Tank Force!

Tank Force! (1958)

Born out of the blazing passions of war!

During World War II, members of a British tank unit in northern Africa are captured and held prisoners by Germans.

Date of release
1958-04-22
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 26m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Terence Young

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: No Time to Die

No Time to Die is a 1958 British war film directed by Terence Young and starring Victor Mature, Leo Genn, Anthony Newley and Bonar Colleano. It is about American sergeant David Thatcher in the British Army during the Second World War.

Production

The film was initially based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Ronald Kemp, but later received a different script unrelated to the novel with the exception of the title and the setting.

Warwick Productions bought the film rights in 1955 and tried to get Montgomery Clift to star. Sy Bartlett was assigned to write the script.

In March 1957, Merle Miller was hired to rewrite the script. Then Richard Maibaum did a draft. The script eventually became about five Allied soldiers, two Englishmen, a Pole, an American and an Australian, who escape an Italian POW camp in the Second World War.

Alan Ladd, who had made several pictures for Warwick, was mentioned as a possibility as star. In April 1957, Terence Young arrived in Hollywood to find two American leading men for the film. Van Johnson, who had just made a film with Young, was a leading contender. Jeff Chandler turned down the role of Sergeant David Thatcher (and fee of $200,000).

The film was the first made by Warwick Films after it greatly cut back on its expenses. It was shot over eleven weeks starting 15 August. There were six weeks of location filming in the Libyan Desert, near Tripoli. The Queens Bays Tank Regiment assisted in production of the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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