A Bit of Film and War is a monthly column series covering war movies. I break down films from the classics to the obscure, detailing what wars they cover and if they’re worth checking out. It’s free for all subscribers to this Substack, but if you enjoy my writing, consider opting for a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to exclusive in-depth pieces and my entire backlog of work. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Welcome back to A Bit of Film and War, my monthly column series covering the best, the worst, the underrated, and the forgotten of my favorite cinema genre — the war movie. Last time I covered a true classic with Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, but our next entry is going in the other direction. Not because it’s a bad film, mind you. Far from it. Yet while Aldrich’s earlier ensemble epic was a huge box office smash when it hit cinemas across the world in 1967, his attempted follow-up in 1970 never saw anything close to that level of success.

Too Late the Hero is a bit of an odd duck. After seeing how much money The Dirty Dozen took in, Aldrich sold his profit participation to MGM and used the funds to start his own studio, The Aldrich Company. This gave him unprecedented creative freedom, but a string of financial duds ultimately lead to his career seeing a notable decline that could not keep up with changing Hollywood trends. One of those unfortunate failures was this film. ABC Pictures wanted Aldrich to do another war picture like The Dirty Dozen and after pulling out an unproduced script that had been written years before, the eventual result was Too Late the Hero.

As this entry of A Bit of Film and War will show, Too Late the Hero has plenty of good ideas and a stellar cast to boot. Whether due to studio interference or its script needing a bit more polish though, it isn’t completely successful in what it attempts to do. I also think that its comparisons to The Dirty Dozen are rather unfounded as both end up being quite different stories. Still, Too Late the Hero is long past due for a critical reevaluation and I would certainly put it into the category of underrated or overlooked.

What’s the film?

Too Late the Hero hit American theaters on May 20, 1970, while the Japanese release arrived less than five months later on Oct. 10. As far as I’m aware, the title is completely original and has somewhat become an idiom like “too little, too late.” The original screenplay was based on an unpublished novel supposedly called Don’t Die Mad written by frequent Aldrich collaborator Robert Sherman, but both titles give a good indication that the story is going to be pretty cynical either way.

Over here the film is known as 燃える戦場 or “The Burning Battlefield” which I suppose is somewhat accurate considering the kind of intense action that takes place, but it does feel a tad generic like most Japanese localizations of war film titles from this era. The Imperial Japanese Army being the antagonists would not have been an issue since such WWII films were already widely accepted by Japanese audiences by the 1970s. In fact, the main selling point was it being the first Hollywood film to star Ken Takakura, one of Japan’s most beloved actors and someone who I don’t think gets enough recognition in the West.

Too Late the Hero ended up with a budget of over $6.2 million, which was a decent amount for the time. On the other hand, The Dirty Dozen was made on $5.4 million and had far more impressive special effects, so I can only assume that most of the money went toward its exhausting shoot in the Philippines. Despite a decent run in British cinemas, Too Late the Hero failed to make a sensation anywhere else and it ultimately lost more than it cost to make.

That lack of initial success is probably the biggest reason why Too Late the Hero has ended up largely forgotten. It received a DVD release in 2004, but that’s it. No Blu-ray and no 4K UHD. It’s not even legally available on streaming anywhere, but as of this writing the full movie is available on YouTube. I suspect that the rights for this one are somewhat of a mess, but as Disney owns ABC Pictures now, the final decision to restore or re-release is likely with them now. The House of Mouse really does have an iron grip on everything these days, doesn’t it?

What’s the war?

World War II and specifically the Pacific Theatre. Other war films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Letters from Iwo Jima of course have also revolved around the Allies’ war with Japan, but Too Late the Hero is the only one to specifically deal with the epic battles which took place on New Hebrides. Just kidding, there were no battles with the Japanese on New Hebrides.

While both the British and the Americans fought the Japanese on many fronts in the Pacific, this former island colony which is now the modern sovereign nation of Vanuatu was a strategically important base of operations for the Allies from 1942. Too Late the Hero depicts a Japanese invasion of the islands, but no such operation ever took place. The strong Allied presence would have made it impossible for this to happen, while Japan was focused on other areas like the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

What’s it about?

Sam Lawson is a U.S. Army lieutenant who specializes in Japanese language interpretation, but has so far been able to avoid direct engagement with the enemy. Despite looking forward to going on leave, his plans are unexpectedly cancelled after being ordered to report to New Hebrides. With his set of skills, he’s tasked with joining a British infantry commando unit and assisting them on what will be a dangerous field mission against the Japanese.

