Force 10 from Navarone

Certain war movies rise above the genre, establishing themselves as classics that are more action and adventure romps than hard-hitting war movies. Released in 1961, The Guns of Navarone is definitely one of those, a WWII commando story that is considered to be one of the best WWII movies ever and one that helped liven up the genre heading into the 1960s. Based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, 'Navarone' was very popular, and while it wasn't exactly timely, some 17 years later, a sequel was released, 1978's Force 10 from Navarone.

Sequels are almost always a mixed bag when it comes to any sort of quality or appreciation from the fans. This is the oddest sort of sequel, one released long after the original with no returning cast members.  An aging Gregory Peck and David Niven would have looked quite ridiculous as WWII commandos, wouldn't they? Instead, a whole new cast steps in, taking over parts made famous by other actors.  Is that a bad thing? I never thought so. I read MacLean's Force 10 (the novel) as a kid, pursued the movie, and loved it. It was a favorite of AMC among other channels, and I've lost track of how many times I've watched it. Not as good as the original, but still an underrated WWII flick that doesn't deserve some of the hate it's gotten over the years.

Several months removed from their successful mission in Navarone, Capt. Keith Mallory (Robert Shaw) and Cpl. Dusty Miller (Edward Fox) are called back in to perform another mission. They are to be sent into Yugoslavia to kill an enemy agent, the man who blew their cover in Navarone and is now hiding out as a member of the partisans fighting the Germans. It's believed the man's name is Lescovar (Franco Nero), but Mallory and Miller must make sure. They'll travel with an American commando unit, Force 10, commanded by Lt. Colonel Barnsby (Harrison Ford) who resents having two more men traveling with his own. Almost from the start though, the mission seems doomed to failure, and Barnsby must turn to Mallory and Miller for help. Against impossible odds, they team together to pull off their mission, but also Barnsby's, one that could turn the tide of war in Yugoslavia.

Before the credits even roll, this movie is fighting an uphill battle with any viewer who knows and loves the original Guns of Navarone.  That movie is a classic, and no matter what this one does, it isn't going to live up to expectations. And just to be clear, Force 10 isn't as good as 'Guns.' It's not even close. Viewed as a stand-alone film, I'd like to think this movie would be held in higher regard by viewers and critics alike. It does nothing particularly new for the WWII commando genre, the script is limiting, bouncing around too much, and the production feels like a small budget was used. Call it sentimentality, but I like this movie a lot in spite of its flaws. And like any movie, there are flaws. It is being able to look past them and just enjoy yourself.

The men-on-a-mission movie, where ensemble casts go to thrive. Without the Hollywood legend name recognition of 'Guns,' director Guy Hamilton (of James Bond fame) does not disappoint assembling his cast. One of my all-time favorite actors, Robert Shaw steps in for Gregory Peck as Capt. Mallory, commando extraordinaire, if a little aged. A year removed from the giant success that was the original Star Wars, Harrison Ford looks ridiculously young as Lt. Colonel Barnsby, the commander placed in an impossible situation. Fox is a scene-stealer as Miller, putting his own personal spin on the part Niven played. Joining the team is Carl Weathers as Sgt. Weaver, an accidental tag-along on the mission. Also, watch for Bond alums Richard Kiel as Drazak, an immense Chetnik fighter hunting Mallory and Barnsby's team, and Barbara Bach as Maritza, a tough partisan playing both sides seemingly.

Complain about anything you want, but that assembling of talent is impressive no matter how you cut it. The tone here -- thanks to the cast changes -- is lighter, especially between Shaw's Mallory and Fox's Miller. They bicker like an old married couple, but never pushing the humor too much. It's subtle, some great one-liners thrown about if you're paying attention. This was also Shaw's last completed movie before his death later in 1978. With so many characters, it can't be helped that not everyone is given much to do. Characters drift in and out as needed. It barely resembles MacLean's novel to begin with. Here's what it comes down to though. We've got Quint (Shaw), Han Solo/Indiana Jones (Ford), Django (Nero), Apollo Creed (Weathers), a Bond villain in Jaws (Kiel), the Jackal (Fox), and a Bond girl (Bach). Talk about a great group. Can you name a more eclectic cast than that one?

