Force 10 from Navarone

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.