SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Good concept, poorly executed.

good back-story, and good acting

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I saw this many years ago. Micael Longsdale deserved an Academy Award for the scene in a kitchen with the Nazis. Being tortured without showing the graphic details only the outcome made me feel sick to my stomach. Sometimes what you imagine is far more scary than what you see. The rest of the film was memorable by the fact that Mason didn't seem to grasp the need to be saved. I personally would have left him in the mountains for being annoying. It seems the premise was good even if the script was not that good. The film flopped at the box office for some reason. In the day we weren't given trailers that tell the whole story so it must have been word of mouth that doomed the film. Mason and Quinn should have been a sellout, but perhaps more was wanted from the audiences in 1979.

Director J. Lee Thompson does a remarkably tremendous job in bringing this epic war adventure to the screen. However, this is much more than an adventure. It is an unrelentingly powerful story of Nazi sadism and cruelty at its most raw. After all these years since its release, it still haunts those who initially witnessed its unholy imagery of SS savagery and Gestapo monstrousness. Beautifully filmed, with exciting sequences of action and overwhelming suspense, it features a cast of exceptional actors doing some of the best work of their careers. Of course, the most noteworthy and notorious performance is given by Malcom McDowel as the Nazi officer who is the epitome of pure evil and bloodthirsty perversion. He is nothing less than superb in the most intense role he has ever played. He personifies the Nazi mindset and lust for violence as no other actor ever has. It is truly one of the most memorably disturbing characters ever written for the screen and McDowel is stunning.

...I managed to pack into a dozen scenes with the whole period of Nazi tyranny in a convincingly evil way." - Malcolm McDowell about his work in The Passage. When I saw The Passage back in 1981, in Moscow, I had no idea that it had been a big flop in the USA where it only lasted a week upon theatrical release, that it was considered a bad movie a failure. It would be much later that I recognized very famous and talented actors who were in the film, James Matson, Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lee, and Patricia Neal. The film was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the Oscar nominated director of highly successful The Guns of Navarone (1961). By the time I was watching The Passage at the theater, I had not seen Stanley Kubrick's A Clock Work Orange or notorious Caligula, and I did not know what Malcolm McDowell was capable of as a screen villain. I did know McDowell from the Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man that also had been released theatrically in Moscow several years prior The Passage. O lucky Man had left a deep impression on me and huge part of it was McDowell's performance as Mick Travis, the young naive man with the most charming smile who wanted to succeed in this world. Watching McDowell in The Passage playing the psychotic obsessed Nazi chasing the family of the anti-fascist scientist across the Pyrenees I was horrified and genuinely scared. Every time he would enter the screen, I felt physically sick anticipating some horror act to follow and McDowell never disappointed. I won't argue that the movie may not be a great or even a good one but I do remember McDowell's performance all too well, and I could not forget him in the movie for 28 years. Now, after I've seen so many movies and memorable performances, I realize that McDowell was over the top and judging by his own words, he knew it very well and did it on purpose: "I played this real nasty Nazi who was chasing these people across the Pyrenees. We all knew real early on that the movie was not going to be any great work of art and so I was determined to have some fun with it. My attitude was that if I was going to play a Nazi, I was going to take it totally over the top and do it right. I ended up playing the character like a pantomime queen. What I was doing was so far out that James Mason turned to me one day and said, 'That's wonderful dear boy, but are you in our film? You seem to be doing something different from the rest of us'..." If after so many years, one performance in a supposedly bad movie stands out and you can't get it out of your mind, and you remember the exact day when you saw that movie, who you saw it with and how you felt, for me it means that the movie was not bad at all.

Quite Frankly, this film was terrible! The acting, the story, the sound, the lighting, the everything. Coming up with ten lines here is going to be hard. I mean, I can only say it sucked so many times. OK, let's look more closely at why it sucked? Malcolm McDowell, the legendary actor from "A Clockwork Orange," is in this film, kind of. His performance is so over the top, that we can only imagine what was going on in his personal life at the time. Did you know that SS officers wear jock straps that have swastikas on them? Well they do! At least McDowell's character (that can't seem to be killed) did. You know what, the film was awful and I have spoken too much about it.