The British base is surrounded by thick jungle with nearby Japanese soldiers ready to shoot down any soldiers who wander astray. With an American naval convoy scheduled to arrive at the island in three days, the British unit must send fake signals and destroy the Imperial Japanese Army’s radio transmitter to buy the Allies time. Yet Lawson quickly clashes with the leadership and attitudes of the British soldiers he’s forced to work with, causing what was already a risky operation to become a complete disaster. As the men end up dead or captured, it eventually becomes a pure quest for survival — mission objectives be damned.

Who’s the director?

Robert Aldrich, but I’ve already discussed him at length in my last column on The Dirty Dozen, so I recommend checking that out for more context. It should be noted that he directed two films between that one and Too Late the Hero, neither of which I’ve seen. The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Killing of Sister George were both considerable departures from The Dirty Dozen, being subversive dramas instead of war films. Lylah Clare was a critical and commercial disappointment, but Sister George did decent box office numbers and has improved in esteem.

These two films and Too Late the Hero were produced by Aldrich’s own company, which allowed him more creative freedom than working for just one studio. It’s probably for that reason why he was able to create such an eclectic filmography even if most of his post-Dirty Dozen career consisted of flops. Two exceptions were the 1974 prison sports drama The Longest Yard starring Burt Reynolds which earned $43 million against its $2.9 million budget and Hustle released the following year which was also a box office success. Too Late the Hero, however, was the last war film Aldrich would ever make and he shifted into other genres afterward.

Who’s in it?

The cast is easily the best aspect of Too Late the Hero. Cliff Robertson, who younger viewers today pretty much only know for as Uncle Ben in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, plays Sam Lawson. This film serves as a decent introduction to his career as it falls in line with the rugged roles and reluctant heroes he often took at the height of his popularity. Lawson is someone who never wanted to take on the mission in the first place, and we first see him in a pretty disheveled state. In a somewhat unrealistic turn midway through, his reluctance disappears and he ends up becoming the strongest moral compass of the story as the British soldiers he’s with are even less willing participants.

Private Tosh Hearne, played by Michael Caine, is the most cynical and compelling character. Performing in his native Cockney accent with heaps of sarcasm for good measure, Caine is in top form here after establishing himself as one of the biggest British stars of the 1960s. His appearance in Too Late the Hero would portend his insistence on taking more challenging roles throughout the 1970s, such as Mike Hodge’s Get Carter and Joseph Mankiewicz’s Sleuth. As one of my favorite actors, I’ve discussed Caine at length in my weekly Bonus Perspectives column before, so expect further write-ups about his work later this year.

Denholm Elliott, best remembered for Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones franchise, is the no-nonsense Captain Hornsby. Tasked with leading the British commando unit, most of Hornsby’s decisions prove to be disastrous and he holds little respect among the men. In contrast to Hearne’s Cockney accent, Hornsby speaks with an upper class Received Pronunciation accent, which was quite common among British military higher-ups at the time. This adds an interesting element of class tension between these two men who already despise each other, something that often features in many Michael Caine films.

The other British actors turn in pretty strong performances as well, while Hollywood veteran Henry Fonda makes a brief cameo in the introduction as the U.S. Army captain who briefs Lawson. Apart from them, the other notable player is Ken Takakura as the Japanese antagonist Major Yamaguchi. He’s essentially saved for the final act, but it’s a surprisingly effective villain role. Yamaguchi constantly taunts the commando unit with the tone of a schoolteacher scolding students, but also knows how to skillfully manipulate the Allied soldiers he has captured. It certainly makes you wish ol’ Ken-san received more recognition outside of Japan, but I’ll get into that in the interesting facts section.

The Foreign Perspectives review

Too Late the Hero on paper has practically everything I could ever want. It’s a film about the Pacific Theatre, something that doesn’t get nearly as much attention in Anglosphere WWII cinema as it should compared to the more well-known European Theatre. It stars Michael Caine, my favorite English actor. It has Ken Takakura as the villain, my favorite Japanese actor. You even get Uncle Ben and Marcus Brody in there too.

I certainly enjoyed Too Late the Hero for all those reasons and more, but enough elements prevent it from being a classic like The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone. While the basic premise of a British military base being mere miles away from the Japanese forces adds to the overall narrative tension, it only raises the question as to how these men were able to survive in such desolate conditions to begin with. Leaving the base more or less means instant death, so why didn’t the Japanese just launch a full scale attack on the Allies if the terrain gives them an advantage? With how easily these men get cut down, my Japanese wife who was watching the film with me even jokingly asked, “How did we ever lose the war with these guys as our enemy?”

That, however, leads to the film’s biggest problem which is Robert Aldrich attempting to draw parallels to the Vietnam War. The Kent State shootings had occurred just two weeks before Too Late the Hero opened, so opposition to the war in the United States would have been at an all time high. Yet as most will agree, World War II was an entirely different conflict with far less moral ambiguity than Vietnam. At one point, Captain Hornsby even sarcastically compares Lawson to a “long-haired conscientious objector,” but such an awkward reference is a clear anachronism.

Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen worked far better as an anti-establishment film because its characters were convicts forced into a mission by the U.S. government, which meant that the narrative was about them dealing with limited agency. The reluctance of the characters in Too Late the Hero, however, is nowhere near as convincing. While there surely would have been soldiers who complained, the British Army was famous for its strict discipline during WWII and the behavior seen by these men would not have been tolerated. The vast majority had the understanding that they were enlisted for a reason. As a result, I don’t really consider Too Late the Hero to be a true spiritual successor to The Dirty Dozen despite that many have often tried to categorize it as one.

With those complaints aside, there is still a lot to like about this film. Thanks to its tropical filming location, the viewer convincingly gets the sense that the jungle is a claustrophobic nightmare for the commandos and that their mission is one with a low chance of success. Despite a few slow parts, Aldrich is generally effective in establishing tension and making the action matter when it does happen. Many critics at the time bashed the film for having too little action, but it should be remembered that wars are not always constant fighting. Most of it is actually waiting the enemy out and Aldrich wants audiences to feel that.

I also enjoyed seeing the subtle elements of class tension between the British soldiers. Aldrich being an American provides a fascinating outsider’s perspective, while Lawson serves the role as a more objective observer. All of this is carried by the aforementioned fantastic cast and considering that Too Late the Hero rarely receives much recognition, it’s a shame that most of its performances have gone under the radar. Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Denholm Elliott, and Ken Takakura are all top tier. Despite whatever problems the story itself might have, their dedication to the material clearly shows and I was invested because they were too.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it’s a fitting conclusion to all the cynical themes about heroism and war glory Aldrich presents. The final sequence’s breathtaking camerawork and swift editing keeps the viewer constantly engaged, while it’s intentionally left vague until the very last moment who made it out of the jungle alive. All of it is very impressive considering the strenuous conditions Too Late the Hero was shot under. While you may disagree with Aldrich’s pessimistic worldview, most will agree that he was among the best in his era at telling a thrilling cinematic narrative. There are plenty of thrills to be found here even if takes some time to get there.

Interesting facts

-Speaking of that ending, Too Late the Hero actually has an alternate one for British audiences. No spoilers again, but the biggest difference is around who lives and who dies. As far as I can tell, this British ending has never been preserved outside of its respective theatrical release. Neither the U.S. or U.K. DVD include it, which could suggest that it’s possibly lost media. All the more reason why there really needs to be an updated physical release of this film on Blu-ray or 4K with such material preserved, assuming it still exists.

-Veteran composer Gerald Fried was responsible for the score, an eclectic combination of patriotic military music and Asiatic ambience. Fried passed away in 2023 at the age of 95, leaving behind a huge body of work including TV shows like Gilligan’s Island, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. The score for Too Late the Hero is unfortunately quite hard to acquire, being only available on a long out-of-print CD.

-“Too Late the Hero” is also the name of a hit 1981 single by English rock musician John Entwistle of The Who fame. It’s a pretty cool new wave song, but it’s debatable if Entwistle was inspired by the movie while writing it. The contemplative lyrics ironically sort of fit the narrative’s themes of hollow victory though (“I’ve just won the war, it was nothing, really”) and I could easily imagine it being a suitable piece for the closing credits.

-As stated previously, the Japanese had no presence in New Hebrides and their role depicted in Too Late the Hero is completely fictional. You won’t find the name New Hebrides on any map today because it’s now the modern island country known as the Republic of Vanuatu. Most aren’t familiar with Vanuatu either, but it’s located 1,750 kilometers away from Australia. New Hebrides was notable for being one of the few colonial territories in history administered by two powers — the British and the French. It later achieved independence in 1980.

-It’s somewhat odd that Aldrich chose this obscure location to set the film while shooting in the Philippines, which was actually occupied by the Japanese for most of the war. Considering that the Allies waged a series of costly campaigns here, there would have been plenty of dark material like the Bataan Death March for Aldrich to draw upon. Perhaps he wanted to focus more on telling an engaging narrative set instead of being bogged down by actual historical details. Either way, consider the events of Too Late the Hero entirely made up.

-Cliff Robertson was not Aldrich’s first choice to play Lawson as he felt that he was not suitable for the role. The studio hired him despite the director’s strong opposition, which could be a reason why the final cut tends to focus more on the British soldiers than Lawson. Both men reportedly had a tense relationship on set and Robertson was particularly annoyed that he could not fly back to the United States to accept his Best Actor Academy Award for the film Charly, which was based on the short story Flowers for Algernon. The precise details of their dislike for one another are not entirely known, but one can assume that their stubborn personalities and contrasting creative visions were the main causes. They had previously worked together in Aldrich’s 1956 drama Autumn Leaves, but Too Late the Hero ended up being their only other collaboration.

