A Time to Die

Luck isn’t with “Rogan” (Edward Albert Jnr) as he and his wife and four other resistance fighters are apprehended by the dregs of the Nazi regime under the command of “Von Osten” (Rex Harrison). Despite hours of torture, he reveals nothing and so all are shot as spies. Amazingly, he survives this point-blank shooting and once the dust of the war has started to settle, he sets out to track down these murderers and take his revenge. This isn’t going to be easy as many have melted into the post-war background and two, “Bari” (Raf Vallone) and the aforementioned “Van Osten” are, for different reasons, going to prove virtually impossible to eradicate. Luckily, he alights upon “Bailey” (Rod Taylor) who has been tasked by the Americans with tracking down some of the surviving Wehrmacht and so perhaps he can help, and conveniently use “Rogan” as his instrument? It may have been based on a Mario Puzo book, but by the late 1970s the cast were already tired and past their sell-by dates. I thought Albert did an ok job here, as did Linn Stokke as the lady of the night “Dora” who has one hell of a survival instinct, but Vallone has little to get his teeth into and Harrison appears to have given this only one or two days of his time to film the few brief scenes he adorns as the story takes for eve to follow it’s join-the-dots format to an ending that lacks any sense of intrigue or jeopardy. It has the look of a television movie throughout and though it’s competently put together, it just lacks any sense of menace and the ease with which “Rogan” manages to carry out his task rather underwhelmed the whole premise of his challenge. Nobody’s finest work, sorry.