BEFORE: Morgan Freeman was my lead-in to the sci-fi chain, and Harrison Ford is my lead-out, carrying over from "Ender's Game". (I guess I could have gone with Ben Kingsley to "Gandhi" or "The Dictator", but my chain is set, and I like it.) There were supposed to be a few more Harrison Ford films here, but I needed to free up some 2014 slots for new films coming in, and I realized that those Ford films are mostly romance-based ("Sabrina", "Six Days, Seven Nights") so they've been moved to next February's line-up.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Guns of Navarone" (Movie #708)
AFTER: Oh, I've been waiting a good long while to watch this - when I started the prep work for this project in late 2008, this one was on the wish list. Not the watch list, the wish list. It seemed that it was always running on AMC, which is a movie channel that airs films with commercials, so it's been banned from my line-up, except for emergencies. Same thing with Sundance Channel and IFC, which USED to run movies without interruption. I'd call the cable company and cancel those channels if they allowed me to do that, just on principle.
I don't know how long a channel licenses a film for, but I was willing to wait - I went ahead and watched "The Guns of Navarone", and other films where ragtag groups of soldiers take on seemingly impossible missions, like "The Dirty Dozen" and "Kelly's Heroes", and then finally a few months ago, one of the REAL movie channels started running this. (Unfortunately, that channel is Encore, which believes that end credits should be blocked by a half-screen pop-up that tells me what movie is coming up next, but what can I do?)
Of course, I was interested in the type of war movie that Harrison Ford made right after appearing in "Star Wars". For good measure it was directed by a man who directed four James Bond films, and there are at least three actors from the Bond films in this, plus two actors who had minor roles in the "Star Wars" films. Oh, and the guy who played Apollo Creed - so it really is a ragtag bunch. If you want to regard this as the film where Han Solo and the ship captain from "Jaws" team up with Apollo Creed to take on the Germans as well as the big guy from "Moonraker", well I'm not going to stop you.
The original film "The Guns of Navarone" featured two men leading a bunch of soldiers on a stealth mission on the Greek island of Navarone to take down some very large guns - and those two men (played by different actors, because Gregory Peck and David Niven got too old waiting to be in the sequel) now lead (OK, tag along on) a different mission into Yugoslavia, to find the spy who ratted them out on the last mission.
They join a team led by an American, Col. Barnsby - there was a Col. Barnsby in the first film, but he was an Australian Air Force commander, played by Richard Harris. So I don't know if this is supposed to be the same character played by a different actor, or perhaps they just share a last name, which is a pretty strange coincidence.
There are a lot of different factions here, it's not just about Allies and Axis. There are Chetniks and Partisans, both are local rebel groups, but which one's aligned with the Nazis? Then we have double-agents and sleeper agents, and their alliances are always shifting, so navigating through the players to pull off the mission is a challenge in itself.
But the real thing to appreciate here is the team's level of ingenuity, which you'd like to think is the sort of thing that tipped the scales in World War II. If they need to eliminate a particular person, or a military target, what's the best way to do that? And if that doesn't work, what else can we try? If we can't lower the bridge, can we raise the river? And if we can't blow up the bridge, what's another way to take it out? And if we don't have the materials we need, how can we get them?
This sort of illustrates the point made in "Ender's Game" - it's creative thinking that wins wars.
Also starring Robert Shaw (last seen in "From Russia With Love"), Edward Fox (last seen in a bit role in "Lost in Space"), Franco Nero, Carl Weathers (last seen in "Semi-Tough"), Barbara Bach (last seen in "The Spy Who Loved Me"), Richard Kiel (last seen in "Moonraker"), Michael Byrne, Angus MacInnes, Michael Sheard (last seen in "Frenzy")
RATING: 6 out of 10 panzer tanks
No comments:
Post a Comment