Orders to Kill (1958)

Directed by Anthony Asquith; produced by Anthony Havelock-Allan

As the invasion of Normandy nears, Allied Intelligence believes that one of its agents in France (Leslie French) is a turncoat, and needs to be eliminated. With their regular operators unavailable or unsuitable for the task, young air force officer Gene Summers (Paul Massie) is brought in to do the job. He is eager and ready, but his inexperience and immaturity may prove problems, not just for the task at hand but for himself.

Orders to Kill has a fine premise behind it; it deals largely with the psychological aspects of assassination, and both how it affects the assassin and how the assassin affects the assassination. Unfortunately, the premise’s execution, if you will, is needlessly cumbersome, and the premise itself causes some issues in the story.

The prelude to the mission itself, involving Summers’s recruitment and training, satisfactorily depicts the man’s inadequacy for the duties he’s given. The army psychiatrist who interviews him is pressured into clearing him for action, and throughout the training, Summers’s attitude is one almost akin to a high school boy getting ready for a friendly football match.

The process of training, however, is not shown well. One can’t help comparing it to scenes from earlier movies, those filmed during the Second World War, which show not only how rigorous the training was, but how the trainees progressed. The scenes in Orders to Kill are almost leisurely; there surely must have been some urgency in getting Summers to France - otherwise an inexperienced novice would not have been chosen for the job - but this is not conveyed in the first third of the movie.

Summers’s boyish blundering is shown, but not his subsequent improvement - as improvement there must have been. He seemingly is taken straight from a failed practical examination to an airfield, from which he is flown to France. There is no convincing creation of a successful operator.

Once he arrives in France, Summers’s moral dilemma is more involving. He demonstrates that he still does not think as he needs to in such a situation, allowing himself to doubt his assignment and himself. This is shown in great contrast to his contact in occupied Paris (Irene Worth), who has steeled herself to carry out her role, compartmentalising the various aspects of her life.

Indeed, the secondary characters are all more compelling and interesting than Massie’s. The sympathetic training officer (Eddie Albert), the deceptively jovial instructor of unarmed combat (James Robertson Justice), the detached, even apathetic, manager of agents (John Crawford), are all well handled. There is a telling scene in which Albert’s character asks Justice’s to make training less of a game for the recruits; the answer is that it must be that way, in order to keep the recruits from realizing the horror of what they will be called upon to do.

Part of the problem may be that Massie isn’t as good an actor as these others. Lillian Gish in the unnecessary part of Summers’s mother has a short time on screen, yet capably shows her superiority to the movie’s star in their shared scenes. Ironically, it is also the success with which Massie’s character comes across as the superficial adolescent that he is meant to be, that makes him annoying and irritating. He is so deeply in over his head that the viewer may want him killed off, for the sake of the Allied war effort.

The moral problems at the heart of Orders to Kill are worthy of a movie but, with an uninspiring lead actor, portraying an unsympathetic protagonist who has gone through an unconvincing period of training - this isn’t the movie.