No one seemed to have a good time on this film - Robert Aldrich, Jack Palance, Hammer, and Seven Arts all whinged about it - but you're always up against it to create tension in a bomb disposal film with two stars because you know those stars are going to live until the end. You get your suspense from supporting actors - like The Hurt Locker did - but here it's pretty much entirely the Jack Palance and Jeff Chandler show, occasionally cutting to a support actor. (At the end when they do the roll call of men who died I kept thinking "oh that's right, they were in the film" - but I barely remembered them.)
It's a different sort of setting - the heroes are German bomb disposal experts working in Germany after the war, where there are bombs everywhere. Palance is one of those "I opposed the Nazis" Germans whose cinematic representatives probably outnumber their real life inspirations, with Chandler as a nasty egotist. Chandler's actually quite good as a baddie and plays with more energy. Palance struggles more, in part because his character is so sketchily drawn.
Like many Aldrich films its best when it concentrates on men under pressure, but the support line up is fatally undercast. (This is normally a strength of films from this director). There is a female character - a French woman who married a German and is kind of a prostitute (there were a lot of these in Aldrich films). The German locations help with reality, but really it's a bunch of rubble.
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