A pretty familiar and simplistic action piece from Leon Klimovsky, with a decent cast and little else of value.
Jack Palance stars as an American commando officer, who must lead commandos on a strange mission behind-the-lines in France. None of the men know the complete plan, so they basically wander around from place to place confusing the enemy until a big, booming climax.
The film features an acceptable cast, with Jack Palance in the lead as a gutsy commander. Unfortunately, just like Michael Rennie in COMMANDO_ATTACK Palance is a 1 dimensional character with no personality. Some scenes, in which he curses at suboordinates sound incredibly corny and every time he gives a command he yells "Give 'em all ya got!" Mankiewicz has no writing talent, and Palance never comes to life. Andrea Bosic from BATTLEFORCE tries hard as one of the commandos, as does Gerard Tichy (LAST DAY OF THE WAR) as an Anti-Hitler German General. We've also got Mirko Ellis (BATTLE OF THE COMMANDOS) in a small and heroic role as an American commando. Wrap up the cast with Giuseppe Addobbati (THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN) as an American officer and Alberto de Mendoza as a German double agent, who constantly switches sides.
The combat scenes are very well-filmed, with lots and lots of explosions, bullet ricochets, familiar M48 tanks and lots of extras falling down and dying. The weapons used here are Italian Beretta submachine-guns (like in BATTLE OF THE COMMANDOS) which does take away from what little realism there is.
Cinematography is actually pretty good, and the countryside looks a lot like France. The musical score by Armando Trovajoli is a pretty mournful sounding score, and doesn't fit the mood of the movie until the last 5 minutes or so.
I really don't like this film much despite all the good stuff it's got going for it. Mankiewicz and his writers didn't do a very good job with the script; there's a lot of boring dialog and not much else. It's pretty pro-war and fun until the last 10 minutes or so, which stresses the human cost and waste of life. There are a few interesting plot twists, though, which kept me awake.
I'm actually not sure what version of this film I saw. It's a dub from what I believe is a VHS from Saturn, due to the decent color transfer, background audio hiss and occasional dropouts. It's a transfer of identical quality to their release of DESERT COMMANDO.
All in all, this isn't a great film nor is it bad. It's got a good cast, fair action sequences, and decent production values but a pretty boring script and little originality.