-Despite Robertson’s character supposedly being a trained linguist fluent in Japanese, Robertson does not speak a word of the language in the film — not even phonetically as is typical Hollywood practice. There’s a scene where he tries to lure a Japanese soldier out from the trees by mimicking one of his comrades and saying that the enemy has passed, but Robertson is clearly dubbed over by someone else. It’s a pretty terrible effect that sticks out like a sore thumb even to someone who doesn’t know the language, but perhaps the sounds were too difficult for him to pronounce.

-The rest of the Japanese cast, however, is pretty authentic. It seems that the studio did take the effort to hire native Japanese extras to play the roles of the enemy soldiers, when most other films of the era would have used Japanese-Americans or other Asian-Americans who don’t actually speak Japanese. Their presence is generally secondary to the screentime of the British commando unit, but that’s actually one point for historical accuracy. Direct personal encounters with Japanese were relatively rare for Allied soldiers in the Pacific Theatre and jungle warfare was usually conducted at a distance.

-Too Late the Hero was Ken Takakura’s first appearance in a Hollywood production. Already an established veteran in his home country thanks to long-running film series like Abashiri Prison and Brutal Tales of Chivalry, Takakura went on to appear in over 200 works and is primarily remembered for his stoic roles a la Clint Eastwood. It isn’t clear how Takakura came aboard on the project, but Aldrich loved his performance so much that he wanted to work with him again. Their next collaboration was supposed to be The Yakuza which had a much hyped screenplay written by Paul Schrader of Taxi Driver fame.

The Yakuza had a complex production that would require a separate article to fully explain, but Aldrich ended up not working on the film and Sydney Pollack directed instead. This was Takakura’s second Hollywood film, with Black Rain and Mr. Baseball following later. Oddly enough, Takakura did not provide his own voice for the Japanese dub of Too Late the Hero. His fluency in English made him one of the few Japanese actors to break into American cinema and at one point he was even considered to play Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, but that obviously did not pan out. One day I’ll give some of Ken-san’s films a proper write-up.

-As was the case with The Dirty Dozen, quite a few of the cast members in Too Late the Hero had real-life military service. Michael Caine served in the Korean War, which had a profound impact on his worldview. The older cast members were directly involved in WWII. Cliff Robertson was a third mate in the U.S. Merchant Marine, Denholm Elliott joined the Royal Air Force, Harry Andrews was present during the D-Day landings as part of the Royal Artillery, and Percy Herbert survived being a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore. Despite his age and existing Hollywood career, Henry Fonda famously enlisted in the U.S. Navy to join WWII. He served in both the European and Pacific Theatres for three years altogether. Lance Percival and Ronald Fraser who were both closer to Caine’s age served in Seaforth Highlanders. As of Feb. 2025, Caine remains the only surviving member of the principle cast.

-Being released long before the days of home video, Too Late the Hero came out when most major films received novelizations. This would have been the only real way to revisit the story after leaving the cinema, apart from occasional vinyl record LPs that may have contained movie audio. Novelizations are a pretty dead art of storytelling these days due to films being instantly accessible via streaming and general audiences losing interest in reading, but during the prime of their relevance some of these books provided fascinating expansions of lore and characters. Too Late the Hero is notable because it actually received two novelizations, apparently because the American and British rights were separate.

The British novel by William Hughes is a standard adaptation, while the American novel by Con Sellers is told entirely from the POV of Lawson. Naturally both of these are very little known pieces of literature for an already obscure film. The American version has thankfully been uploaded to the Internet Archive, but the British version to has no digital preservation to my knowledge. I was able to snag a copy off AbeBooks, but it hasn’t arrived yet as of this writing. I plan on reading both and will probably feature my thoughts in a separate piece at some point as I’ve been wanting to review more books on Foreign Perspectives. Film novelizations are a fascinating concept and some even stand strong as their own independent works.

Should you see it?

Yes, even if it’s no masterpiece. For all its flaws, Too Late the Hero is still a thoroughly enjoyable war movie that’s carried by strong performances and an interesting jungle setting. Aldrich might get caught up too much at times in trying to draw parallels to the Vietnam War while some of the premise stretches the limits of credibility, but the production does show the characteristics that made him such an acclaimed auteur. It’s frankly miraculous that despite its difficult production, the film turned out to be as entertaining as it is.

The Dirty Dozen is certainly the superior war picture, but Too Late the Hero should be viewed less of a spin-off or spiritual sequel and more of its own thing. In retrospect, it feels very much like a transitionary work from the standard formula of many 1960s war films into the harder edge of the 1970s when restrictions on violence were being lifted. What a shame though that Too Late the Hero has fallen through the cracks into obscurity. It may not be quite worthy of a Criterion Collection release, but some distributor like Arrow Video really should get on restoring this underrated work so it has a life beyond low quality YouTube uploads. I can confidently say that Too Late the Hero deserves far better than the initial tepid reception it got 55 years ago.

