fred-houpt Oh, I don't know...such great actors stuck in such a stinky and crappy film. I can't imagine the private conversations between them. The good thing is that this film is based on a true story. The bad thing is that from my vantage point in 2012, it looks awful, cheesy, horribly edited, grating music, clumsy special effects. Things for me started off bad from just a casual glance at the photographs of Peck, Moore and Niven on the jacket of my DVD and even on the photo here at IMDb. I cannot recall a moment in this film when Niven and Moore dressed up like German naval officers. So, why have them depicted as such in the photos? Ridiculous.Gregory Peck, one of the finest actors ever, was there ever a miscasting mistake in his career worse than this one? Atticus Finch tries desperately to sound like a lord of the manor and it is painful to listen and watch. Some actors just should not attempt to sound British and the sad joke of Kevin Costner trying to be Robin Hood in his Yankee-English disaster....is the stuff of Hollywood jokes. So no, Peck should not have been cast as a British officer. He was, strangely enough, very powerful and frightening as the evil Dr. Mengele in "The Boys from Brazil". He pulled that role off with great effect. In Sea Wolves I was almost howling with displeasure.Roger Moore was apparently in between shooting two James Bond films and the Sea Wolves was the sandwich centrepiece. His debonair mannerisms were detracting. David Niven looked exasperated and embarrassed to be stuck in this clunker. Oh, the better days were way behind him. The great Trevor Howard is wasted in this film, his time on screen too short and the material just garbage.This is a film that should be remade and with a better script. And please, next time, don't include the scotch dowsing scene.....just such a sad sight to see good scotch wasted.....on such a dreadfully boring film.

ma-cortes True WWII story about a commando-style mission undertaken by a group of middle-age semi-retired British Cavalrymen in 1943 . The crew of veteran saboteurs (most of them formed by veteran actors as Trevor Howard , Patrick Mcnee ,Morgan Sheppard , Terence Longdon and several more besides ) commanded by Gregory Peck and David Niven are assigned the dangerous operation by the general (Kenneth Griffith) to blow up a German ship called Ehrenfels that carries a radio station located in the port of Marmagoa . They must destroy a transmitter in Goa , a Portuguese colony and neutral territory . As the end credits of this movie state , "during the first 11 days of March 1943, U-boats sank 12 Allied ships in the Indian Ocean , after the Light Horse raid on Goa, only one ship was lost in the remainder of the month¨. The film is dedicated to the memory of the honorary colonel of the Calcutta Light Horse , Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma , K.G. 1900-1979 . The producers wish to thank the Government of India and Administration and peoples of Goa and to pay tribute to commander B.S. Davies whose skill and courage at the helm of ¨Phoebe¨ contributed so much to the success of the mission . There are not the ¨Sea Wolves ¨of the title also called ¨Wolf pack¨ , that refers to the Nazi U-boats that are doing the shipwrecked and damage on the Allied fleet.This exciting film contains intrigue , suspense , noisy action scenes ,fascinating battles and an enjoyable love story with treason and tragedy between Roger Moore and Barbara Kellerman who results to be the main fascination of the film . Other chief excitements about the movie, will be in the intervention of famous British secondaries who realize professionally competent interpretations , some of them with no more than a line or two to say as Allan Cuthberson ,Patrick Allen , Donald Houston , Jack Watson , Grahame Stark , John Standing , Percy Herbert and several others . Vibrant and rousing musical score by Roy Budd with agreeable final song titled ¨The precious moment¨ sung by the usual Matt Monroe . Colorful and evocative cinematography by Tony Imi . The picture finely directed by Andrew V. McLagen is based on the book ¨Boarding party¨ by James Leasor who took actual events for his writing , these are the following : On reserve since the Boer War, they are most noted for their attack with members of the Calcutta Scottish against the German ship, Ehrenfels. The operation was organized by SOE's India Mission. It was kept covert, to avoid the political ramifications of contravening Portuguese neutrality in Goa, and was not revealed until thirty-five years afterwards, in 1978. The Ehrenfels was known to be transmitting information on Allied ship movements to U-boats from Mormugao Harbour in Portugal's neutral territory of Goa on 9 March 1943.The Light Horse embarked on the barge Phoebe at Calcutta and sailed around India to Goa. After the Ehrenfels erupted in a fireball and was sunk by the team of British saboteurs, British intelligence dispatched an open message over the wire falsely warning that they would invade Goa. The crews of the other two German ships in the Harbour, the Drachenfels and Braunfels, received the message and scuttled their ships in Goa's Harbour in the belief that they were protecting their ships from capture by the British. Italian ships in the Harbour were also destroyed. In 1951 all three ships were salvaged.

