This chapter of the Second World War is hardly known by anyone, while this film makes a good show of it, reminding you above all of "Rififi" and its classic bank robbery sequence - there is a touch of Rififi here, but the other way around - a bank is robbed to save its jewels, not to dispose of them. Peter Finch is the lead finding Eva Bartok on the point of suicide, while he and his friends succeed in converting her enough to make her save them and Holland. It's a great thriller and war drama at the same time, while you easily overlook and forgive its flaws for the general sustained suspense. At the same time it gives a very realistic and almost documentary insight into the trauma of the German invasion of Holland early in May 1940, and the finest scenes are perhaps those with the diamond business men in their life's greatest quandary in their business club, with some very gripping moments of old old men being compelled to make desperate decisions. The music from a pianola also plays a most significant part almost furnishing the film with something of a golden framework not of diamonds but of the delicacy of human values.
Review of Operation Amsterdam