Different versions of the movie exists (odd for a movie from the late 1970s), but they all clock in at around two hours. The widescreen version on the DVD is the longest at 126 minutes. The story certainly takes its time moving along, an almost episodic pacing keeping things going. There really isn't a pointed, one-way plot, just a series of adventures and misadventures. Some parts just work better than others, but once the missions are established, the movie picks up steam. The ending especially is impressive, Mallory, Barnsby and Co. working together to prevent three divisions of German armor and infantry from wiping out the last remaining partisan brigade. It's typical men on a mission fare, an impossible mission against impossible odds. There's no way they get the job done....unless...oh, wait. This is a movie. Of course they get the job done.

Force 10 from Navarone is a solid if unspectacular (and highly entertaining) WWII commando movie. I've always thought it would be more popular if it wasn't attached in anyway to the original Guns of Navarone, but it is what it is.  Great cast, fun story, whistle-worthy score from Ron Goodwin (listen to a sample HERE), good action, a gratuitous nude scene of Barbara Bach, and a few laughs here and there. Can you ask for much more? It's fun from start to finish.  

Force 10 from Navarone <---trailer (1978): ***/****

The Colditz Story

I started reading about history pretty early in grammar school and never really stopped.  I was introduced early to The Great Escape -- the book and the movie -- and 40 or 50 viewings later, it is still one of my two favorite movies.  The story of Allied prisoners of war during WWII has translated well to both book form and movies in the 60-plus years since the end of the war, some more well known than others.  I've seen a fair share -- Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, King Rat -- among others, but I always keep an eye out for ones I've missed, including 1955's The Colditz Story.

Like The Great Escape, this WWII P.O.W story is based on the actual escape attempts of the prisoners from their German captors.  The start of the WWII brought up the question for both sides; what to do with captured prisoners? The Geneva Convention provided for the treatment of prisoners, but there was still the matter of housing and feeding the thousands of prisoners on either side.  A prisoner's right and responsibility was to try and escape so the German Luftwaffe was forced to improvise.  One of the most infamous prison camps was in the town of Colditz in the Colditz Castle, a medieval building reserved for only those prisoners dubbed the most dangerous, those most likely to escape. A recipe for a successful POW movie if there ever was.

It's summer 1940 and two British officers, Captain Pat Reid (John Mills) and Mac McGill (Christopher Rhodes), have been captured by the Germans and sent to the prison camp at Colditz Castle deep in Germany. There they find only two other British officers, Pat Tyler (Lionel Jeffries) and Jimmy Winslow (Bryan Forbes), who they quickly hit it off with.  It's not long before truckloads of new prisoners arrive, including a senior British officer, Colonel Richmond (Eric Portman), who doesn't seem interested in escaping. In the crowded supposedly inescapable prison, the Brits go to work on their escape attempts, but coupled with the efforts of the French, Poles, and Dutch, end up stepping on each others toes.  With help from Richmond, the diverse group of prisoners begin to work together in their escape plans, all with the hopes of someone hitting a "home run" and making it all the way to Switzerland.

Mostly known and respected for some of the earliest and best James Bond movies, director Guy Hamilton makes an entertaining, somewhat atypical war movie here. For being supposedly an inescapable prison, Colditz actually had its fair share of successful escapes over the course of WWII so right off the start Hamilton is working with a story that maybe -- just maybe -- could end on a positive note.  The movie was filmed on location in Colditz (a nice touch), but I'm not sure how much and where.  Regardless, it gives the story an air of authenticity as we're seeing the actual buildings these events took place in.  Mills' character Pat Reid was an actual escapee from Colditz and wrote several books about his time in the prison so the story feels truthful and authentic in dealing with the facts.

Like other POW movies focusing on escape, the story isn't the most linear thing around.  It tends to bounce from escape attempt to escape attempt rather than focusing on one specific plan devised by the prisoners.  This could have ended with a bloated, overlong movie, but at just 97 minutes, Hamilton picked an appropriate run time.  He wastes little time early on, introducing his characters and the setting and moves on to what viewers want to see; the Allied prisoners cleverly trying to escape from their German captors.  Just the sheer audacity in which these prisoners make their attempts is impressive.  They had no fear, no worries about consequences and repercussions.  Watch one stupidly brave attempt HERE. These prisoners would try anything to escape, and that's maybe the most amazing thing about the story of this movie. These things actually happened.

