What was wrong with the first nine forces?

One of the movies that aired last August when Robert Shaw was honored during Summer Under the Stars is one that I had long known about but never actually seen: Force 10 From Navarone. So, when it showed up I made certain to put it on the DVR and then eventually watch it to do the obligatory post on it here.

As you can guess from the title, the Navarone is the one referred to in the classic movie The Guns of Navarone. That movie being a big hit, the producers wanted to put a sequel into production. Unfortunately, all sorts of production issues resulted in no sequel being made until the late 1970s, by which time the cast of the original was much too old for a sequel. Instead, we get a bit of footage from the original reminding us of what the soldiers in that movie did before the action moves to our original story.

It's now 1943, with the Americans beginning to make their way up Italy. The Brits want to find Nicolai, who nearly made the Navarone mission go bad as he turned out to be a double agent. He's now believed to be working with the Germans in Yugoslavia, to Maj. Mallory (Robert Shaw) and Sgt. Miller (Edward Fox) would like to parachute into Yugoslavia to find Nicolai and eliminate him. The Americans have plans for their own secret mission in Yugoslavia, and to that end are looking so send their "Force 10" into the country. The British try to commandeer one of the planes, and in the resulting fight some of Force 10 get injured, and an American soldier not part of the force, Sgt. Weaver (Carl Weathers) more or less stows away on the plane to escape the military police.

Worse for all of them, the plane they're flying over the Adriatic gets shot down by the Nazis, so a skeleton crew of British and Americans, the Americans commanded by Lt. Col. Barnsby (Harrison Ford) have to bail out over enemy territory and try to make it to their objective even though they have no idea where they are and no way to distinguish between Chetinks working against the Nazis, Chetniks nominally working the Nazis to try to survive, or Croaitan Ustaše. So it goes without saying that they eventually get captured by some Serbs under Dražak (Richard Kiel).

Dražak's mistress Maritza (Barbara Bach) helps Mallory and Barnsby escape, and they make their way to those Yugoslavs working against the Nazis. Except that they may not be, since Mallory thinks one of them may be the original Nicolai. It also doesn't help that the Americans and British have different missions they're hoping to accomplish, or that there are still some of their soldiers being held by Dražak. Eventually, we learn that the Americans' mission is to destroy a bridge in Bosnia that is a major transit point for the Germans, and the attempt to destroy that bridge forms much of the second half of the movie.

If Force 10 From Navarone were called anything other than that; ie. if it hadn't been about some of the soldiers who were in that original movie, I think it would be remembered as a fairly minor film from the end of the cycle of action movies about World War II. However, because of its provenance with the original producer and writer of The Guns of Navarone, it has that reputation that it is unable to live up to, with the result that it's generally considered a rather inferior film. That's a bit harsh on Force 10 From Navarone, which isn't a bad movie, albeit also certainly not a great one.