A Bit of Film and War is a monthly column series covering war movies. I break down films from the classics to the obscure, detailing what wars they cover and if they’re worth checking out. It’s free for all subscribers to this Substack, but if you enjoy my writing, consider opting for a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to exclusive in-depth pieces and my entire backlog of work. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Welcome back to A Bit of Film and War, my column where I break down the masterpieces, misfires, hidden gems, and obscure relics of war cinema! I kickstarted this series last year with The Guns of Navarone and returned to it in November with Condor’s Nest, which should give you an idea of how drastically different each entry can be from the next.

For 2025, I intend to fulfill my promise of this being a regular series. Readers of Foreign Perspectives are familiar with my weekly column Bonus Perspectives which consists of me covering the news and recommending media. A Bit of Film and War is essentially the latter, but with full focus on what is my favorite genre of cinema — the war movie. I had to skip December’s entry due to unexpectedly getting sick twice at the end of 2024 thanks to a strenuous part-time job in addition to the usual holiday commitments, but we’re now back on schedule. I have quit that job and will be dedicated all of my energy to this Substack and my freelance writing.

Expect a new entry of A Bit of Film and War to drop during the last week of each month in the place of Bonus Perspectives. This was supposed to go out a couple of days ago, but there was a brief delay due to a readjustment of my schedule. Consider it January’s entry for A Bit of Film and War, while my regular edition of Bonus Perspectives will be out in a few days. New content for paid subscribers will also be posted soon, so I appreciate your patience. But enough housekeeping, this time we’re looking at the definition of a stone cold classic with The Dirty Dozen. Onward into battle!

What’s the film?

The Dirty Dozen premiered on June 15, 1967 in New York City. Its initial venue was the Capitol Theatre, one of the flagship cinemas of the now defunct Loews Theatres chain and a highly coveted spot for major Hollywood releases. Capitol Theatre would shut its doors just a year later with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey being the final film screened.

The Dirty Dozen came here to Japan less than four months later on Oct. 10 under the title 特攻大作戦 or “The Great Suicide Attack Operation.” That more or less encapsulates the central theme of the story, but it certainly does not have the same ring. As future columns in this series will show, Japanese distributors gave war films like The Dirty Dozen very repetitive titles containing terms like “operation” and “invasion.” I’m sure at least a few people must have been somewhat confused when Play Dirty starring Michael Caine arrived a couple years later as 大侵略 or “The Great Invasion” and Kelly’s Heroes after that as 戦略大作戦 or “The Great Strategic Operation.”

Like most films of its era, The Dirty Dozen was adapted from a pre-existing bestselling novel. In this case, The Dirty Dozen written by E. M. Nathanson in 1965. The book supposedly sold over two million copies, but it’s pretty obscure today and appears to have not had much of a lasting impact compared to the more popular cinematic version. The film did gangbusters worldwide at the box office, grossing a very impressive $45.3 million against a budget of less than $5.5 million.

Professional critics were generally positive, but a few singled out The Dirty Dozen for having more violence than other films at the time. A young Roger Ebert in one of his earliest reviews praised the picture for its technical merits and setup, but negatively compared the carnage on screen to the everyday violence of Chicago. While probably not too unsettling by today’s standards, one has to remember that the late 1960s were a watershed moment for Anglosphere cinema. Filmmakers were trying to push the limits of censorship and works like The Dirty Dozen were the stepping stones that lead to the harder edge works later seen in the 1970s.

What’s the war?

World War II, but you can basically consider the story of both the novel and the film 95% fiction. Nathanson wrote his book after hearing a story about a renegade unit called the “Filthy Thirteen” which supposedly went on particularly dangerous missions and had little regard for military authority. It did exist as a demolition unit and its members were described as more insubordinate than the average soldier, but unlike The Dirty Dozen which depicts convicts being enlisted to fight, the Filthy Thirteen were not criminals.

The men reportedly only shaved once a week while undergoing training, hence their name. The film also shows this and their generally difficult personalities, so in those aspects there are some grains of truth. World War II was also an era when convicts could have their sentences commuted in exchange for military service. FDR gave 44 prisoners serving life sentences the chance to fight the Japanese, but it’s unclear how many went and how many died.

The Dirty Dozen’s narrative about 12 dangerous criminals being assembled to assault a Nazi-occupied chateau in France, however, is completely fictionalized.

What’s it about?

