HeadlinesExotic Boring

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Leofwine_draca MOSQUITO SQUADRON is an average little war film about the British efforts to blow up a German base in France which is responsible for developing the technology used to bomb London and other British cities. It's a film that's pretty derivative of other movies which have come before such as THE DAM BUSTERS and it's also a rather uneven viewing experience, although there's much that's worthwhile here too.The cast is somewhat unremarkable aside from lead actor David McCallum. McCallum is fresh off his success in America in THE MAN FROM UNCLE here and he delivers a good performance as the dedicated young pilot who feels that he needs to win out no matter what. His allies are all well cast and there's a priggish turn from the ever-imposing Charles Gray as the commodore, but too much of the screen time is taken up with McCallum's love for Suzanne Neve as the wife of a dead co-pilot. I appreciate the tragedy in such a situation but it really slows the film down at times when it should be flying along.Footage of the planes at work and dropping their bouncing bomb payloads are the best part of the movie. The climactic action sequences are well handled and readily exciting and the dated nature of some of the effects, in particular the back projection, is easy to forgive. With a little more drive in the flagging midsection, MOSQUITO SQUADRON could have been something great; as it stands it's an average little film.

MartinHafer I must tell you up front that I have a prejudice towards this film, as I love airplane movies--particularly WWII air films. So, when I saw this on the queue for Netflix, I thought I had to see it--especially since I am familiar with the famed fighter-bomber, the Mosquito. It was an amazingly able and agile plane--one of the best of the war, though it's seldom talked about today.David McCallum stars in this film. If the name isn't familiar, he was one of the stars of the 1960s show "The Man From UNCLE". Unfortunately, he really wasn't given a personality in the film--he was there, but not much more.The story is about a Mosquito squadron. Their job will now be to bomb a rocket production facility. However, it will take absolute precision bombing using very odd bouncing bombs--much like smaller versions of the ones used to blow up the dams in the Ruhr Valley (for more on that, see the excellent film "Dam Busters"). But there's a hitch---the Germans are anticipating it and have moved all the shot down Mosquito crews to this location--daring the Brits to carry out this raid and kill their own men.The action is generally good, but due to a lack of availability, the German fighters are actually slow-moving transport/observation planes. At times, some of these planes are models and move in impossible ways.And, considering how much better the flying sequences were in "The Battle of Britain" (also 1969), I could see how this film might have been overshadowed. There also is a bit of predictability towards the end--with a few clichés among the escaped prisoners. Overall, a decent movie that's worth watching but also one that is far from a must-see.

