Victory At Entebbe (1976)

On June 27th 1976, an Air France flight going from Tel Aviv (with a stop in Athens) to Paris was hijacked by four terrorists (two Germans, two Palestinians) and rerouted to the Entebbe airport in Uganda. The terrorists were sheltered by Idi Amin (Julius Harris, LIVE AND LET DIE) while awaiting word whether their demands would be met by the Israeli government. On July the 4th, a daring rescue was made by an Israeli task force. That's just five months between the actual incident and the December airing of this film. The film is a rush job, hastily put together and it shows it. It doesn't help that its heavyweight all star cast throws the picture out of whack. Coupled with Ernest Kinoy's trite dialogue, the film is more akin to an all star disaster movie rather than a serious docu-drama along the lines of UNITED 93 whose cast was made up of unknowns. A handful of the actors (Helmut Berger as a terrorist, Jessica Walter as an Israeli hostage, Christian Marquand as the plane's French pilot, Harris as Idi Amin) manage to acquit themselves admirably but almost everybody else sinks. The massive cast includes Elizabeth Taylor, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Dreyfuss, Helen Hayes, Linda Blair, Theodore Bikel, Harris Yulin, David Groh, Bibi Besch and Kristina Wayborn (OCTOPUSSY).