The plot is simple. Under “Project Amnesty,” the U.S. government recruits 12 convicts with special skills to infiltrate a French chateau ahead of D-Day and assassinate top-ranking Wehrmacht officers inside. The criminals are all bastards, being a salty lot of thieves, murderers, and rapists. Yet OSS Major John Reisman sees the potential for them to hone their skills together and promises any man who survives the mission a full pardon. Most of The Dirty Dozen revolves around the men’s training into commandos who can work as a team, as well as them overcoming their differences and proving to the doubtful higher ups that they are qualified to carry out the mission.

Who’s the director?

The name Robert Aldrich (not to be confused with Robert Altman who directed M*A*S*H which perhaps I’ll cover here some day) has little resonance with modern filmgoers, but in his prime during the Golden Age of Hollywood he was a pioneer of socially conscious films and the use of violence to tell narratives. He was a clear inspiration on Quentin Tarantino for one thing.

Aldrich dished out quite a number of pictures throughout his career and essentially worked nonstop as a director from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. His work covered everything from westerns to war movies, resulting in a pretty well-rounded filmography that attempted to push beyond genre tropes. Many of Aldrich’s films are pessimistic commentaries on the human condition, which some critics would argue are too overtly cynical. Yet his skillful blend of action with introspective themes fleshed out by collaborating screenwriters resulted in surprisingly deep movies that also managed to be commercial hits.

I admit that I have not seen much of Aldrich’s work apart from The Dirty Dozen, which is easily his most famous film. Plenty of his movies have been restored and released on Blu-ray, even here in Japan, so I hope to fix that soon. The Dirty Dozen is especially in need of a proper restoration though, as its sole Blu-ray release from 2007 came out at a time when the disc format was still new and the picture quality was quite mediocre. Let’s hope that someone like the Criterion Collection or Arrow Video puts out a proper 4K UHD disc by 2027 for the film’s 60th anniversary. If any of Aldrich’s films deserve that treatment, it’s certainly this one.

Who’s in it?

One of the best ensemble casts ever put together for any action film. For starters, The Dirty Dozen came out at a time when much of Hollywood’s leading men actually served in World War II. While the action itself is obviously stylized, the real life experience of the actors adds a sense of military professionalism and familiarity that simply cannot be recreated today.

You have Lee Marvin as John Reisman, a no-nonsense major who assembles the team while trying to convince his superiors that the Dirty Dozen can actually pull off the mission. The contrasting personalities of Ernest Borgnine (better known to millennials and zoomers as the voice of Mermaid Man in SpongeBob Squarepants) and George Kennedy end up being quite humorous when paired against Marvin’s character.

Then we have the Dozen themselves. Whether it’s Charles Bronson’s straight-laced demeanor of few words, Telly Savalas being the diabolical troublemaker, or Donald Sutherland being a total goofball, each viewer is inevitably going to have their own favorite character. It is no small task to deliver a consistently entertaining narrative with so many people involved, but screenwriters Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller were able to pull it off. Surprisingly, each character gets a decent amount of screen time and no one feels like they are being sidelined.

The Foreign Perspectives review

Talk about a fun time! I can only imagine what audiences in 1967 must have felt when The Dirty Dozen premiered. With superhero movies being decades away from hitting mainstream cinema, war movies and westerns were the closest things you could get to them back then. As such, you can basically consider this one your grandfather’s Avengers. The Dirty Dozen assembled Hollywood’s most famous male actors of the decade and threw them together into one huge crossover that was quite simply unlike any other war film.

Yet The Dirty Dozen deserves credit for going beyond mindless action. The setup seen in first two acts is essential for the destruction seen in the final act to be effective. Many go into the film thinking it will be constant explosions and gunfire, but that’s not how director Robert Aldrich does things. He was an auteur that aimed to turn genre conventions on their head and make something like a war film a bit more than just people killing each other.

While it takes place during World War II, The Dirty Dozen arrived on the scene in the late 1960s when the United States was intensifying its involvement with the Vietnam War. The premise of the titular characters being violent criminals as well as cannon fodder for a suicide mission undoubtedly appealed to Aldrich’s pessimism toward the U.S. government at the time. He surely would have dismissed critics who slammed his film as too violent given the fact that it was quite tame compared to the real-life conflicts going on both domestically and abroad.

The Dirty Dozen in typical Aldrich style flirts with cynicism, but there is enough humor to avoid depressing audiences. Some of the most hilarious moments are provided by Donald Sutherland, with the famous scene of him impersonating a general bound to leave most viewers in stitches. The film M*A*S*H was still three years away, but you really can see an embryonic form of Captain Hawkeye Pierce in Vernon L. Pinkley.

