Escape to Athena (1979)

Roger Moore is the commanding officer of a Nazi POW camp on the Greek coast. His main task is to use three prisoners ... David Niven, Richard Roundtree and Sonny Bono ... who are experts in antiquities to retrieve valuable archaeological relics for the Reich. A pair of American entertainers ... Elliot Gould and Stefanie Powers ... are picked up by the German army near the camp and became it's latest guests. Moore is not particularly sympathetic to the Nazi cause, so he teams up with his 3 experts and Greek partisans lead by Telly Savalas to take over the camp and steal some extremely valuable items from a nearby mountaintop monastery. This film is clearly meant to cash in on the success of "The Dirty Dozen" and it's imitators, most notably "Kelly's Heroes". It's characters are mostly morally questionable folks who walk a thin line between noble intentions and naked self-interest. In addition, many of the characters, Gould and Bono being the clearest examples, are just raging anachronisms who have stepped right out of the 1970's and into WWII. Unlike "The Dirty Dozen", this film just does not work for me. Major plot points are just frankly unbelievable (the Greek partisans use a brothel that caters to Nazi officers as their headquarters), and the action, when it finally comes, is rather flat and uninteresting. Great cast though ... although Moore should have never ever ever tried to do a German accent.

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.

Hogan's Heroes meets Batman-like camp. Totally and utterly implausible and fluffy. A lot of dumb Germans, etc. But if you go int it thinking that way it's not THAT bad. After all, it is a movie. Lots of explosions and gunfire and flames. It looks like they had fun making it. A nice vacation for all involved. If not just a payday. weird jump to "current times" (1979?) at the end. I saw this twice as a kid at the local town theater. Probably had a pack of Sweettarts and a flat coke. End credits include "lingerie by.......". Definitely wouldn't pay $10+ to see it but if you catch it on cable, give it a try. I'm now trying to make the required 10 lines here for submission.

I watched the movie a few years after it was released. Then I watched it on TV a few times and I enjoyed it every time. It is true that for a war film it looks sometimes unrealistic (as someone has already said) like "a holiday brochure" (really nice pictures). It is however an adventure film, with elements of comedy, so it is NOT meant to be realistic. The only realistic scenes are the ones from the town. I liked the actors - especially Roger Moore and Telly Savalas. They are very contrasting characters. I hope it will not be a spoiler to say that Roger plays a nice man that happens to be on the wrong side and Telly plays a cynical, ruthless (at least looking like that) man being on the right side. I liked some dialogues as well.