Bomb at 10:10

Poor B- film with George Montgomery. His preceding film in 1966 was 'Hallucination Nation' - the title alone gives you some of the quality pf Mr Montgomery's work in this period. The cinematography is amateurish and the dubbing (of both voices and sounds) grates. The acting is way below par.

I (semi-)viewed this film on a March Saturday afternoon during Covid lockdown in 2021. I part-read a weekend newspaper and part-surfed the internet so that the whole enterprise would not be a complete waste of time. The first 5 minutes was a harbinger of the experience to come.

Please avoid - even if you wish to sate your sense of curiosity.

Bomb at 10:10 has George Montgomery as an American flier in World War II in a Nazi prison camp in Yugoslavia who escapes with one other and is trying to make it back to the Adriatic coast and then Italy when he hears that the former camp commandant at his Stalag is now the governor of an area he's passing through. Montgomery decides to give him a little payback for the bad time he had as a prisoner.

Montgomery is the only name you will recognize in this cast of Yugoslav players. No doubt he did this one for the paycheck as Marshal Tito was opening up his country in the 60s to western film companies and trying to get a Yugoslavian film industry going.

When he makes contact with the Partisans it seems as though they have an unexploded bomb that Army Air Force dropped. They view it as the method to killing the commander in a Reinhard Heydrich type affair.

That together with a little romance between Montgomery and the commandant's daughter is what this silly film is about.

It is true that are Army Air Corps did do missions in the Balkans once we were established in Italy. But the only Americans on the ground were OSS people. One of them was Sterling Hayden who had he been caught would have been executed as a spy. Now his exploits in Yugoslavia might have made a great film, but of course he had his run-in with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Maybe one day he will be the subject of a film and I'm sure it will be a lot better than this one.

BOMB AT 10:10 is a little different from the rest of the Yugoslavian war films I've endured over the years. This film seems to have a lower budget than those others because there aren't any big or long-running battle sequences between Nazi troops and Yugoslavian partisan fighters. Instead, this is more of an espionage thriller in which the action is played out decidedly low-key.

The story is about a couple of fighters who bust out of a concentration camp and decide that, instead of fleeing, they're going to hang around and help local forces to assassinate the camp commander. Inevitably romance gets in the way, but there's also a lot of creeping about in the dark and killing of sentries and the like.

As is usual with Yugoslavian cinema, BOMB AT 10:10 looks the part but lacks the suspense and excitement to make it a decent film. Instead, it's quite plodding. American western actor George Montgomery can do little to make his lead interesting and director Caslav Damjanovic displays his lack of experience in making a movie. It's the sort of film I'd skip.

This film is a piece of crap even by 1967 standards. It really came straight from the dung heap. The script and directing are ridiculous.

The evidence that this was going to be a bad film came in the very first few seconds when the film opens with two men escaping from a POW camp. Instead of wearing their military uniforms, as they did in German POW camps, they were both wearing the blue-and-white striped "pajamas" that Jews were required to wear in concentration and extermination camps. In the very next scene, the American hero is shown wearing normal civilian clothing that fit him just fine, with no explanation as to how he came into possession of them.

Along with the females all having 1960s hairdos, and the commandant of the POW camp also being the ranking occupation authority of the city, it just got worse from there.

Clearly the producers were not bothered about faithfulness to the period.Both Montgomery and the female lead look as if they had just walked out of a boutique.Her hair seems to be modelled on that of Audrey Hepburn.The plot seems to be based on the Reinhardt Heydrich assination.There is a slight twist at the end.However the use of a dud bomb as the assassination tool is laughably silly.