Of course, when Aldrich finally gives viewers what they want with the bombastic third act, he’s firing on all cylinders. The Dozen’s assault on the Wehrmacht-occupied chateau still holds up as a beautiful medley of pyrotechnics and bullets, being staged decades before CGI took away the hard edge from war films. It’s a complete slaughter with enough grenades, gasoline, and gunfire to shake a stick at. Over the top and bordering on ridiculous? Undoubtedly, but this is classic Hollywood action at its finest.

All of this works because despite his bleak worldview, Aldrich believes in his characters and wants you as the viewer to end up caring for them as well. That’s a hard ask given that some of these men are real sons of bitches, but the strong screenplay and methodical pacing gets you on their side in the end. While antiheroes are a dime a dozen today, they were just entering mainstream cinema in the 1960s due to the political and social climate of the time. I defy you to not feel at least a little bit sorry when certain characters bite the dust in The Dirty Dozen.

Interesting facts

As previously stated, many cast members in The Dirty Dozen actually participated in World War II. Lee Marvin was on the front lines of the Pacific Theater against the Japanese as a scout sniper and even sustained injuries from machine gun fire. He surely would have seen much death during his time in Marine Corps and like the characters in The Dirty Dozen, he also faced trouble for discipline-related issues. Ernest Borgnine had already joined the U.S. Navy years before the war started and reenlisted after America officially joined.

George Kennedy served in the U.S. Army for 16 years, participated in the Battle of the Bulge, and surprisingly enough gained a cultural interest in Japan after working for the Far East Network. He would go on to play foreign characters in Proof of the Man and Virus among other Japanese films. Certainly an underrated actor who deserves more recognition, so I hope to highlight more of his work in future columns.

Other cast members who were veterans included Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Robert Webber, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, and Clint Walker. Bronson had a particularly tough upbringing being born into an extremely impoverished coal mining family consisting of 15 children. After his father died, Bronson took over his job working in the mines and was only able to leave after enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Bronson’s entire life would be enough for its own movie, but he rarely ever discussed his personal life and preferred to let audiences come to their own conclusions about his characters.

Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Trini Lopez, and Donald Sutherland were born roughly a decade after their older cast members, making them too young to have served in World War II. Brown was most famous at the time for playing fullback with the Cleveland Browns and announced his retirement from football in favor of acting during the filming of The Dirty Dozen. Cassavetes went on to become one of the most important independent directors in Hollywood with works like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence and is frequently taught in film schools. Lopez more or less abandoned acting altogether, but became a successful singer and guitarist in the decades since.

Sutherland requires little introduction as one of the most acclaimed Canadian actors of all time. He would later become known for taking on a wide range of roles ranging from sympathetic heroes to sinister villains, but his earlier output was more comedic by comparison. His son Kiefer, who was born during the filming of The Dirty Dozen, is also a famous actor and is best remembered for Jack Bauer in 24. Donald Sutherland passed away in 2024 at the age of 88, leaving Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland as the only surviving members of the Dozen.

The Dirty Dozen being a massive success at the box office meant that things couldn’t end at just one film. In 1970, Aldrich directed Too Late the Hero which is widely regarded as a spiritual successor. It shifts things to the Pacific Theater, but that’s a topic for a future edition of A Bit of Film and War. Italian director Enzo G. Castellari did his own take on a similar narrative premise with The Inglorious Bastards and Quentin Tarantino would later make his own war film under the title Inglourious Basterds. Quite the rabbit hole, isn’t it?

Throughout the 1980s there were a total of three TV movie sequels to The Dirty Dozen, but Aldrich had nothing to do with their production. Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Richard Jaeckel returned in 1985 for The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, but out of the trio only Borgnine stuck around for 1987’s The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission and 1988’s The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission. Interestingly enough, Telly Savalas did come back for the two latter sequels, but he plays a different role than his character from the original film. I haven’t seen these films, but given my love for cheesy action schlock I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually.

The Dirty Dozen has had considerable cultural influence on other works as well. In an homage to their original roles, George Kennedy, Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine, and Clint Walker provided voice work for the Commando Elite in Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers. In the comic book world, Marvel’s Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen was a spin-off from Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and as one can tell from its title, directly took inspiration from The Dirty Dozen. DC’s Suicide Squad is more or less exactly the same concept, just with super villains.

Hollywood has thrown around ideas of remaking The Dirty Dozen over the last few years. While I would love to see a throwback to old school World War II films, that doesn’t seem to be what’s in development. David Ayer wants to direct his own take on it, but I question what the point would even be given that he disappointed audiences so badly in 2016 with Suicide Squad. He has openly stated that he has little interest in doing a Dirty Dozen film set in the past either, so let’s hope that it never gets made. Then again, the same can be said about most Hollywood remakes.

Should you see it?

