The late J. Lee Thompson's
The Passage (1979)
I saw this in 1982 in the early days of American cable TV, when films made their cable debut only 1 to 3 years after their theater releases, and before videotape release was more common, Occasionally it was shown on syndicated TV during the 1980s. Somewhere I have a VHS copy of this film's edited re-run from there.
Does anyone else remember this movie? I would be mildly surprised if Phylo does not.
This was a WW2 thriller about a scientist (James Mason) and his family who must escape from France to Spain. The Resistance hires a Basque shepherd (Anthony Quinn) to lead them in a dangerous overland route passage across the Pyrenees. They are pursued by a murderous SS captain (Malcolm McDowell) and aided by a Gypsy patriarch (Christopher Lee).
- The screenplay was by Bruce Nicolaysen, based on his novel Perilous Passage. About 20 years ago I came across this book in a charity shop. I remember thinking there was a big difference between book and film as is usually the case, but had not understood it when the author for both are the same.
Director Thompson might be best known for The Guns of Navarone (1960), which had also starred Anthony Quinn. In Thompson's The Passage Quinn comes out rather like Zorba the Basque. Coincidentally, Quinn's co-stars from Navarone, Gregory Peck and David Niven, were reunited at the same time in another commando thriller, The Sea Wolves (1980).
According to some of the imdb.com commentary linked above, James Mason tagged
The Passage a box office flop during its production. In production values it seems to have been made like something like the "spaghetti Westerns" or "spaghetti war films" from the 1960s. Various of these B-films make for campy humor today, in or out of their genres, and especially if they have star casts as does this one.
There are actually two redeeming afterthoughts for it:
- Fans of Malcolm McDowell would probably like The Passage for him alone. McDowell might be best remembered for his series of cruel screen roles since Lindsay Anderson's If ... (1968) and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). He supposedly said that he did at least like his role in The Passage as a distillation of Nazi character extremes -- sadism, inferiority complex hiding behind police power, the smiling torturer, rape, and casual murder. In production Mason supposedly asked McDowell if he was acting in the same film as he at all, probably in the same spirit as realizing the film was a stinker. If true, I would have liked to know what answer he got.
The soundtrack by Michael J. Lewis is very good -- a sweeping, dramatic score that conjures grand scenes of the Pyrenees. It could be counted as one of those films where the musical score outdoes the film.
-- Alan
So what particular obscure, unknown or just plain bad war film - not any of the accepted classics - do you like?
I love that episode of Doctor Who!