It's hard to believe that this mediocre wartime thriller was directed by the man who made "Ice Cold in Alex", "Northwest Frontier", "The Guns of Navarone" and "Cape Fear". J. Lee Thompson's "The Passage" boasted a starry cast, (Anthony Quinn, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell, Patricia Neal, Michael Lonsdale, Christopher Lee), all wasted playing various peasants, resistance fighters and Nazis as Quinn shepherds Mason, Neal and family over the Pyrenees pursued by McDowell's sadistic SS officer.
It's the kind of film that might have been made in the fifties but which was tarted up with large dollops of gratuitous sex and violence for the late seventies. In other words, it's not just poorly executed but thoroughly tasteless with everyone involved looking very uncomfortable, the exception being McDowell who camps it up no end and clearly relishes being the villain. One to avoid.
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