Today, I take on Von Ryan's Express (1965).
A popcorn movie from the 1960s that borrows a stack of entertaining WW2 movie cliche's from "The Great Escape", "Bridge on the River Kwai", and the far superior 1964 movie, "The Train".
Trevor Howard has little to do but hang out and give a few speeches as it's really Sinatra's show. The rest of the cast does as well as it can with the cardboard characters. Sinatra seems a bit bored and, ahem, frankly too old for the part of an action hero (he was 50 at the time). It's just assumed that his character inspires the men without the screenplay or acting doing the heavy lifting to bring the audience along for the ride (oops, sorry).
The effects are decent and there is lots of good looking location work. The show improves once we get to the train heist part of the movie. The score isn't one of Goldsmith's best with a fair amount of jokey musical cues (slide whistles and trombones, anyone?) .
I'm guessing Dad saw this when it came out and got a kick out of it as WW2 entertainment fluff. Deep, it ain't, baby.
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