Peck, Niven and Quinn lead a risky mission to destroy The Guns of Navarone (film review)

On June 22, 1961 – by coincidence, the 20th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union – writer-producer Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone premiered in the United States. Not only was it the first of several adaptations of novels by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean to become big-budget action-adventure movies, but it also marked the return of Foreman, who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s as one of the Hollywood Ten, to the limelight of the movie industry after years of working anonymously for more than a decade. 

Starring Gregory Peck as Capt. Keith Mallory, David Niven as Corporal Miller, Anthony Quinn as Andrea Stavros, and Anthony Quayle as Maj. Roy Franklin, The Guns of Navarone tells the exciting – if at times a bit implausible – tale of a small Allied commando team tasked with one hell of a mission: Infiltrate the German-occupied island of Navarone in the Aegean Sea, avoid detection, and blow up a pair of large radar-controlled cannon mounted deep on the side of a 400-foot-high cliff. If they succeed, a small flotilla of Royal Navy destroyers will be able to sail past the shores of Navarone to pull off a Dunkirk-like evacuation of the 2,000-man garrison on the island of Kheros, which is about to be invaded by the Axis as a demonstration of force and to push Turkey into the war as an ally of Germany and Italy. 

Although Foreman tinkers a bit with the cast of characters – one British officer featured in MacLean’s book vanishes altogether and two female characters are added – the movie is, for the most part, faithful to its literary source. This was possible because MacLean’s approach to writing was to get on with the story, move the plot forward fast and with lots of action, and avoid any sidetracks involving sex and romance, thus giving his readers – usually males – lean and mean testosterone-filled tales full of suspense, fighting, and plots, counter plots, and cross-plots. 

The movie begins with a narrated prologue that sets the stage for the “ordinary people” tasked to blow up the guns of Navarone, read by James Robertson Justice, who also plays Commodore Jensen, the officer who orders Capt. Mallory, a.k.a. “the Human Fly” for his pre-war mountain climbing experience, and the other saboteurs to carry out the nearly-impossible assignment. Then, director J. Lee Thompson gets things underway as a Lancaster bomber carrying Mallory lands on a British airfield near Alexandria, where, he finds out to his dismay, his scheduled leave has been canceled. 

In their first face-to-face meeting, Commodore Jensen tells Mallory he regrets having to send him out on another mission, and lays out the situation by first giving him a short briefing, then – when Mallory asks why the Navy or the Allied air forces can’t take the guns out – takes him to a room where a rather tired and dejected-looking group of RAF pilots is being debriefed after a failed attempt to bomb the guns from the air. 

Squadron Leader Howard Barnsby RAAF: First, you've got that bloody old fortress on top of that bloody cliff. Then you've got that bloody fortress inside the cliff. You can't even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns. And even if we could, we haven't got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock. And that's the bloody truth, sir. 

Mallory, whose friend Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) has been assigned to lead the team on this mission, is not only to climb up the side of the cliff and help guide the saboteurs into the fortress, but he is also able to “speak Greek like the Greeks and German like the Germans,” so he is to play the part of the skipper of a fishing boat, one of many that plies the waters of the Aegean. On this nearly-mythical adventure he’s to be joined by Maj. Franklin, Cpl. Miller, Andrea Stavros, Private “Butcher” Brown (Stanley Baker), and Pvt. Spyros Pappadimos (James Darren, in his first acting role as “an angry young man with a killer instinct”). This all-guy team will be supplemented by Maria Pappadimos (Irene Papas) and Anna (the lovely Gia Scala) once they reach Navarone. 

All in all, this motley crew of soldiers and resistance fighter has only a brief period of time – seven days – before the Royal Navy sends out the destroyers to evacuate the British garrison on Kheros. Will Mallory and the team be able to evade Nazi air-sea patrols? Will they be able to make it to Navarone on their rickety fishing boat? Or will the elements and the enemy combine to make their labors part of the annals of failed commando operations against the vaunted Third Reich? 

Of course, if you’re a watcher of the daring-commando-team subgenre of World War II movies (The Dirty Dozen, Hanover Street, and 1978’s Force 10 From Navarone), you know that the issue is hardly ever in doubt. I mean, we don’t watch action-hero flicks to watch the good guys nearly beat the bad guys, only to be defeated in the end, right? (It happens in real life all too often, but when it comes to entertainment, such dark endings usually kill a film’s box-office appeal.) 

That having been said, screenwriter Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson (who was called in to take over after Alexander Mackendrick was fired) pull off the never-easy trick of getting the audience to forget that a happy ending is in store by putting the characters in a never-ending series of cliffhangers (literally, as there is a cliff-climbing sequence early on in Act Two) and set-piece action sequences. Even when the viewer is asked to buy into the “unbeatable commando team myth” or to disregard Mallory’s clearly American accent even though the character was British, their use of constant action, subliminal references to mythological themes, and complex relationships between characters – Stavros, we learn early on, wants to kill Mallory because he holds the Englishman responsible for his family’s death at the hands of the Germans - the writer and director grab our attention and hold it for two hours and 38 minutes. 

Yes, there are continuity goofs, bizarre little visual gaffes – such as German troops riding in a Dodge truck – and cheesy little things along the lines of model planes clearly hanging still in midair and erroneously placed light sources, but the movie still works, partly because the acting is superb, partly because – despite its somewhat long running time – it is paced nicely, has mostly good Special Effects (which won an Oscar), and boasts a rip-roaring score by composer Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon, 55 Days at Peking), among other attributes that more than make up for its flubs and flaws. 

All in all, if you enjoy well-acted, well-written (if sometimes somewhat formulaic and even unbelievable) action-adventure films, you can't really go wrong with this 1961 classic. 

(Oh, yes. If you're also a fan of James Bond films, you'll probably recognize actor Walter Gotell, who played Soviet spymaster Gen. Gogol in several of the 007 movies. Here he plays, of course, a German officer on Navarone.)