Telling the story of a multinational group of Allied prisoners allows Hamilton to assemble a cast of multinational talent to fill out his ranks.  Mills leads the heavily British cast as Pat Reid, a prisoner who becomes "escape officer," basically a coordinator of escapes who by taking the position agrees not to attempt an escape on his own.  I like Mills as an actor on-screen because he has a knack for making his characters likable with little effort, and his Reid definitely is a prisoner you're rooting for.  Portman as Colonel Richmond too is a scene-stealer, the stiff upper lip British officer who'd like nothing more than to break out as many prisoners as possible.  Rhodes, Jeffries and Forbes are all solid as fellow British prisoners, especially Rhodes as a prisoner who may be too tall to escape.  Frederick Valk plays the German commandant at Colditz and Denis Shaw plays Priem, a German ferret assigned with rooting out any and all escape attempts.

Because of my love for The Great Escape, I'm a sucker for like-minded movies like this one.  It was a British production so it is not well known outside of England, but because it deals with the facts of being a WWII prisoner, it's easy to see the blueprint it laid out for prisoner of war movies yet to come.  Filmed in a stark black and white on location in Colditz, this flick doesn't do anything great and isn't as flashy as The Great Escape or epic as River Kwai.  But it is the truth in the story it tells that makes this movie worthwhile.

The Colditz Story <----opening 9 minutes (1955): ***/**** 

Battle of Britain

Heading into May, I had this plan to watch and review a bunch of WWII movies in honor of Memorial Day. Well, Memorial Day is tomorrow so that's not going to happen, but I can still get a couple reviews in at least.

Battle of Britain (1969), directed by Guy Hamilton of James Bond fame, is everything that was good and bad about the epic war movies to come out of the 60s, and really epic movies in general. Growing up in the good old USA, the early parts of WWII were never taught as much as the post-Pearl Harbor years once America got involved in the war so this movie serves as a good introduction to the earlier years of the war. Immediately following the Dunkirk disaster, it appears that Hitler and the Third Reich are one good push away from winning the war. All that's needed for that final push is the invasion of England.

But before a cross-channel invasion can take place, Herman Goring and his illustrious Luftwaffe must knock out the Royal Air Force so an invasion force can go across the channel relatively unmolested. For the RAF though, they're heading into a battle with the odds heavily stacked against them with just 600 pilots to Germany's 2,500. As Laurence Olivier's Air Chief Marshal Dowding so eloquently but effectively states, "Our boys are going to have shoot down their boys at a rate of 4 to 1." So begins the battle of Britain, here's the film's opening, a good sum-up of what's happened and what's to come.

With a movie that focuses exclusively on a key moment in Britain's history, the benefits are obvious. Director Hamilton collects a who's who of British actors to fill out his cast. Olivier and Trevor Howard star as Dowding and Air Vice Marshal Park, the higher-ups in the RAF who oversee the desperate fight in the air. As the pilots, Micheal Caine, Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer lead the fight with Ian McShane and Edward Fox as two pilots in Shaw's squadron. And then making short appearances are Curd Jurgens, Harry Andrews, Patrick Wymark, Michael Redgrave, Kenneth More, and Ralph Richardson. If that cast doesn't impress you at least a little bit, this might not be your movie.

As I've covered before though, the flaw with such a huge cast is the characterization which suffers. These characters are more outlines of historical figures than flesh and blood people. Plummer stands out mostly because he's given a love interest, the beautiful Susannah York, so we find out something about his squadron leader. You're not hoping Caine's Squadron Leader Canfield makes it, you're hoping Michael Caine makes it. The same with Shaw and Plummer. But that's a minor flaw for me, not something that should stop you from seeing the movie.

