Plot
The movie centers around efforts by German intelligence to find the target of an upcoming raid by the mythical "B-99 bomber." To achieve this end, they interrogate a recently shot-down air crew.
The German officers use various methods to discover this information, some of them quite subtle. Though no physical brutality is used, the Germans at one point stage a mock execution to scare a prisoner. Another prisoner is subjected to isolation to heighten his fear. Each airman eventually provides useful information because of their arrogance, fear, or naivete. Some of what they say, which the enemy finds useful, seems innocuous but is used by the Germans as pieces to solve the larger puzzle.
In the end, the Germans are able to find the target of the raid and the B-99 bombing mission is intercepted. The intended target is spared heavy damage and 21 B-99's are shot down with the loss of 105 aircrew. The message of the movie, delivered by an intelligence officer played by Lloyd Nolan, is to not talk under any circumstances, that even innocuous conversation can help the enemy, not to let down one's guard, everything in a prison camp is suspect, and to not try to outwit the enemy.
Read more about this topic: Resisting Enemy Interrogation
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)