Commandos | |
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Directed by | Armando Crispino |
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Story by |
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Based on | A short story by Menahem Golan [1] |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Benito Frattari [1] |
Edited by | Daniele Alabiso [1] |
Music by | Mario Nascimbene [1] |
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Release dates |
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Running time | 112 minutes [1] |
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Commandos a.k.a. Sullivan's Marauders is a 1968 Italian-produced war film starring Lee Van Cleef and Jack Kelly and directed by Armando Crispino. [1] The film is set in North Africa but was shot in Sardinia. [2]
Dario Argento is credited as co-screenwriter.
The film is set in the middle of World War II, and in the deserts of Africa, Sgt. Sullivan puts together a group of Italian-Americans into disguise as Italian soldiers in order to infiltrate a North African camp held by the Italians. Sullivan, along with Dino, was one of three that survived from the Pacific War against the Japanese, although Lieutenant Freeman was killed in his last mission. Their Captain in charge of the mission, Captain Valli, has several soldiers with special training.
Commandos was released in Italy on 19 November 1968. [1] It was released in West Germany as Himmelfahrtskommando El Alamein in several cities on 8 August 1969. [1]
In a contemporary review in the Monthly Film Bulletin , Richard Comb commented that the conclusion of the film was "the kind of meaningless apocalyptic moment much favoured when international producers get together to meditate over mutual insanity in war", and that Commandos was "rife with such rhetoric, interspersed with all the action cliches of the war movie and fitfully jerking its line with type" [3]
Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef Jr. was an American actor. He appeared in over 170 film and television roles in a career spanning nearly 40 years, but is best known as a star of Italian Spaghetti Westerns, particularly the Sergio Leone-directed Dollars Trilogy films For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). In 1983, he received a Golden Boot Award for his contribution to the Western film and television genre.
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Anzio, also known as The Battle for Anzio, is a 1968 Technicolor war film in Panavision, an Italian and American co-production, about Operation Shingle, the 1944 Allied seaborne assault on the Italian port of Anzio in World War II. It was adapted from the book Anzio by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who had been the BBC war correspondent at the battle.
Raid on Rommel is an American B movie in Technicolor from 1971, directed by Henry Hathaway and set in North Africa during the Second World War. It stars Richard Burton as a British commando attempting to destroy German gun emplacements in Tobruk. Much of the action footage was reused from the 1967 film Tobruk, and the storyline is also largely the same.
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The Virgin Soldiers is a 1969 British war comedy-drama film directed by John Dexter and starring Lynn Redgrave, Hywel Bennett, Nigel Davenport, Nigel Patrick and Rachel Kempson. It is set in 1950, during the Malayan Emergency, and is based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Leslie Thomas.
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