And surprise, surprise, what's the actual reason for seeing a movie built around WWII in the air? If you answered 'dogfights' and lots of aerial footage, pat yourself on the back. It's a pre-CGI movie that relies on actual footage being shot of these pilots in action, the British Spitfires tangling with the German Stukas, here's one great scene with Goring asking his officers what they need to win. The film will sink or swim for most viewers on the dogfights, which do eat up most of the movie's 132-minute running time. The best is saved for last appropriately enough as the British throw all their reserves into the battle in one last, desperate ploy to stop the Luftwaffe. It's a 4-minute scene with no dialogue, no sound at all other than Ron Goodwin's score, sampled here, a very British score indeed.

Hamilton's movie then is not so much about the characters as the battle itself. Obviously, without the pilots, WAFs and coast watchers, the battle for Britain could not have happened. But Hamilton goes for the spirit of these people. Maybe we don't know much about them, their personal backgrounds, but they're fighting for what they believe in to stop a power-hungry Adolf Hitler as he swept across Europe. If these pilots hadn't held off the Luftwaffe and ultimately won the battle, who knows how different the world would be right now? It's a frightening thought. And that's why Battle for Britain works, even with its flaws.

Still wavering? Here's a trailer, a long one at that, and a longer preview of the movie as a whole. A WWII movie not as well known as many war movies of the time, but one definitely worth checking out if you've missed it up to now.

Netflix review #4: The Man With The Golden Gun

I've seen all the Connery Bond movies, the last two obviously with Daniel Craig, and bits and pieces of the Roger Moore entries, but I never really sat down and watched one straight through. I was never a huge fan of Moore, but thought as a fan of the series I should watch all of the movies. I watched Moore's first movie, Live and Let Die, a few weeks back and got The Man With The Golden Gun in the mail yesterday.

Reading reviews, TMWTGG seems to take a lot of heat for being pretty cheesy so I was surprised by how much I liked it. Moore seems to have figured out how to play 007 more so as compared to LaLD. His one-liners are there, but they're not overdone. We get it, you're clever, stop with the cheesiness. The action scenes are well-handled, and he's more believable as it looks like he did most of his own stunts. When it comes to the ladies, Moore was never in question. Just two movies in and with the snap of a finger, he's got the Bond women waiting.

Horror movie master Christopher Lee is the villain here, the man with the golden gun, Francisco Scaramanga, the world's deadliest assassin who charges a $1 million per kill. The hit man supposedly sends a golden bullet to MI6 with "007" imprinted on it. So Bond has a master assassin on his tail, but there's a glitch, no one knows what he looks like. In an odd twist, even for this series, the only way to identify Scaramanga is that he has an extra nipple. There's a subplot here too about capturing solar energy, but it isn't as good as the two men going head to head.

In the Bond girls department, this one gets high points with Britt Ekland and Maud Adams starring. Ekland plays Mary Goodnight, a fellow agent working as Bond's liasion of sorts who plays hard to get with him. In a memorable ending, Ekland runs around the last 30 minutes or so in a bikini. In her first Bond movie, she would return as a different character in Octopussy, Adams is Andrea Anders, Scaramanga's mistress who sees a way to safety through 007. Both women are up there as two of the more beautifuly Bond women.

One more bit of interesting casting, a pre-Fantasy Island Herve Villechaise as Nick-Nack, Scaramanga's deadly little assistant who we're never quite sure what his motives are. Clifton James also returns as Sheriff JW Pepper from Live and Let Die in an unnecessary return. Convenient that a Louisiana sheriff is visiting Thailand the same time as Bond, isn't it?

When it comes to action, I thought "Golden Gun" was top-notch including an exciting boat chase and a chase through Hong Kong with a good pay-off as a car does a corkscrew over a river. The scene's marred by a cartoonish slide noise, but the stunt's impressive no matter how you look at it.

Other things worth mentioning, or maybe not mentioning, the theme by Lulu is forgettable and painfully unsubtle, even for a Bond song, and the movie at 125 minutes can be a little talky. But otherwise, it's worthwile. Not a classic Bond movie, but better than the clunkers. This was director Guy Hamilton's fourth and final 007 movie, a good end for the director of the classic Goldfinger.

The DVD has the movie in its widescreen presentation, the Hong Kong and Thailand locations look great, and two different commentary tracks.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974): ***/****