The acting in this movie is really good.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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 Austrian commandant of a German POW camp located in the Grecian Isles in Escape to Athena. He's got a couple of favorites among the prisoners, an Italian cook in Sonny Bono, an archaeologist in David Niven and a black GI magician in Richard Roundtree. In addition USO entertainers Elliott Gould and Stefanie Powers are shot down in their transport plane and become Moore's prisoners.Moore really hasn't got his heart in the commandant business. He's an antique dealer in civilian life and he relishes the assignment only because of the location where he's also involved in Adolph Hitler's looting of Greek antiquities of which there are many in that area. Niven and company aid him because if they didn't they'd be in the hands of the SS. STill they want there freedom.Which they get when they join with resistance leader Telly Savalas and his mistress, bordello madam Claudia Cardinale. It's rumored there's a lot of hidden loot in a monastery on a nearby hill, whatever Moore hasn't taken for his own private stock for after the war. But Savalas is interested in some prototype V2 rockets located there.Escape to Athena mixes the plot elements of The Guns of Navarone and Topkapi, but they're not stirred too well. The scenery is quite nice and I'm sure the prospect of some paid time in the Aegean Sea might have been a big inducement for all these people signing on for the movie.As he was involved with Stefanie Powers at the time, William Holden gets a small unbilled cameo in a brief scene with Elliott Gould. As it turns out Moore's Prison Camp is also Stalag XVII. That might have been part of the package for Stefanie to go to Greece.It was also plain dumb to make Richard Roundtree a black GI. Americans were not involved in that theater, let alone black soldiers. Now if they had made his character be part of the African colonial troops of the British Empire, it would have made more sense. Then again we couldn't have heard Roundtree call a German soldier a 'cool cat'.The action sequences are done well enough, but the cast here just collected their paychecks and walked through the parts.

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.