset. What I liked about OPERATION AMSTERDAM is that, despite the outlandish premise, the whole thing is rooted in realism; there are no gung-ho heroics, just characters struggling through as best they can. The production values are excellent and while there isn't a wealth of needless action in the film, a climactic firefight is expertly choreographed and one of the best filmed ever (eat your heart out, HEAT!).

The cast is very fine and includes Peter Finch in a solid hero-type role. My favourite character was that of the lovely Eva Bartok, who plays a resistance fighter with courage and determination, even more so than the men she helps. The real star of the show, though, is director Michael McCarthy, who had previously only helmed TV fare and low budget B-films. In OPERATION AMSTERDAM he was given a proper budget and ran away with it, although the success was bittersweet; he died in the same year the film was released.

"Operation Amsterdam" from 1959 stars Peter Finch, Alexander Knox, Tony Britton and Eva Bartok in a Rank film based on a true incident. In 1940, there was a British move to get industrial diamonds out of Holland so that the Germans could not make use of them.

A British Major (Britton) travels to England with two diamond experts (Knox and Finch) to persuade diamond merchants in Amsterdam to give over their industrial diamonds, which would be brought to England.

There is danger all around them, with soldiers, shootings, and bombings everywhere. At a harbor, a young woman, Anna (Eva Bartok) tries to drive into the water to commit suicide after her fiancée's parents are killed, as she blames herself for inadvertently causing their death. The men are able to stop her and make use of her car, and her knowledge of Amsterdam, all the while not sure if they can even trust her. No one, in fact, can trust anyone, since German parachuters are disguised as Dutch soldiers.

Jan (Finch's) father, who is a diamond merchant in Amsterdam, appeals to his circle to relinquish their stashes so that the major and the men can bring them to a destroyer on which Churchill is allowing them to travel. The time is short -- will the merchants cooperate? Or have they come a long way for not very much? I found this film very exciting and very moving. The atmosphere was tense throughout. Peter Finch gives a wonderful performance as Jan, and he was so handsome and had good chemistry with the beautiful, mysterious Anna of Bartok. Alexander Knox seemed to be an afterthought, not given much to do.

Knowing what the Dutch suffered during the war made this an emotional experience watching the courage of the people who helped the men along the way. This wasn't the officially formed resistance, but an earlier group who didn't want the Nazis in Holland and probably were the core people when the official Resistance began.

Highly recommended. I think the story is compelling enough to overcome editing criticisms, the time of release criticisms and the like. Powerful stories are timeless.