Highly Overrated But Still Good

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A 'Stalag 17' style P.O.W. action adventure feeble on jokes and suspense but it is packaged with pleasing elements. A joke cameo appearance from William Holden early on prepares us that it's going to be a good, old fashioned war romp. It's beautifully shot (blu-ray version is sumptuous) with a stellar cast and there is a fabulous motorcycle chase through the narrow streets of Rhodes. One of the main criticisms is that with no obvious lead role it has a disjointed feel. It's good Sunday afternoon fun after the roast beef and pudding.

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.

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

When people compile a list of the greatest war films ever they often overlook this rip roaring action adventure.......this film has everything you could ever want in a film and more....The story involves a group of prisoners of war (David Niven, Elliot Gould, Claudia Cardinale) held on a Greek island during WWII, who recruit the aid of their sympathetic camp commandant in harassing the SS. Below I have tried to identify the factors that separate this film from run of the mill war films.1) Tele Savalas as a Greek resistance fighter / Monk. Tele as you would expect brings the same gritty realism as he did to his Portrayal of Blofeld in 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'.2) David Niven is superb as a British Antiques expert held prisoner by the German army. Niven expertly manages to convey the characters inner turmoil and disbelief of the situation he has found himself in. Niven also manages to turn in a great comic performance with the help of Elliot Gould's character.3) The director George P Cosmatos manages to expertly capture the futility and horrific nature of war, in a style of direction that is reminiscent of early William Friedkin work.4) However, the real star of the show is Roger Moore. Moore plays a German Officer who witnessing the atrocities carried out by his country decides to switch sides and help the allies, namely Tele and his band of fighters. Moore shows once again what a truly gifted actor he is, with the simple twitch of an eyebrow he can convey the purest of emotions, that would send even the most stone hearted person to tears.So in summary...Escsape to Athena is a life changing movie, it shows that the British film industry could still produce films as good as / or even better than their American rivals, but from a personal view it restored my faith in humanity and what people can achieve when they work together.