jubilee77 If one asked why does the press and critics hate "this movie" and they would have loads of different answers on whether it has a rather poor plot and its either silly or overdone and this World War II adventure titled Escape to Athena is no exception being among the worst films to be premiered during 1979 and there is every possibility that this movie almost looked a bit like a remake of The Guns of Navarone classic due to similarity of filming locations supposing centred around the Mediterranean. Even so, the casting of Roger Moore, Telly Savalas and David Niven plus many more clearly seemed to be totally wasted in this utterly inept movie where they seem to be enjoying the roles they should never have played until they realise it when this one crashed in the Box Office and by look of it, has World War II crept into the computerised security era of 1979 some 34 years after it supposed to have ended? At the same time as well as starring as James Bond in Moonraker, Roger Moore had also filmed another failure movie, this one being North Sea Hyjack. Either Moore didn't take film roles seriously enough and can't act or was he typecast as Simon Templar or James Bond and seemed to parachute helplessly into unsuccessful films.

Jackson Booth-Millard I am always keen to try war films with a good amount of actors in the cast, and even though this had a low rating, I was still willing to try it, from George P. Cosmatos (Rambo: First Blood Part II, Tombstone). Basically it is World War II, and the Germans have managed to sweep through Greece where camp Stalag VII-Z is located where various civilian prisoners have been thrown. The camp is under control of unpleasant brutality enjoying SS Major Volkmann (Anthony Valentine), and the more charming and former dodgy Viennese art merchant Major Otto Hecht (Sir Roger Moore). Amongst the prisoners who have been spared their lives are archaeology Professor Blake (David Niven), American show performer and presenter Charlie Del Mar (Elliott Gould) and his wife Dottie (Stefanie Powers), black POW Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and Italian cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono). Local Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas) and these prisoners have plans not to escape the camp, but to take it over to avoid more villagers being executed. However, they all have the same goal when they hear of priceless treasures on the nearby Mount Athena inside the monastery, and Hecht is persuaded to help with a cut. Of course with an invasion on the way Zeno and the gang have to hurry before the secret German rocket installation beneath the monastery mountain can be activated. Also starring Claudia Cardinale as Eleana and William Holden as Prisoner smoking a cigar in prison camp. Moore might be a good charming lead, but his German accent is terrible, and co-stars Niven, Savalas, Gould and Roundtree all get their moments too. The war element is possibly the least focused part of the story which I found really boring in parts, so much so I even dozed off, not even the explosions and action could do much to grab my attention, so a disappointing war adventure. Adequate!

intelearts Absolutely dreadful 70s mish mash of comedy and action - all overacted and under directed. This really has lazy written all over it - dialed-in performances and everything is done in a way that belittles everyone involved.The plot of a misfit gaggle of POWs on a Greek island with a benevolent German commandant (Roger Moore) who decide to rob a Monastery sounds good but the reality is just awful, and horribly banal.The whole film is not helped by occasional forays into a harder colder sadistic SS company who arbitrarily hang and shoot the Greek citizenry, and Telly Savalas as an ex-monk with too much testosterone is no better.Have to be honest and say this is probably my least favourite war film of all time - it just jars at every stage - even the great David Niven - who could make any line seem natural - seems totally bemused by the awfulness of the effort here. Maybe he did it out of paternal love for his son who co-produced this fiasco.I firmly believe this film was one of the main reasons Hollywood stopped making WWII films and started making Vietnam films, and on the evidence here who can blame them? Fantastic cast, awful, awful, awful film - not even worth watching on a cold, wet Autumn Saturday - honestly...Look and feels like an amateur holiday video... good luck enjoying this one!

James Hitchcock Films about the Second World War were highly popular in the British cinema throughout the fifties and sixties, but by the time "Escape to Athena" was made at the end of the seventies the genre was beginning to run out of steam. The film could be described as a sort of "Guns of Navarone" meets "Colditz". Like the former, it is set on a German-occupied Greek island, and like the latter it concerns the attempts of a group of Allied prisoners to escape from a prisoner of war camp. The prisoners, however, are not merely concerned with escaping. They also plan to make a raid on a nearby monastery in order to loot a collection of priceless Byzantine golden plates. The local Greek Resistance are also interested in the monastery, because the Nazis are using it as a base for the V2 rockets with which they hope to defeat any Allied attempt to liberate the island.One unusual thing about the film is that it features a "good German", although both the noun and the adjective need to be given a fairly wide definition. Major Otto Hecht, the commandant of the prison camp, is Viennese by birth, and therefore only German by virtue of the 1938 Anschluss between Germany and Austria. In civilian life he was an antique dealer, and he is not above using his military position to loot antiquities which he ships to relatives in Switzerland, hoping to sell them at a profit after the war. In wartime, however, embezzlement of this nature is a minor offence compared with the other crimes of the Nazis, and the comparatively liberal Hecht is repelled by the brutality of some of his comrades such as the fanatical SS Major Volkmann (played by Anthony Valentine who had played a very similar role in the early seventies British TV serial "Colditz"), and has no difficulties about throwing his lot in with the prisoners he is supposedly guarding.The other characters are something of a mixed bunch. We have David Niven going through the motions as an upper-class English archaeologist, Telly Savalas as a Resistance leader, Richard Roundtree as a black American POW and Sonny Bono as an Italian marooned on the wrong side after his country switched sides in the war. The war film is normally a male-dominated genre, although this one has rather more glamour than normal, with Claudia Cardinale as a Greek prostitute and Stefanie Powers as a swimmer turned actress (presumably based on Esther Williams), one of two American entertainers captured by the Germans, the other being Elliott Gould's Jewish comedian.It was a surprise to see Roger Moore playing something other than an Englishman, although it must be said that he does not make a convincing German. This film came halfway through his reign as 007, and he sounds much the same as he did when playing James Bond, making only the most perfunctory attempt at a foreign accent. As in some of his less successful Bond films he just seems content to stroll through the film without putting any great effort. To be fair, however, the same could be said of most of the rest of the cast. One wonders if they signed up merely in order to spend a few months in the Greek sunshine. Niven, for example, too old in his late sixties to be taking a leading role in an action film like this, seems even more laid-back than Moore.If the cast seem uninspired, that is possibly because they are dealing with a very uninspiring script. The film's occasional attempts to blend humour with action (mostly involving Gould's character) tend to fall flat. "Escape to Athena" is very much an average war adventure, or even a below average war adventure, with little to set it apart from all the other indifferent war films that had appeared on both sides of the Atlantic over the preceding few decades. 4/10