No Time to Die [Tank Force!] * (1958, Victor Mature, Leo Genn, Bonar Colleano, Anthony Newley, Luciana Paluzzi, Alfred Burke) – Classic Movie Review 11,631

‘When iron men in iron monsters fought for a continent!’

Director Terence Young’s 1958 black and white British war film No Time to Die [Tank Force!] stars Victor Mature, Leo Genn, Bonar Colleano, Anthony Newley, Luciana Paluzzi and Alfred Burke, and is based on the 1954 novel No Time to Die by Ronald Kemp and a screen story by Merle Miller.

No Time to Die tells a tale of World War Two adventures in Libya as US army sergeant David Thatcher (Mature) and his fellow British tank corps boys (Leo Genn, Anthony Newley, Percy Herbert, Kenneth Cope) escape from an Italian camp but are caught by a pro-Nazi sheikh (Maxwell Shaw).

Bond producer Albert Broccoli and his partner at Warwick Films productions, Irving Allen, come up with a rather tedious, slow-moving adventure, with nothing new or interesting to offer. Fairly weak performances from a pretty decent cast cannot bail out the unexpectedly dull script by Richard Maibaum and Terence Young, with too many stereotypes and war-film clichés.

It runs 103 minutes, but the US cut version, released as Tank Force!, runs only 86 minutes.

Also Richard Marner, Martin Boddey, Percy Herbert, Kenneth Cope, David Lodge, Sean Kelly, Kenneth Fortescue, Maxwell Shaw, George Coulouris, Robert Rietty, Bob Simmons, Ernst Walder, Peter Elliott, George Pravda, Julian Sherrier, Robert Bruce, Alan Tilvern, Anne Aubrey, and Andreas Malandrinos.

Mature left England in the autumn of 1957 for six weeks of location filming in the Libyan Desert, near Tripoli.

The Queens Bays Tank Regiment assisted in production.

Allen and Broccoli founded Warwick Films in London in 1951, taking the name from the Warwick Hotel in London. Their films were released by Columbia Pictures.

The Bond folks reused the title for the 25th 007 movie No Time to Die.

Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,631

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