This one's a classic and a popular TV late show feature, and with good reason: as other comments have suggested, it's a film to see over and over.
Beautifully photographed and well acted, directed and scripted, Counterfeit Traitor is a notable exception to the general decline in quality of the studio system product of the fifties and sixties.
William Holden is ideally cast as an everyman caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The rest of the cast is wonderful - vivid, even eccentric, but never over the top - and I include here a bit by then-unknown Klaus Kinski and an array of, with one exception, uniformly nasty Nazis. Even the conventional love interest between Holden and Lilli Palmer doesn't intrude on the action and fits nicely into the plot.
Since much of Counterfeit Traitor was filmed on location it's also a treat to see European stars we seldom get to see in domestic films, particularly the great Danish actor Poul Reichhardt as a fishing boat captain.
If you see Counterfeit Traitor on your (preferably commercial-free) movie channel line-up and have never seen it, stop being one of the few who haven't!
Beautifully photographed and well acted, directed and scripted, Counterfeit Traitor is a notable exception to the general decline in quality of the studio system product of the fifties and sixties.
William Holden is ideally cast as an everyman caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The rest of the cast is wonderful - vivid, even eccentric, but never over the top - and I include here a bit by then-unknown Klaus Kinski and an array of, with one exception, uniformly nasty Nazis. Even the conventional love interest between Holden and Lilli Palmer doesn't intrude on the action and fits nicely into the plot.
Since much of Counterfeit Traitor was filmed on location it's also a treat to see European stars we seldom get to see in domestic films, particularly the great Danish actor Poul Reichhardt as a fishing boat captain.
If you see Counterfeit Traitor on your (preferably commercial-free) movie channel line-up and have never seen it, stop being one of the few who haven't!