Alan Ladd wartime adventure film, a.k.a. The Red Beret, that influenced the motorboat chase scene in From Russia with Love. Coproduced by Albert R. Broccoli, directed by Terence Young, and written by Richard Maibaum—all future 007 mainstays—the film features a sequence in which Ladd’s unit of soldiers is trapped in a minefield, and to escape one of the soldiers skims a bazooka rocket along the ground, touching off a row of lethal mines.

From Russia with Love, also written by Maibaum, merely changed the location of the sequence to the sea. Bond (Sean Connery) dumps his speedboat’s punctured gasoline drums overboard, watches them float among the SPECTRE boats, and then skillfully targets the gasoline with a flare. The skimming effect of the flare rocket ignites the gas, engulfing the enemy flotilla.

Paratrooper was also the first film produced in Europe by Broccoli and his partner Irving Allen.