From the Rental Vault: The Sea Wolves (1980)

Although thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Europe, India was the site of its own theater of World War II, with a large focus on the shipping the Allies sent through the Indian Ocean to the southeast Asian front against Japan. In early 1943, German U-boats are having a field day against Allied shipping, seeming to know exactly were merchant vessels as well as military craft will be traveling. British agents Col. Lewis Pugh (Gregory Peck) and Capt. Gavin Stewart (Roger Moore) are tasked with finding the source of the information and stopping the secret transmissions putting the Allied ships in the Nazi crosshairs in the 1980 movie The Sea Wolves.

Unfortunately they learn the transmissions are secretly coming from a German freighter anchored in the neutral Portuguese harbor of Goa, meaning that British military can't touch it. The actual leak source can't be traced, so Pugh and Stewart recruit retired soldiers from the Calcutta Light Horse reserve unit to stage a commando raid on the freighter and destroy its transmitter. Pugh travels with the majority of the unit via a decrepit river craft that should allow a stealth approach, and Stewart pulls strings onshore at Goa to entice the German sailors ashore and distract from the sabotage mission in the harbor. He also finds himself in an affair with a beautiful widow, Agnes Cromwell (Barbara Kellerman), who may be something other than what she seems.

The Sea Wolves has a lot of fun with its over-the-hill commando squad, featuring some longstanding character actor mainstays of British moviemaking as well as a few headliners like David Niven and Trevor Howard. Peck is his usual stalwart self and fits right in with the English cast despite his all-American background. Moore offers a slightly toned-down version of his James Bond antics, although he does manage to be the only cast member with a romance. But it's hard to see "Gavin Stewart" in anything he does here, especially since the character is an intelligence agent.

The movie is based on a 1978 novel by James Leasor, who combined a couple of real-life operations from WWII to make his Boarding Party. One of those operations featured the real life Calcutta Light Horse and was similar to the raid described in Wolves, and it might have been worth it for screenwriter Reginald Rose and director Andrew McLaglen to have developed a script from that actual incident. Wolves itself at two hours starts to slog more than move and could jettison a half-hour to its great benefit. Some of the espionage escapades from the first hour and the entire Moore-Kellerman storyline are good candidates; neither strengthen the movie's centerpiece raid by the middle-aged commandos finally given the chance to do their part for their country in a meaningful way.

As it is, The Sea Wolves isn't so much of a chore it can't be enjoyed, but its construction makes the fast forward button a lot more tempting than a movie-maker would like it to be.