screenman Yep, it's another of those trans-generation pot-boilers like 'Cassandra Crossing' and 'Shout At The Devil', enabling a group of superannuated movie grandees to top-up their pension-funds whilst the new generation graduates from drama class.Although loosely based upon a true story, it hardly does the heroes credit. Gregory Peck leads a creaking cast containing Roger Moore (never a good sign), David Niven and many others in such a pedestrian actioner that there are times when it almost needs a Zimmer frame.It's a raid on some German merchant ships interned in Goa harbour. One of them is transmitting intelligence to submarines. Somehow it accomplishes this task without an aerial. That's about it. We only ever see one ship. After attaching external limpet-mines with timers, for some reason they have to board them (it) as well. Quite why is unclear, but it provides a hammy firefight or two. Tension is at best Luke-warm. The script is pretty unimaginative. Directing is by numbers. And as to camera-work - most tourists could match its ingenuity with their holiday films.Directing is the key. All of the leads know how to act. We've seen Peck and Niven working well together in the similar 'Guns Of Navarone'. Yet despite this movie being almost 20-years more recent, it doesn't pack in a fraction of the pace and tension. Old geezers don't need to be, or portrayed as, laughable old duffers. That's patronising and stereotypic. Just check-out Big Larry's Dr Zell in 'Marathon Man'. Serious and scary, or what? And couldn't they have found a couple of genuine old freighters ready for scrap and made some authentic bangs and sinkings? Apparently not; they had to raid someone's Airfix collection with fireworks. There's plenty of good Boys Own actioners out there that are really worth your time and attention. This one isn't.

Critical Eye UK Pretty much a period piece when it came out -- not the content, but the style of movie-making itself -- 'The Sea Wolves' is another of those examples of cinematic abuse that make the viewing of the results so disappointing an experience.A re-tread of just about any and every Brave Brits / Nasty Nazis war movie churned out by UK studios large and small in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the surprise here is that production occurred in 1979 / 1980 rather than 30 years earlier.What's no surprise, however, is the degree of self-indulgence that infuses efforts like this, i.e., take a true-life story, promote your wares on the back of it. . . but change almost everything in it to fit box office conventions of the day.Appealingly lethargic at its outset, where the script certainly does map something of the genesis of the Ehrenfals raid, things then rapidly fall apart with the introduction of Roger Moore in a dinner jacket chatting up a villainess in a casino. Obviously nothing of the kind ever happened, and had this been but a minor diversion it may be easily overlooked. However, as the Spy Who Loved Me bit accounts for at least a third of the over-long film, it can't be ignored.If this inept fiction -- and inept it most certainly is -- doesn't do for Seawolves, then the finale certainly does: writer and director presumably got together and said ah, well, better have a shoot-out here, as if it's the OK Corral they're chronicling rather than a mission to disable a German ship.Thus it is that several scenes which never occurred in reality unfold with hilarious unreality: never have so many True Brits been shot in the arm, or missed at point blank range, than here, nor have so many really Bad, Bad Germans been mown down only to sneakily turn over after dropping dead and shooting back.It's rubbish, and annoying rubbish at that.But where Seawolves truly irks is its sustained deceit to be drama-doc rather than popular fiction. The facts are that the boarding party was detected as soon as it set foot on the vessel and the crew, thinking it was a regular Brit military operation, immediately set off charges pre-installed in the hold and engine room so as to scuttle the Ehrenfals and prevent her from falling into Allied hands.The ship was in no more than 80 foot of water so sank quickly and obligingly to the bottom, almost dragging the Phoebe with her. There was no gun battle, no hand to hand fighting, and despite SOE's ludicrous claim to have subsequently fooled the Germans into sinking the other two vessels by sending some kind of phony wireless message, the truth is that once the Ehrenfals had gone down, the crews of the other two vessels likewise scuttled theirs.Ends.Of course, the ordinary, middle-aged (and older) folks who actually participated in the raid weren't to know that. This motley bunch of solicitors, managers, accountants, jute growers, export clerks and retirees left their homes, their jobs, and their families to freely embark on a venture that could have claimed the lives of every one of them. That took guts. Real, genuine, shining courage.Seawolves, of course, has no grasp of this kind of truth, so makes no salute to it. Instead, there's one cliché after another, strung together on the pretext that, somehow, This Is How It Was.When it wasn't.Worthy of 1 out of 10 on release (for its location photography) it's today worth 4 out of 10 for the screen presence of Trevor Howard, David Niven and Gregory Peck. Sadly, we'll not see their like again. Rather more happily though, we're unlikely to see anything as embarrassingly bad as Seawolves again, either.