Carl Weathers, who had a brief career as a professional football player before going onto a much more successful career as an actor, is best known for the iconic character of Apollo Creed, Sylvester Stallone’s co-star in the first four Rocky films. He later went on to do Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and had a part in the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore. Weathers was still active in television when he died, playing Greef Karga in The Mandalorian.

Very few people remember the late 1970s war movie Force 10 from Navarone, the sequel to the classic Guns of Navarone, and for good reason. Force 10 from Navarone is a bad movie. Filmed in Yugoslavia during the last days of the Tito regime, and with Tito’s full cooperation, it tells the story of a group of British and American Commandos who travel to the Balkans during the Second World War to help the Partisans, the military wing of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, blow up a bridge. They end up blowing up a damn instead and probably flooding half the countryside, but that’s another story. Why they didn’t just send a few thousand pounds of dynamite to the Partisans, who were very good at sabotage, is never entirely explained by the script, although the reason was obvious. Force 10 from Navarone was a paycheck for big name actors Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. It was a chance to meet Tito, hang out at the beaches in Croatia, and see a part of the world unfamiliar to most westerners. It also starred Barbara Bach, who is still married to Ringo Star, as a sexy partisan girl, and Richard Kiel, best known for his Bond Villain roles, as a gigantic Black Chetnik. Franco Nero, who’s married to Vanessa Redgrave, plays a Nazi collaborator, and veteran character actor Edward Fox plays a British demolitions expert. It must have been a fun film shoot, but as a movie it was scattered and incoherent.

Force 10 from Navarone could have been good movie. Not only was it written by blacklisted former Communist Party member Carl Foreman, best known for the classics High Noon and Bridges on the River Kwai, it also starred a 30-year-old Carl Weathers as as Sergeant Olen Weaver, a character very loosely based on Robert Martin, a Tuskegee Airman shot down over Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in March of 1945, and who escaped capture with the help of Tito’s partisans. In a memorable scene, one of the film’s few good scenes, Ford, Shaw, Fox and Weathers meet up with their Yugoslav contacts. Led by the gigantic Richard Kiel as Captain Dražak, they are supposed to be the Partisans, but something is fishy right from the beginning. Half of them are wearing masks to hide their identity. Even worse, Captain Dražak takes one look at Weaver, and immediately starts to bully him, wondering out loud if his black skin rubs off, and threatening him with a knife. Richard Kiel of course was 7’3″ tall, 221cm, a terrifying mountain of a man. But he has no idea who he’s dealing with, Apollo Creed himself, who knocks him cold with one punch.

That they might in fact just be dealing with a gang of Nazi collaborators and not Tito’s partisans is immediately obvious to just about everybody, except of course for Harrison Ford, Robert Shaw and Edward Fox, who are supposed to be a crack team of special forces and yet can’t see what’s right in front of their eyes. They think Weaver’s out of line for defending himself. Three minutes later when Dražak’s men reveal themselves to be Black Chetniks and Dražak himself brags how he hunts British and American soldiers like dogs for his friends the Germans, all you feel like saying is “well duh.” Ford and Shaw then escape by concocting a preposterous story about being deserters who have stolen valuable medical supplies from the British Army, and while the script tells us the German SS captain believes them, the actor has a hard time selling it. Worst of all, we see almost nothing of the Partisans. Almost all of the Yugoslavs in the movie with speaking lines are either Nazi collaborators or dupes, and while Tito kindly provided the Yugoslav Army, complete with T34 tanks, as extras, one has to wonder if he read the script.

But looking at this scene, the most frustrating thing of all is realizing THEY HAD THE FUCKING STORY. Carl Weathers as a badass African American stranded behind enemy lines fighting the Nazis and their collaborators with Tito’s Partisans, THAT WAS THE FUCKING STORY. It would have been a great movie, a star making role for Weathers, and a chance at redemption for the formerly left wing and blacklisted Foreman, who was probably senile by 1978. It was a glorious opportunity lost, a chance to tell the story of a real “rebel alliance” that would have contrasted nicely with the pseudo mystical, and elitist, Star Wars. There it was, an Anglo American partisan movie to rival Walter Defends Sarajevo. If ever there was a time for a bit of “woke” screen writing, this was it. It makes me angry to think about, a great piece of cinema I was deprived of, a chance to cast actual Yugoslav actors instead of Ford and Shaw, an opportunity for long monologues by Weathers where Weaver explained American racism to his Partisan comrades and his comrades explained to him that it was all about capitalism and the falling rate of profit. It’s a film that could made in 2024, long after the breakup of Yugoslavia, but during the Cold War of the 1970s, even with Tito’s cooperation, things like that were just not allowed in big budget Hollywood. It’s just too bad Tito didn’t hire a great B movie director. It would have made a fortune.

Quentin Tarantino, are you listening?