Operation Ogre

Spain, 1973. Francisco Franco has held power since 1939, but he is old and ill, and the regime he built looks less certain with each passing month. Admiral Carrero Blanco is positioned to inherit that power and keep the dictatorship going. A group of Basque militants concludes that killing him is the way to stop it.

The film follows the operation from the inside, centred on the people who plan and carry it out. Gian Maria Volonté plays Izarra, with José Sacristán as Iker, Ángela Molina as Amaiur and Eusebio Poncela as Txabi. Gillo Pontecorvo directed, working from a screenplay he wrote with Giorgio Arlorio and Ugo Pirro; José Sámano produced for the Spanish and Italian companies behind it.

Pontecorvo came to the material after The Battle of Algiers and Burn!, and Operation Ogre was the third of the four features he directed, arriving a decade after the second. It was released in September 1979. On IMDb it holds a 7.1 rating from around 1,200 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.9 from a much smaller pool of about 50. More than a thousand votes on the first suggest a durable if modest following; the second rests on too few to read closely.