Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), released in the US as Night Ambush (which is eleven minutes shorter than the British release), is a film by the British writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and the last movie they made together through their production company "The Archers". The film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and features Marius Goring, David Oxley, and Cyril Cusack, is based on the 1950 book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe by W. Stanley Moss, which is an account of events during the author's service on Crete during World War II as an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The title is a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the book features the young agents' capture and evacuation of the German general Heinrich Kreipe.

Plot

During World War II, the Greek island of Crete is occupied by the Nazis. British officers Major Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO and Captain Bill Stanley Moss MC of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) land on the island and meet other British agents and members of the Cretan resistance. In April 1944, they kidnap General Kreipe, the German commander of the island's occupying forces and, in disguise, drive his car through a number of German checkpoints until they abandon it and set off on foot with the General.