Review of Escape to Athena (1979) by James H — 09 Jul 2013

Set on an anonymous Greek island during the last year of the war, 1944, Allied POWs in a remote POW camp are forced to work for the Germans by digging up ancient Greek archaeological artifacts. The camp Commandant, Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore), was an Austrian antiques dealer before the war. Unknown to Hecht's superiors is the fact that he's withholding the more valuable finds for his own personal gain, and sending them to his sister living in Switzerland. Hecht is far from the dutiful army officer, the total opposite of the nearest town's Commandant, Gestapo Major Volkmann (Anthony Valentine). The prisoners conspire as well. Knowing that they would be sent to another prison camp and endure worse hardships should they run out of artifacts, they repeatedly "discover" the same ones. Volkmann and his Lieutenants (Siegfried Rauch and Richard Wren) rule the town's population with a sadistic grip, executing the innocent residents just as easily as enemy soldiers. The only opposition to the Germans is Zeno (Telly Savalas), a former Monk, and his few resistance fighters who use the local brothel as an undercover headquarters. Zeno, who is in contact with Allied Headquarters, is ordered to break the prisoners out of their camp to increase his numbers and therefore liberate the town from the Germans and also secure a U-Boat refuelling depot. Using two captured USO artists Charlie (Elliott Gould) and Dottie (Stefanie Powers) to perform a concert as cover, the prisoners and Zeno's resistance take over the camp. With the choice of helping the resistance or being killed by Zeno, Hecht joins forces with the allies to help them eradicate Volkmann's troops and as well capturing the fuel depot...

When seeing the cast list of "Escape To Athena" you would think this would be a pretty ok WWII ensemble piece, but unfortunately it´s not. It´s a shitty try to make something similar to "Kelly´s Heroes" and "The Great Escape", but fails miserably in all areas. Bad dialogue, bad direction (some actions sequences are ok though), really bad acting (Moore´s german accent, my oh my...), incoherent plot and a bad "slip on a banana peel" sort of humour taking over a lot of the scenes. It´s just a mish mash of everything and nothing holds together. Almost all actors from Niven to Savalas seems to have no idea what´s going on and maybe took the roles to get some downtime at this beautiful island setting. The production team has done some serious miscasting in my book, and I reckon they only looked upon who might be a bankable star at the time and thus get the audience to the cinemas due to that fact. At the same time it´s obviously a large-scaled and lavishly produced movie with a nice island surrounding and a musical score by Lalo Schifrin. Thus, it seems they had the whole thing in the bag preproduction wise, but somewhere along the line someone fucked up and the ends didn´t meet whatsoever.