zardoz-13 "633 Squadron" producer Lewis J. Rachmil let "Girl Happy" director Boris Sagal recycle exciting aerial combat footage from "633 Squadron" for his generic World War II thriller "Mosquito Squadron," starring David McCallum and Charles Gray. This lackluster epic combines elements of 1964's "633 Squadron," principally the plywood built De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bombers, with 1954's "The Dam Busters," with a bouncing bomb designed to destroy a top secret German weapons facility. The Germans are developing the V-3 rocket, and British Intelligence has located the site in the French countryside at the Château de Charlon. Air Commodore Hufford (Charles Gray of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show") assigns Squadron Leader Quint Munro (David McCallum of "The Great Escape") to bomb it with special ordinance. This low-budget melodrama set in England and France has very little to recommend it. Again, 90 percent of the shots of Mosquitoes winging their way over enemy country were appropriated from Walter E. Grauman's classic "633 Squadron." The prefabricated screenplay by Donald S. Sanford and Joyce Perry antes up one surprise, but everything else is formula served up without verve.Our British heroes are streaking toward their target, a V-2 rocket launching pad, on the French coast as "Mosquito Squadron" opens, using footage from Michael Anderson's "Operation: Crossbow." Incidentally, Anderson directed "The Dam Busters," too. The British destroy the missile launching ramp, but a flight of Messerschmidts blow Squadron Leader David 'Scotty' Scott (David Buck of "The Mummy's Shroud") out of the sky. Quint Munro spots no parachute and assumes 'Scotty' is kaput. Scotty's death elevates Quint to Squadron Leader. Worse, our protagonist has lost a friend who was as close to him as a brother. Scotty and Quint grew up together because Quint's parents died and Scotty's parents raised him. Quint even handed off one of his former girlfriends, Beth (Suzanne Neve of "Bunny Lake Is Missing"), who wound up marrying Scotty. After a reasonable period of mourning, Beth and Quint take long bicycle rides in the country.Air Commodore Hufford sends Quint off on a reconnaissance mission to photograph the Château de Charlon where the British believe the Germans are developing a V-3. V-2 rockets are falling on London and wrecking havoc. Hufford shows Quint some film footage of a bomb that bounces on any terrain, no mean feat. In real life, the bomb was the genuine article and was called a 'Highball' and had been designed to use on battlewagons like the Tirpitz. Meanwhile, now that the Germans know the British are interested in Château, they drop a canister of film which shows that they have gathered British POWs as hostages against any bombing runs. The revelation that Scotty is among those prisoners shocks Quint. Security prevents him from telling Beth about it. Initially, nobody wants to give the Germans a propaganda coup by killing their own men. Quint devises a way to kill two birds with one stone. Not only will they destroy the laboratory tucked into an underground facility with the 'Highball' bomb, but also they will breach the wall at the Château so the French Resistance can storm the Château. The closest thing to a villain in "Mosquito Squadron" is a German Lieutenant named Schack (Vladek Sheybal of "From Russia with Love") who suspects that the Allies prisoners are plotting something when they all turn out for mass on a Sunday, especially when some of them aren't Catholic. The suspicious Sheybal shows his villainy when shoots a Catholic priest with a machine gun. The POWs overpower their guards and fortify themselves in the chapel as the Mosquitoes appear to bomb the premises.Quint and his Mosquito Squadron destroy the underground facility, but our hero has to crash his plane. Once on the ground, Quint runs into Scotty, but Scotty cannot remember his own identity, and he sacrifices his life heroically by blowing up a German tank with a bazooka after several others have tried and failed. A wounded Quint makes it back to England and reunites with Beth. As it turns out, Beth never learned that her late husband survived the crash only to die in France as a casualty of a combined British & French Resistance operation. There is a subplot about Beth's younger brother who has to show the film that the Germans have dropped for the benefit of our heroes. When he threatens to spill the beans about Scotty, the authorities lock him up for the duration."Mosquito Squadron" qualifies as a hack attempt to cash in on "633 Squadron," "Operation Cross-Bow," and "The Dam Busters." Boris Sagal made a couple of memorable movies and television shows, but "Mosquito Squadron" isn't among them. Worse, "Mosquito Squadron" was cranked out by Oakmont Productions which ground out several cheapjack World War II thrillers, including another Sagal saga "The One-Thousand Plane Raid", "The Last Escape," "Hell Boats," and "Submarine X-1." These movies ranked as half-baked epics with neither a shred of atmosphere nor credibility. Sagal has to stage several shots on a studio set, principally the drive in the country that Quint and Beth take in his red roadster to see Scotty's bereaved parents has our stars seated in an automobile mock-up with scenery back projected behind them. Sagal generates neither suspense nor sense of urgency. The cast walk through their roles like automatons delivering uninspired dialogue written by Sanford who went on to write the equally lackluster "Midway" and Joyce Perry who wrote teleplays for juvenile television shows like "Land of the Lost." McCallum gets the best line in the movie when Hufford asks him about the odds of the mission succeeding: "About the same as spitting in an Air Commodore's eye from an express train, sir." In "Mosquito Squadron," Suzanne Neve and McCallum never generate any chemistry so it is difficult to believe that they love each other. Mind you, it is always a pleasure to watch David McCallum act, but "Mosquito Squadron" gives him very little to do.

mark2-1 Some other reviewers comment here are that it is not one of the best British films of it's time - well, the director (father of Katey Sagal from Married with Children and 8 Simple Rules... for Dating My Teenage Daughter) was a real American TV series director and that is why this film has the look and feel of an American TV film from the period.This is a very bad movie. It's only saving graces are the presence of some real Mosquito aircraft and some good footage lifted from another slightly earlier film about a Mosquito Squadron - 633 Squadron.633 Squadron is also not one of the best WW2 aircraft films, but it is still far better than this one.For some odd reason "our hero" has a Canada patch on his uniform, although he is supposed to have grown up with his best friend, another pilot, who lives nearby (in Britain). Very odd. I suspect someone else with a more American accent (like Cliff Robertson in 633 Squadron) was supposed to have had the role and David McCallum was a last minute replacement.There is a scene where David McCallum actually crawl out of a wrecked and burning Mosquito - which at first I thought was also a scene lifted from the other Mosquito film. I do hope they didn't also wreck a Mosquito for this film, as they did in the other film. What a waste!The film begins with scenes lifted from Operation Crossbow.Note: There was actually a real, and quite well known, Mosquito raid in 1944 on Amiens prison in France to liberate important French resistance prisoners, where they breached the wall as they did in this film - though not with Barnes-Wallace bombs. This must have inspired this part of the film.