Navarone Collection

Robert Shaw

Harrison Ford

Barbara Bach

Edward Fox

Franco Nero

Carl Weathers

Richard Kiel

Alan Badel

Michael Byrne

Philip Latham

Angus MacInnes

Petar Buntić

Michael Sheard

Leslie Schofield

Anthony Langdon

Richard Hampton

Paul Humpoletz

Dicken Ashworth

Christopher Malcolm

Nick Ellsworth

Jonathan Blake

Roger Owen

Francis Mughan

Mike Sirett

Graeme Crowther

Jim Dowdall

Michael Osborne

Edward Peel

Michael Josephs

Jürgen Andersen

David Gretton

Paul Jerricho

Edward Kalinski

Robert Gillespie

Wolf Kahler

Hans Kahler

Ramiz Pašić

Robin Chapman

Alistair MacLean

Guy Hamilton

Robin Browne

Peter Robb-King

Irene Lamb

Guiseppe Carozza

Veljko Despotović

Nigel Wooll

Bert Batt

Colin Jamison

Cheryl Leigh

John Palmer

Emma Porteous

Freddie Cooper

Derek Holding

Tony Teiger

Eddie Stacy

Donko Buljan

Phil Sanderson

Dino Di Campo

William Trent

René Albouze

John Brady

Terry Apsey

Peter Hutchinson

Jack Heather

Anthony B. Unger

Misa Autić

Samuel Z. Arkoff

Marko Cerovac

Zdravko Smojnec

George Dean

Robin Gregory

Vicki Deason

Ron Goodwin

Christopher Challis

Geoffrey Drake

John R. Sloan

Raymond Poulton

Oliver A. Unger

Carl Foreman

David W. Orton

Drama

Adventure

Force 10 from Navarone

Columbia Pictures

American International Pictures

Navarone Productions

United Kingdom

United States of America

***Comic book “men on a mission” WW2 adventure with a great cast and lots of action***

Major Mallory and Sgt. Miller (Robert Shaw and Edward Fox) from “The Guns of Navarone” (1961) are commissioned to Yugoslavia to find & eliminate the German spy who tried to sabotage their mission at Navarone (Franco Nero). To get there, they have to join with an American unit on a covert mission to blow up a bridge. Harrison Ford plays the leader of the operation while Carl Weathers plays a sergeant escaping the MPs, a last minute addition. Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel show up later. 

"Force 10 from Navarone” (1978) is the McDonalds equivalent of the first movie. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad (after all, McDonalds ain’t bad), just that it lacks the class of its predecessor and trades it in for cartoonish writing and loads of action. It’s sort of a mixture of the first film with "Where Eagles Dare" (1968) and “Hornets’ Nest” (1970), but with a wildly comic book tone à la “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), albeit less goofy and not as proficient. The cast is great, though, and the locations are to die for. It’s just that the writing is glaringly juvenile.

FYI: This was Robert Shaw's second to last movie; he died of a heart attack three months before release at the too-young age of 51.

The film runs 1 hour, 58 minutes, and was mostly shot in the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Durdevica Tara Bridge on Tara River, Montenegro; and Jablanica Dam, Jablanicko Lake, Bosnia and Herzegovina).

GRADE: B-

CinemaSerf

You could always count on Ron Goodwin to come up with a lively score for a wartime movie, and he does so well here with this “Guns of Navarone” spin-off. It keeps the “Mallory” (Robert Shaw) and “Miller” (Edward Fox) roles and introduces them to American colonel “Barnsby” (Harrison Ford) as they hijack a Lancaster bomber and end up in Yugoslavia where the partisan army is fighting the encroaching Nazi war machine. The former two are up for tracking down a fifth columnist called “Nikolai” who had caused them considerable grief in Greece earlier in the war. The Colonel is to try and help the locals - led by “Petrovich” (Alan Badel) to stop the advancing army, and that means holding a vital bridge. Of course, when they arrive they have to find their potential allies, and with nobody quite sure who to trust, and the menacing “Drazak” (Richard Kiel without shiny teeth) on their trail, it’s dangerous stuff. A combination of fairly easy clues let us know who the baddie is, but as the adventure heads to it’s quite exciting denouement, there are loads of escapades for our ever diminishing squad as they set about their tasks. Ford and Shaw work well together, Fox and Franco Nero also do just about enough and the whole thing rollicks along nicely for just shy of a two hours that also introduces us to some earthily disguised WWII explosive devices. It was probably made just a decade too late to really resonate as a film about the atrocities of war, but as an action adventure film from a lesser-known theatre of the war, it’s quite an enjoyable watch that passes the time without stretching your grey cells too much.