Educational Thriller

The only thing dull about Resisting Enemy Interrogation is its title. This latest instructional product of the Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit is as much of a success in its own spy-thriller class as the FMPU's famed Technicolor documentary Memphis Belle (TIME, April 17).

Sergeant & Pretty Nurse. Long before Captain Spencer and his U.S. medium-bomber crew are forced down in German territory, each crew member has been warned to tell his captors only his name, rank and serial number. The movie dramatizes the wiles employed by the German Military Intelligence to worm out additional information.

First crack in the crew's silence is opened by congenial Lieut. Williams. Pleased that a German officer recognizes his Boston accent, he chattily lets drop the fact that wounded Sergeant Cole is from Atlanta. A pretty little German nurse promptly knocks Cole's guard down by confiding that she has just finished Gone With the Wind. Enamored, he never suspects a thing when she produces a fake Red Cross form and gets him to fill in his unit's number and its base (Naples).

Threat, Kindness, Shop Talk. With this piece of information--and Williams' hint that low-level bombing is the unit's specialty--the prison camp's commandant quickly calls the bluff of a cocky U.S. technical sergeant who has lied to him about the unit number, base and other matters. The commandant follows up by threatening to shoot Captain Spencer unless the surprised sergeant spills some more. The sergeant spills. In another part of the camp, another sergeant is getting the reverse treatment: after a scary but harmless session in a hotbox cell, he is lured into blabbing by kindness and good food. Soon the commandant knows the bomber unit's specialty, range, materiel, and the fact that it plans a major raid within 24 hours.

Then the impeccably alert Captain Spencer is invited to what seems to be a Luftwaffe officers' mess. In the ensuing friendly shop talk, he reveals that a head cold is the reason his mission commander has been dropped from the projected flight. Colds are serious to flyers only when they don oxygen masks. The only prime German target separated from Naples by oxygen-mask mountain altitudes is Munich. When U.S. bombers head for Munich's Hermann Goring oil works, Messerschmitts are waiting for them.

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