Force Ten from Navarone is the 1978 sequel to 1961’s The Guns of Navarone and starts with a recap of the ending of the previous film, showing the super-cool giant guns of the title being destroyed and our heroes escaping to a British ship. Our heroes are revealed to be played by Edward Fox (A Bridge too Far) and Robert Shaw (The Battle of the Bulge) instead of the original stars, David Niven (The Way Ahead) and Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High).

One might be tempted to say this is the first of this film’s disappointments in comparison to the original, but the sequel comes seventeen years later, so picking younger actors is certainly reasonable, and Fox and Shaw do well in the roles they are given. Calling this film a disappointment is, however, also reasonable. It is clearly the worst of the Alistair Maclean World War II movies, but the other two movies (Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone) are really good, which makes judging this film on its own merits difficult.

In fact, I’ll be spending much of this review encouraging you to watch the other two films instead of telling you why this one is pretty good because it’s just not as good. In fact, go watch those two films.

I’ll wait.

They’re pretty good, right? This one isn’t as good. The plots and charms of all three movies are very similar–and some of the twists in this film are certainly entertaining. But Force Ten is not as well directed and doesn’t have as good action or as many signature moments as the other two.

This site kind of has a thing for attractive women with MP 40s

All three have quick-thinking heroes who deceive Germans with brilliant lies and more twists than are strictly needed for a single movie–and traitors; someone’s a traitor, and we often cannot guess. Force Ten often leaves us wondering who is on whose side, though, like all three films, our heroes are quite clearly our heroes; Harrison Ford (perhaps best known for 1979’s Hanover Street) isn’t going to be the traitor, but Barbara Bach could be.

And all the Red Shirts are agonizingly clear. When the last one dies, you’re left wondering what took them so long to kill a character who served no function other than to eventually die, leaving our heroes to fight on bravely against overwhelming odds. Where Eagles Dare does much the same thing, but some characters who are not Clint Eastwood or Richard Burton help keep things complicated because nothing in any of these movies is simple. In Guns of Navarone, some characters are clearly more expendable, yet they have depth, and their deaths are part of their characters and part of making sure the plan succeeds.

Force Ten’s twists are as clever (or as ridiculous) as any in the other two films. There are probably fewer twists here, which is fine because the other two have rather a great many, maybe more than Operation Crossbow, which has many, many twists.

Force Ten may seem to go over well trod ground, creating a faint copy of the cleverness of the two earlier films because we’ve seen these twists already (it’s fair to say one involving scars is egregious). We’ve seen people be captured by Germans and use clever ruses to help them escape and lie in clever ways, but I really like the big lie in Force Ten—it seems the least fanciful and the cleverest at the same time, and it’s well scripted, but the scene where they tell it doesn’t seem as well blocked or edited as some in the other two films.

I think this shot from The Guns of Navarone is better done than the following one. Everyone seems more natural, is in focus and in frame.

Shaw, Ford and Fox all play their lies nearly as well as Burton does his nearly innumerable lies, but only nearly because Burton’s performance is outstanding.

Director Guy Hamilton (The Battle of Britain, The Colditz Story) also did more than a few James Bond films, so he knows how to direct, but I want to blame him here; many of the scenes aren’t punchy—oh my God; I wrote “punchy”—they don’t pop. Someone stop me because these terms that try to convey how the movie doesn’t generate excitement are far more bland and trite than the movie is. The movie isn’t trite but may be a little bland.

The action scenes are vanilla. People land haymakers or have shootouts that aren’t clever or particularly exciting, something I would never say about Where Eagles Dare or The Guns of Navarone, and the lackluster action sequences may be the movie’s biggest failing.

Force Ten’s finale lacks the charm and force of the other two. There are no cool huge guns manned by dozens of Germans in cool uniforms. There’s no race to the airport with things exploding and heroes with MP-40s valiantly mowing down waves of hapless, pursuing Germans. Shaw and Ford have a good scene at the end—it’s surprising and funny and satisfying because this movie is actually pretty good; it just isn’t as good as two World War II classics.

Recommendation

Watch this movie if you have some free time because it’s pretty good. If you’re a completist, you should definitely own Force Ten from Navarone. If not, it comes in some multipacks worth considering.