THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: J. Lee Thompson
SCREENWRITER: Bruce Nicolaysen
FILM STARS: Anthony Quinn, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell, Patricia Neal, Kay Lenz, Christopher Lee, Michael Lonsdale, Marcel Bozzuffi, Paul Clemens, Jim Broadbent (uncredited)
COUNTRY: England
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Bruce Nicolaysen
TYPE: Novel
PUBLISHER: Sphere
THIS EDITION
PUBLISHED: 1979
COUNTRY: Great Britain
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1976
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: Perilous Passage
NOTES
GENRE: War
WORDS: I love Anthony Quinn and will watch any film he is in. I will watch any film with James Mason and Malcolm McDowell in it (in the latter case not always an easy task). I will watch any film directed by J. Lee Thompson.
Of course then I will watch The Passage.
Is it good? Yes and no. It has many flaws but there are a lot more respected films that aren’t as much fun.
During World War II a Basque shepherd (Anthony Quinn) is hired by the French Resistance to safely guide an important scientist (James Mason), his wife (Patricia Neal), daughter (Kay Lenz), and son (Paul Clemens) through a passage across the Pyrenees. In hot pursuit is a psychotic SS officer (Malcolm McDowell) who will torture anyone who helps the fugitives, including the leader (Christopher Lee) of a gypsy caravan.
This is a high adventure World War 2 story as opposed to a war drama film, or a men in war film, or a historical war film.
So, everything can be a little over the top.
Anthony Quinn plays his slightly befuddled ordinary peasant who rises to the challenge role as he has done many times, and, I never tire of watching him do it. For me, it’s a little like comfort food. Quinn can chew scenery but seems a little subdued here but that may be because co-star Malcolm McDowell isn’t just chewing scenery but devouring it with gluttonous joy (something he would also do in his next film Caligua (1979) playing the decadent Roman emperor of the title). He is unrepented evil as the SS officer, but he is hard to take seriously because of one liners and intended humour. It’s a moustache twirling performance though one with dollops of sexual and physical sadism. He even wears underpants with a swastika on them. I hate to call it fun because of who he portrays but it is. Of course, all this evil makes his comeuppance all that much more better.
McDowell later (1981) called the movie “utter rubbish. I took it only because I needed money to pay my taxes. Making it depressed me terribly.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passage_(1979_film)
In an interview with Starlog Magazine (September 198) McDowell said of this movie: “That movie contains some of the best work I’ve ever done. I managed to pack into a dozen scenes with the whole period of Nazi tyranny in a convincingly evil way.”
He also said this in Starlog Magazine (July 1995) “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’.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079700/reference/
That’s Malcolm.
James Mason is dialing it in which means he is still utterly convincing in his role. He was never bad even if the films around him were atrocious. All he has to do here is make it through the snow and pontificate every now and then about men and war. Patricia Neal has an almost nothing role culminating in self-sacrificing heroism. Christopher Lee is good as the noble gypsy though a little against type as he normally would have played the SS officer. Kay Lenz is there to provide the sex interest.
J. Lee Thompson is probably my favourite English director along with Hitchcock, Basil Dearden, Jack Cardiff and maybe Michael Winner. He could do high adventure (North West Frontier (1959), Taras Bulba (1962), Kings of the Sun (1963)), war (Ice Cold in Alex (1958), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Before Winter Comes (1969)) and crime drama, much of it laden with sexual sadomasochism that became more pronounced as time went on and the censors relaxed (Cape Fear (1962), the slasher Happy Birthday to Me (1981), 10 to Midnight (1983), Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)). Specific films aside he seemed to squeeze in sexual assaults as if they were just another part of life’s everyday obstacles, into all sorts of films at a rate to rival Michael Winner. But, he never let anything get in the way of the storytelling. It may seem insensitive, but his films are here to entertain not counsel.
The SS in the 70s was always portrayed through a sexual sado masochistic lens … dating back to mainstream films like The Damned (1969), The Night Porter (1974) and the exploitive Love Camp 7(1969) but culminating in the 70s naziploitation films (Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), SS Girls (1977), Fräuleins in Uniforms (1973), SS Experiment Camp (1976), Elsa Fräulein SS (1977) etc), So it is inevitable that here would be the same along with some gratuitous nudity.
The film is, not surprisingly, uneven in mood or perhaps it just doesn’t care. There is violence, adventure, humour, sadism, torture, rape all within close proximity of each other.
But yes, it is entertaining. The action has that pre-CGI excitement where everything is real, the military hardware lumbers along, the explosions are all colourful and the special effects guys are destroying things without destroying them (the budget was big but not that big).
The film was written by Bruce Nicolaysen based on his novel. It was his only screenplay. Apart from some name changed the film follows the book. It is Alistair MacLean type stuff without the set-up thrills. He went on to write a series of historical dramas about the fictional de Kuypers family in America.
There is a rousing (or loud depending on your point of view) score by Michael J. Lewis and excellent location photography of the Pyrenees in France.
What more could you want?
More apparently. The film at the time was a flop.
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That sounds like a very interesting movie, I will try to track it down on YouTube.
Christopher Lee would have made an excellent Nazi villain, he oozed menace. He was one of the best Bond villains in The Man with the Golden Gun. During the war he was some sort of secret agent but the details of his service are a little fuzzy.
That whole SS porn sub genre was very weird. Himmler, a deeply strange figure, frowned upon extramarital affairs conducted by SS officers, who were expected to be faithful to their wives and have many children. So I’m not sure where the SS porn idea came from, but stranger things have happened.
James Mason was a conscientious objector during ww2. I don’t think he appeared in a lot of war films-he played Rommel in a biopic and I think he was in a 1950s English film about the rats of Tobruk. My memory is probably failing but I can’t recall him being in too many others.
I watch every Mason film that passes me and know bits and pieces about him i never knew he was a conscientious objector during WWW2, or if I had i had ogotten about it.I have his bio but, clealry, i havent read it. It probably explains why he always played germans in war films which were lucrative at the time – you missed Cross of iron (1977) and The Blue Max (1966) (though that was WW1). i assume in part that was also because if he played a Brit soldier he would be called out for having been a conscientious objector. Having said that he plays a naval captain in Torpedo Bay (1963) though there the theme is mutual respect and camaraderie amidst the arbitrary nature of war, and he did play a French resitance fighter in Secret Mission (1942).
Lew Ayre of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) fame) was also a conscientous objector though he served as a noncombatant medic and chaplain’s assistant in the Pacific