Ill Met by Moonlight (film)


Ill Met by Moonlight, also known as Night Ambush, is a film by the British writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and the last movie they made together through their production company, "The Archers". The film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and features Marius Goring, David Oxley, and Cyril Cusack, is based on the 1950 book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe by W. Stanley Moss, which is an account of events during the author's service on Crete during World War II as an agent of the Special Operations Executive. The title is a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the book features the young agents' capture and evacuation of the German general Heinrich Kreipe.

Plot

During World War II, the Greek island of Crete was occupied by the Nazis. British officers Major Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO and Captain Bill Stanley Moss MC of the Special Operations Executive land on the island. With the help of the local Cretan resistance in April 1944, they kidnap General Kreipe, the commander of the island. They take Kreipe across rough country to a secluded cove on the far side of the island, where they are picked up and taken to Cairo, the Middle East headquarters of British forces.

Cast

Cast notes:
Ill Met By Moonlight was filmed at Pinewood Studios in England, with location shooting in the Alpes-Maritimes in France and Italy, and on the Côte d'Azur in France.. Both Patrick Leigh Fermor and Xan Fielding were present on the location shots in Alpes-Maritime as advisors.. Patrick Leigh Fermor expressed great satisfaction with Bogarde's representation of him.

Box office

The film was the seventh most popular movie at the British box office in 1957.

In popular culture

The story was affectionately parodied by Spike Milligan in the 1957 Goon Show episode, "Ill Met by Goonlight".