bigwhiskers-12170

I haven't watched the Guns of Navarone so I can only surmise that with the caliber of acting compared to this movie. It had to be better .

And after reading up on the plot of the actual books , the Guns of Navarone follows the books plot more closely compared to Force 10 which does not. Now lets get to this movie - after watching it a couple times , i got to see some of why it didn't do well . The dialog is really bad at times with characters delivering lines that were probably not supposed to sound comedic but come across as silly. The acting is average at best , we have some miscasting as well - While Shaw is good as Mallory , Fox is not right for the role of Miller - the character in the books is supposed to be American but here he is a wise cracking boring Brit and rather wishy washy. Ford also I think is miscast as Colonel Barnsby , Ford was only 36 ,still looking very young at the time and just off Star Wars so I didn't buy it , that and in real life , to make Colonel would take 20-25 years meaning he would have to be in his 40's or 50's. His acting is a bit stiff too. Franco Nero was handsome and good in the role of the spy . Carl Weathers did not belong in this movie nor did his character , it was almost a move to include a black actor to be politically correct , his acting was terrible and his character was no more than comic filler and irrelevant. Richard Kiel was a joke and looked like a corny bond villian. Barbara Bach's character had too much screen time and according to the books writer was not a main character so why did she get more time , probably to show her boobs for the guys in the audience. 7/10 - Shaws prescence helps but not enough to carry the whole movie , Weathers ,Bach and Kiel drag it down . Ford and Fox phone it in pretty much.

In this episode Betty and Wilma are fawning over some Hollywood phony resembling Cary Grant. They see him doing all these ridiculous things on TV and assume that it's real. And like a lot of women do they compare their husbands to that and laugh. Fred of course can see right through it and realizes that the guy is the phony and doesn't do all those stunts.

So when there is a contest to win a role on the show that this phony is in Wilma writes a letter using a phony name for her husband and telling the studio that he is a world champion athlete and that he wrestles dinosaurs and so forth. When they get to Hawaii Fred finds out that he only has one line but then when they read Wilma's letter again they decide to make him a stunt man doing all these dangerous things while the phony just sits back and does nothing showing Wilma and Betty that he really is a phony and does none of the things that they see on TV.

So in my opinion this was Wilma and Betty at their worst - using their husbands to get a free trip and fawn over a phony.

The whole behind the scenes to the setup of this show doomed it to failure. When you read about how Ritter snuck around and alienated his cast mates from Three's Company was an omen. Then you have Kline and Knotts declining to be in it which was also a bad sign not to mention DeWitt getting blind sided by walking in on the interviews for Jack's girlfriend Vicki . I mean 3's Company needed to end , the characters had gone as far as they could and the recycled plotlines were boring and unfunny and the actors were getting too old to keep playing these fun loving single roommates. However the rush job of wrapping up the roommates storylines so Ritter could sneak into 3's A Crowd was terrible - Janet meets a guy and gets married over the course of 3 episodes ,Terry finds a job in Hawaii and Jack also meets and falls in love with a very imo unattractive girl named Vicki all in the same few episodes. I'm sure audiences didn't like it and of course it was hard to believe that Jack would have settled just like that and with a girl like Vicki. I watched the pilot of 3/s A Crowd and it wasn't funny and you can tell the same writers from 3's Company were also the writers of this show because they couldn't figure out what to do with Ritter who was a ham and kept borrowing from 3's Company's old plotlines by having similar plots of misunderstandings and the same tired Ritter doing slapstick and probably ad-libbing .

The only thing good about the show was Robert Mandan who played Vicki's father James. He was funny but unfortunately wasn't given much to work with and usually ended up in the background trying to keep Ritter from hogging everything . I give it a 3/10 for him but a 0 for everything else.