How sad is this?

Brilliant and touching

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

*Spoiler/plot- 1968, A group of French partisans and US Paratroops attack a super secret coastal defense complex on the Normandy coast beaches to help the D-Day landings to be less murderous against the invading troops.*Special Stars- Guy Madison, Peter Lee Lawrence, Erika Blanc *Theme- Secret operations during wartime can save lives.*Trivia/location/goofs- Italian film. D-Day US Army paratroop uniforms are makeshift Italian NATO modern uniforms and have the wrong helmet and camouflage patterns.*Emotion- A crazy WW2 film about wildly speculative secret operations to cripple the German electronic bunkered coast defenses just before D-Day invasion. It's a comedy in all the wrong places during the war scenes.

Peter Lee Lawrence plays a theatrical actor whose mission is to infiltrate and destroy a German flamethrower installation at Normandy Beach before the allied attack there. His mission is only partly successful, but he is able to join up with a squadron of paratroopers sent to finish the job and guides them to the installation. Hell in Normandy climaxes with fairly standard fast-paced war action.Lawrence was 23 when he starred in this film, and his promising career would be tragically cut short six years later by his suicide. The rest of the cast mixes American and continental European actors and actresses, mostly of the spaghetti western genre. The acting is generally good, though Guy Madison seems a little uncomfortable with his sad-sack paratrooper captain at times. Erica Blanc is excellent as a brave and intelligent member of the local resistance.Brescia's Hell in Normandy is a cleverly plotted and well-directed military action-adventure centered on events preceding the allied victory at Normandy during World War Two. The film is fictional and makes no pretense at engaging the realities of the battle. But it does remain mostly within the constraints of plausibility. The cinematography is very good - hardly unexpected from an Italian film. But the script is horrendous. The writer included several token American idiomatic clichés - probably at the insistence of the cast - but did way too much exposition through dialog. The version I saw was dubbed. Perhaps the dialog is better in Italian? Recommended for war film fans only.

Poor Guy Madison was reduced to picking up "coffee and dough-nut" money making second rate Itailian stinkers during the 1960s and early 1970s. I saw this film in Italy and it was the non-dubbed version. Surpringly, I thought Guy came across very well dubbed in! I'm joking! Seriously, Guy looked stiff and unhappy here. He plays a Captain in the U.S. Army who leads a group of doomed paratroopers on a "deadly" mission. Nothing much to the whole thing. Nice uniforms, some stock black and white film on World War II, a bit of action, and really nothing else. If you look hard enough, you can find "cult" actor William Conroy playing a German soldier in yet another of his countless uncredited roles in Italian made 1960s films.

This is yet another tolerable low-budget Italian war film, which also happens to be the most satisfying effort I've watched from this director. As the title suggests, the narrative centers around the D-Day landings: the Nazis have prepared a booby trap for the Allies about to 'invade' Europe from the sea, so a select band of paratroopers is flown over beforehand to nip their plan in the bud! While I wasn't familiar with any members of the cast other than Guy Madison and Erika Blanc, the film emerges as a fairly engaging actioner which also features a couple of stage actors assigned to impersonate the distinguished professor who invented the Nazi's latest gadget and the young German officer accompanying him. An unusual subplot involves an old French peasant who informs on the whereabouts of the commando outfit (they're being sheltered by his partisan daughter Blanc) because he's afraid of what the Nazis might do to him if they get wind of the situation.Though the film ends with the D-Day operation itself (shown through black-and-white stock footage), the downbeat climax sees the majority of the Allied squad perish trying to destroy the Nazi's Normandy beach outpost. Nevertheless, there's a healthy dose of comedy throughout – with Madison as perhaps one of the most cynical soldiers ever depicted on the screen; my favorite bit, however, was in a scene where a German officer rebukes the guard dogs for failing to detect any trace of the Americans' presence in a barn – whereupon one of his underlings (off the screen) quips sarcastically, "You should be glad they didn't die from all the stench!" The film has probably been out of circulation since its release, as the print I watched was in extremely poor shape: scratched, grainy and excessively dark (yet faded enough at times to expose the day-for-night shooting!).