This movie warrants a technical 3/10 but for the many ways it ends up being intriguing and funny for all the wrong reasons, and the way it is all carried along by a briskly-paced direction. The clumsy misogyny of Roger Moore's character, the tendency of the all-too-obvious Mata Hari type person to corpse when Roger delivers his lines, and so many other things worth a chuckle. Gregory Peck attempting an English accent is a hoot. The movie's alleged basis in fact is interesting as the story has an archetypal oddball-Brits-pull-it-off-again feel. However there is no missing that dialogue is pitiful, the relationships implausible - both brotherly and romantic. The smutty banter is straight out of Carry On film tradition. There's so little to feed the mind on the menu with no real historical context, and a meagre helping of just a few very thin back stories. So to get the best of this film, do adjust your expectations and take this quirky offering lightly, and in good humour and to best enjoy the ride.

The Sea Wolves is one of those "old guys still got it!" movies, so if you prefer your action heroes to be young and fit, you might not like this. Me, I usually prefer men with a little mileage on them, and I'll watch anything with David Niven—at any age—so I was very excited to watch as he, Gregory Peck, Roger Moore, and Trevor Howard took on the Germans in this true WW2 story.Unfortunately for me, Niven had the second smallest part of the four, but any Niven is better than nothing! Gregory Peck might not have the best British accent in the world, but I don't really think anyone minds, as long as he's full of integrity and leads his troops to do the right and noble thing. And even though I would have preferred Niven to play the romantic lead, Roger Moore was very charming in his pursuit of Barbara Kellerman.All in all, there are some funny moments, cute music, and a pretty good and safe story. I mean, with Gregory Peck in charge, what could go wrong, right?

The story in "The Sea Wolves" is based on a real and rather strange episode in World War II history. Not wanting to provoke an international incident with neutral Portugal, the British decide to attack a German ship docked in Goa (an Indian city controlled at the time by the Portuguese) using civilians....elderly non-coms at that! They need to destroy or capture the boat because the ship is being used against Allied shipping. And, the film starred a lot of older stars--the likes of Gregory Peck, David Niven, Roger Moore and Trevor Howard! This really sounds like an interesting story, right? Well, oddly, it wasn't. In fact, after a while I was just looking forward to the film ending. Why? Well, I think the problem is mostly because none of the characters were very interesting. They had a nice idea but the writer simply didn't instill enough in the characters to make them the least bit endearing or realistic. Sad. As a result, it's a film that you could watch if you have nothing better to do or you could just skip it. My vote? Flip a coin.

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.