VividSimon Simply Perfect

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

ritacavell49 I saw this many years ago. Micael Longsdale deserved an Academy Award for the scene in a kitchen with the Nazis. Being tortured without showing the graphic details only the outcome made me feel sick to my stomach. Sometimes what you imagine is far more scary than what you see. The rest of the film was memorable by the fact that Mason didn't seem to grasp the need to be saved. I personally would have left him in the mountains for being annoying. It seems the premise was good even if the script was not that good. The film flopped at the box office for some reason. In the day we weren't given trailers that tell the whole story so it must have been word of mouth that doomed the film. Mason and Quinn should have been a sellout, but perhaps more was wanted from the audiences in 1979.

jlthornb51 Director J. Lee Thompson does a remarkably tremendous job in bringing this epic war adventure to the screen. However, this is much more than an adventure. It is an unrelentingly powerful story of Nazi sadism and cruelty at its most raw. After all these years since its release, it still haunts those who initially witnessed its unholy imagery of SS savagery and Gestapo monstrousness. Beautifully filmed, with exciting sequences of action and overwhelming suspense, it features a cast of exceptional actors doing some of the best work of their careers. Of course, the most noteworthy and notorious performance is given by Malcom McDowel as the Nazi officer who is the epitome of pure evil and bloodthirsty perversion. He is nothing less than superb in the most intense role he has ever played. He personifies the Nazi mindset and lust for violence as no other actor ever has. It is truly one of the most memorably disturbing characters ever written for the screen and McDowel is stunning.

MARIO GAUCI I had watched this on PAL VHS during the late 1980s; it's an ill-advised (and misguided) attempt to update the big-budget, star-studded WWII adventure spectacle spearheaded by THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) – by the same director and featuring one of its leads (Anthony Quinn), no less – for the more permissive 1970s (with new-fangled dollops of violence, sex and foul language). Being aware of its bad reputation (mostly due to Malcolm McDowell's outrageous contribution as the villain), I decided to give it another look when it turned up recently on Cable TV.The film involves a shepherd-cum-experienced mountain-climber (a rather glum Quinn) who's asked by the French resistance (in the figures of Marcel Bozzuffi and Michel Lonsdale) to take a prominent nuclear scientist (James Mason) and his family (including wife Patricia Neal and daughter Kay Lenz) across the Pyrenees to safety in neutral Spain; along the way, they're helped by a group of traveling gypsies (led by Christopher Lee), while McDowell is the maniacal SS officer in pursuit.The journey is fraught with problems – mainly caused by Neal's poor health (a really thankless role for the Oscar-winning actress), with which Quinn has little patience. Eventually, she decides to rid them of the burden and goes away to die in the snow (Quinn and Bozzuffi feel her emerging from the cabin where they're all sheltered, but do nothing to stop her!)…after which Mason tries to attack Quinn for pushing her to this, but falls flat on his face in the snow after only a couple of paces (this bit somehow reminded me of a scene from one of the NAKED GUN films in which George Kennedy lashes at a couple of bullies for mistreating his partner and ends up getting beaten to a pulp himself!). Lee, then, expires in a fiery death at the hands of the sadistic McDowell – except that whatever tension there was here is destroyed by its being continually cross-cut with the flight of the central group!However, the film's main source of entertainment is McDowell – especially via his campy attire as a chef while torturing the captured Lonsdale, his Swastika-imprinted underpants (during the scene in which he rapes Lenz), and even while mimicking the Fuehrer in front of a mirror (parting his hair a' la Hitler, putting the black comb above his lips as a makeshift moustache, and giving himself the Nazi salute). Surely it was no great stretch for him to go from this to Tinto Brass' CALIGULA (1979)! Worst of all, though, is the climax as a deranged and wounded McDowell turns up at the cabin (after having miraculously survived an avalanche he caused himself!) and bloodily exterminates the remaining members of the group…which transpires to be merely a delirious fantasy – one final folly enacted in his own head, and given away really by being intercut with snippets from scenes that have gone on before! – and that he's the one to perish. In the face of all this, Michael J. Lewis' sweeping score seems out of place – especially when considering that the action sequences are too few and far between, and certainly nothing to write home about when compared to the typical war movies of its ilk.

mombasa_pete Yes many dislike it but this film in the performance of McDowell manages to capture everything that was terrifying about the Nazi regime, there is an authentic atmosphere of dread and oppression, more so than any other film about WW2 made, how it was in occupied territories.The stand out scene is the one where he interrogates the Michel Lonsdale resistance man, and chops off his fingers while cooking dinner, we don't see it the camera pans away, but it still is terrifying! More so than any Texas chainsaw film! Yes they really did things like this the SS! Watch it now!