Escape to Athena (1979)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Perfect cast and a good story

The acting in this movie is really good.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A stupid yet smug, Aren't We Hip Now? late 70's look at WWII and WWII movies. Savales tried to act serious some of the time; but most couldn't be bothered.Most of the characters were pretty annoying- probably Elliott Gould's "comedian" most of all. (Actually, I found Roger Moore was one of the more palatable ones here, bad German accent and all).But Director Cosamatos obviously loved Gould's a**. Literally. In fact Cosamatos was obviously an @ss-man- we get countless shots of 'em, especially Gould's fat tush. Make it a drinking game if you are ever forced to watch this.

It's always weird for me to see an actor who played James Bond in another movie from that period of their 007 career. This would have to be the weirdest so far.Roger Moore plays an antique collecting SS Officer stationed in Greece during WWII who runs a prison camp. In this camp, which more or less resembles a resort, are David Niven (also a former James Bond,) Richard Roundtree (Shaft!,) and Sonny Bono (the ex-Mr. Cher.) In a 'Hogan's Heroes' type set-up they annoy Roger Moore and his evil SS colleague (played by Anthony Valentine) by always trying to escape. When they are caught, instead of being put to death they are given a slap on the wrist. You see, it turns out that Roger Moore isn't a bad Nazi, he's just an opportunist, which we learn when two American art dealers, played by Elliot Gould and Stefanie Powers, arrive. He and the three prisoners and these two Americans plan on stealing some treasure hidden in a local monastery. When the Germans lose the war, they'll make millions.Meanwhile, Telly Savalas (a former Bond villain) plays a Greek resistance fighter who is holed up in a local brothel run by the vampy Claudia Cardinale. He plans on liberating the Nazi prison camp and destroying a German submarine.After an overlong and dull second act, it turns out that the Nazi's have turned the local monastery into a secret launch pad for a deadly nuclear bomb. Telly leads Mr. Cher, Shaft, and Elliot Gould up the cliffs to the monastery while Moore, Niven and Stefanie Powers get to work on destroying the German submarine.If only any of it were exciting. This movie is only good for seeing such a big, interesting cast in such a big disaster of a WWII adventure. The most egregious offender is Elliot Gould, whose character seems like he's right out of the 70's, not the 40's. In fact, this whole film seems to take place in some alternate reality where WWII continued on into the late 1970's.

This film is a fantastic brochure for Greece and it's surrounding Isles. There are some beautiful shots of mountains and hills and then Roger Moore steps in and blocks the view. We get to see a gorgeous, ancient monastery but then Telly Savalas blocks the view by firing a machine gun and lumbering around. Damn. The ocean view was very pretty until Elliot Gould got in the way, slipping on a banana skin. "Move out of the way, Elliot! You're blocking the scenery!" The trees were particularly lovely until David Niven blocked the view. These actors keep getting in the way of the visual tour of the islands that we are treated to. I wonder if the Greek Tourism Commission got a rich cut of this films earnings? What? What do you mean it flopped?

Films about the Second World War were highly popular in the British cinema throughout the fifties and sixties, but by the time "Escape to Athena" was made at the end of the seventies the genre was beginning to run out of steam. The film could be described as a sort of "Guns of Navarone" meets "Colditz". Like the former, it is set on a German-occupied Greek island, and like the latter it concerns the attempts of a group of Allied prisoners to escape from a prisoner of war camp. The prisoners, however, are not merely concerned with escaping. They also plan to make a raid on a nearby monastery in order to loot a collection of priceless Byzantine golden plates. The local Greek Resistance are also interested in the monastery, because the Nazis are using it as a base for the V2 rockets with which they hope to defeat any Allied attempt to liberate the island.One unusual thing about the film is that it features a "good German", although both the noun and the adjective need to be given a fairly wide definition. Major Otto Hecht, the commandant of the prison camp, is Viennese by birth, and therefore only German by virtue of the 1938 Anschluss between Germany and Austria. In civilian life he was an antique dealer, and he is not above using his military position to loot antiquities which he ships to relatives in Switzerland, hoping to sell them at a profit after the war. In wartime, however, embezzlement of this nature is a minor offence compared with the other crimes of the Nazis, and the comparatively liberal Hecht is repelled by the brutality of some of his comrades such as the fanatical SS Major Volkmann (played by Anthony Valentine who had played a very similar role in the early seventies British TV serial "Colditz"), and has no difficulties about throwing his lot in with the prisoners he is supposedly guarding.The other characters are something of a mixed bunch. We have David Niven going through the motions as an upper-class English archaeologist, Telly Savalas as a Resistance leader, Richard Roundtree as a black American POW and Sonny Bono as an Italian marooned on the wrong side after his country switched sides in the war. The war film is normally a male-dominated genre, although this one has rather more glamour than normal, with Claudia Cardinale as a Greek prostitute and Stefanie Powers as a swimmer turned actress (presumably based on Esther Williams), one of two American entertainers captured by the Germans, the other being Elliott Gould's Jewish comedian.It was a surprise to see Roger Moore playing something other than an Englishman, although it must be said that he does not make a convincing German. This film came halfway through his reign as 007, and he sounds much the same as he did when playing James Bond, making only the most perfunctory attempt at a foreign accent. As in some of his less successful Bond films he just seems content to stroll through the film without putting any great effort. To be fair, however, the same could be said of most of the rest of the cast. One wonders if they signed up merely in order to spend a few months in the Greek sunshine. Niven, for example, too old in his late sixties to be taking a leading role in an action film like this, seems even more laid-back than Moore.If the cast seem uninspired, that is possibly because they are dealing with a very uninspiring script. The film's occasional attempts to blend humour with action (mostly involving Gould's character) tend to fall flat. "Escape to Athena" is very much an average war adventure, or even a below average war adventure, with little to set it apart from all the other indifferent war films that had appeared on both sides of the Atlantic over the preceding few decades. 4/10