Guy Hamilton’s “Force 10 From Navarone” was a late-stage sequel to J. Lee Thompson’s 1961 war picture “The Guns of Navarone.” “Guns” is a fun, if clunky, men-on-a-mission movie about a scrappy group of allied soldiers on a secret mission to destroy a pair of massive Axis cannons located on the fictional island of Navarone. It starred Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn. 

“Force 10” replaced Peck and Niven with Robert Shaw and Edward Fox, and followed up on some loose ends from “Gun.” Particularly, the soldiers from the first movie were betrayed by a secret Nazi agent, and it will become their mission in the sequel to track him down and kill him. The two leads team up with a cast of new characters, Harrison Ford among them. Ford was just coming off the success of “Star Wars,” so “Force 10” might have felt like a step down in any circumstances. 

It seems that any lingering fans of “Guns of Navarone” didn’t leave the house to see a 17-years-later sequel, as “Force 10” made a paltry $3.2 million against its $10.5 million budget. It is not widely talked about anymore, with only deep-cut cineastes may bring it up in conversation. 

One person who remembers “Force 10,” however, was designer Christian Alzmann, noted for his work on “Rogue One,” “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones,” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” In the “Art of Rogue One” book, he cited “Force 10” as a primary inspiration source, saying: 

“If we go all the way back, it was very much like ‘Force 10 from Navarone’ – a ragtag commando team, which would allow us to play with a bunch of different character types and scales.”

A side-by-side comparison of the films’ respective casts reveals Alzmann’s thinking.