So much average

Just perfect...

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

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Lee Van Cleef and Jack Kelly are the two American stars of this European made war film with an Italian and German cast. Van Cleef is a combat veteran of the Pacific and Kelly is a Captain in his first mission. That mission is a gem.Kelly and Van Cleef head a team of picked Commandos all of whom have an Italian background and speak fluent Italian. Their mission is to take a desert waterhole over from a company of Italian soldiers and hold it until Eisenhower's army, landing in Morocco can reach it. In the meantime the group is to kill all the Italian soldiers and take over their command like a relief unit and keep their cover under the watchful eyes of the Germans. Van Cleef is convinced that Kelly is incompetent and Kelly proves him right. Their bickering also endangers the whole mission. The story is interesting, but the production is truly shoddy. Not more to be said about Commandos.

I got this as part of Millcreek's 50 Combat Classics for under 20.00 at Amazon. It has some decent movies on it and is worth the purchase. My experience with Italian war movies are that most made in the 60's (well just about all) are comic book with the exception of the one about the Naples uprising and the one about the Battle Of El Alemain, both are good for a couple of viewings before you see some pretty bad flaws with the acting. I had low aspirations for Commandos but the print on this public domain set was so good, and Lee Van Cleef is so warped that I started to get into it and was ready to give this a 8 star review. Then something happened, actually that was incorrect, nothing happened. You can pretty much skip the middle 1/3 and not miss anything, I wish I had. Its a shame too because this film print is really decent and a really wide format wide screen, plus you've got two actors you will recognize, Van Cleef and the German guy who flew the fighter plane over Omaha beach in The Longest Day movie (among other recognizable roles he has played to American audiences). Production values are really decent here, the problem is the script, its pretty bad. The story curiously enough was written by someone with a Jewish sounding name, I find that curious since it's a joint Italian/German production and clearly puts both of their armies in a good light were as the Americans kind of stink. 5 of 10 only for hard core war film buffs. Go in with very low expectations and you will be happy.

Commandos is one of those movies I remember watching on the late-late-late show back in the late 70s and early 80s. It aired frequently.I was quite surprised to find it included in a WWII movie multipack I bought at WM. An entirely different description of Commandos was listed, so imagine my surprise when I saw it was the old Lee Van Cleef movie! This movie isn't going to win any awards. There's no historic accuracy to it at all, other than the Germans and Italians were fighting in North Africa (or the Western Desert, for our British friends). But it's still fun to watch.

I've now watched this one about five times and just don't get the vibe. It might be because this is more or less a straight-up war movie that happened to be made by Italians rather than a Spaghetti Western with tanks instead of horses. The film seems to be lacking in the "fun" department too, with a heavy handed musical score, shameless overacting by the usually more low-keyed Lee Van Cleef, a cast of hundreds of nobody's rather than just a dozen or so, and a brooding sense of doom that builds into an over-the-top final battle scene where everyone of importance to the movie dies horribly. Thank God. Even the funky desert goggles couldn't liven things up, might as well kill everybody.War Is Hell and of course it shouldn't be fun, so fans of mainstream war films will perhaps enjoy this more than the cultists -- and they got the stupid machine guns + uniforms etc right for once, thank freakin' God for that ... I also recognize another Euro War formula element here, and that is the Singing Germans scene. This is where the decadence of the Nazi chic is portrayed by having the high ranking "Krauts" sit around a table enjoying first a hearty, fattening meal & then group-assaulting whatever liquor is on hand. Preferably expensive French wine (looted from the innocent) or top shelf German schnapps (withheld from the lower ranks). And as they get drunk, the Germans begin to sing some Vaterland schnitzel song that has them waving glasses, embracing each other, smiling like fools, and not noticing as the spy in their midst readies his stiletto for a quick execution or perhaps French Partisans loot the ammo dump. Look for Singing German scenes in HELL IN NORMANDY, CHURCHILL'S LEOPARDS and BATTLE OF THE LAST PANZER for more information.COMMANDOS does have a great sequence where the captured Italian officers break out of their jail cell to fight their American commando captors, and like with Umberto Lenzi's DESERT COMMANDOS this movie sort of tricks you into rooting for the Axis soldiers, including a sympathetic German officer who comes off as rather a decent chap. Lee Van Cleef on the other hand comes across as a sweaty faced, sneering, jittery psychopath barely able to contain his homicidal rage, and the best image of the film has him staring into the eyes of a dead man he killed with his bare hands, reliving a flashback to a disastrous raid gone bad from his days fighting in the Pacific. He is a great exaggeration of the battle scarred WW2 vet, burnt out to the point of not caring about the difference between right & wrong, but so over-wrought that you wish someone would get him his black suit & horse.The closing battle is a doozy for sure, but I don't know about this one: It's a slog, and sense desperation in the 26 credited scriptwriters. And by the way, those miraculous widescreen bargain bin releases were made from a (now discontinued) Japanese DVD release -- "Clara Vision" or "Front Row" didn't do anything but rip off a nice rare DVD for their commercialized re-burn, and congratulating them for their work is like rooting for BitTorrent. Welcome to the world of public domain genre films, where the point is to rip off the best version possible, undercut the original releases with a ridiculously/suspiciously low price, and as such de-value a rugged little distinctive movie into a bit of garbage on sale for $.49 cents in the store where people go to buy things like forks, mutated Doritos or cheap party decorations. If that's your idea of progress, here you go. 4/10