Yes, most definitely. The Dirty Dozen stands strong as one of the best war films of its era, but also as a timeless classic that can still hold the attention of audiences today. Robert Aldrich’s direction keeps the proceedings compelling with tight pacing, a strong script, memorable characters, and an explosive final act that is well worth the journey to get there. The real World War II experience of the cast and masterful use of practical effects have kept The Dirty Dozen just as fresh and exciting as it was when it came out nearly 60 years ago.

Pretty much any action film that centers around a group of antiheroes or reluctant protagonists tasked with a seemingly impossible mission likely owes something to The Dirty Dozen, which is a testament to how much cultural force the picture has had over so many decades. For that reason, there shouldn’t be too much unfamiliarity if you’re seeing it for the first time. There have been many sequels, parodies, homages, and rip-offs, but accept no substitutes. Go back to the original and enjoy a hell of a time with the real Dirty Dozen.

Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far as a new reader or free subscriber, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

A Bit of Film and War is a monthly column series covering war movies. I break down films from the classics to the obscure, detailing what wars they cover and if they’re worth checking out. It’s free for all subscribers to this Substack, but if you enjoy my writing, consider opting for a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to exclusive in-depth pieces and my entire backlog of work. Your support is greatly appreciated!

My weekly column series Bonus Perspectives is off this week and in its place I’m bringing back a long overdue entry of A Bit of Film and War. In case you weren’t subscribed that far back, in April I started a new column series dedicated to covering my favorite genre of cinema, the war film. I wrote about The Guns of Navarone and was pleased with how it turned out, but was never able to find the time to write further articles in the series.

Well, that time is now. As I elaborated in a previous edition of Bonus Perspectives, the last week of every month will feature a new entry in A Bit of Film and War in its place. Like Bonus Perspectives, this too is a free column for all subscribers of the Foreign Perspectives Substack, so no further action is required to get access to it. Still, I would very much appreciate it if you would consider a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to my entire archive of work and upcoming pieces that will be exclusively for paid subscribers. Foreign Perspectives recently surpassed 800 subscribers and I’m trying to hit 1,000 by the end of the year.

Without further delay though, let’s move on to this month’s edition of A Bit of Film and War with Condor’s Nest, a very low budget independent WWII movie that I guarantee you’ve probably never heard of. Why am I devoting an entire article to it? Because while it’s far away from anything particularly good, I’m amazed that such a film like this exists at all in the year of our Lord 2024. It’s like a cross between a run-of-the-mill 1980s war movie that was forgotten after its initial theatrical run and one of those early 2000s direct-to-DVD flicks you see in Walmart bargain bins for $5. Here at A Bit of Film and War we don’t just cover the classics, we cover the obscure too.

What’s the film?

Condor’s Nest premiered on Jan. 27, 2023 via limited theatrical releases across major U.S. cities before quickly moving to digital, streaming, and home video. Despite clearly being made on a shoestring budget, Paramount Pictures is the distributor and seemed to have enough faith in the project to pick it up. I normally include the Japanese title given where I live, but this film seems to have never gotten a release here. The title probably takes inspiration from other WWII movies like Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed.

I saw Condor’s Nest earlier this year when I traveled via Delta Airlines back to Japan, it being part of the free in-flight movie package. Being thousands of miles above the ground with no internet, there was no way to check its reception, so I went into it blind. Despite being released in 2023, there’s actually very little information about the film available online. You know that you’re in for a treat when there’s not even a Wikipedia article.

What’s the war?

The Second World War obviously, but more specifically the years after it. While the Third Reich was defeated and its leadership executed after WWII with the Nuremberg trials, thousands of Nazis escaped to South America via “ratlines” and lived in their new adopted countries under assumed names. Many escaped justice for decades thanks to sympathetic governments and supporters. It should come as no surprise that such an intriguing subject lends well to movies and documentaries like Condor’s Nest, though if you want something a bit less schlocky I’d probably recommend Operation Finale starring Oscar Isaac or the Netflix true crime series The Devil Next Door.

What’s it about?

The story blends real stories of Nazis fleeing to South America and the bizarre conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man Heinrich Himmler actually survived the war to lead the Fourth Reich. If that sounds like an utterly insane plot, that’s because it is. Condor’s Nest deciding to take such a wacky alternative history narrative and playing it all completely straight like an espionage thriller is what compelled me to keep watching to the very end even though the overall believability was quite thin.

Toward the end of WWII, U.S. Army sniper Will Spalding and his B17 crewmates are shot down over France. Nazi soldiers lead by SS Colonel Martin Bach quickly surround the men except for Spalding who was previously ordered to scout the area from a distance. He witnesses Bach kill all the men in cold blood, making him the only one in the group who survives the war. Years later, he travels to Argentina on a quest for revenge, only to realize that a greater plot is at hand to revive the Nazis under Heinrich Himmler and threaten the world with nuclear weapons.

Provided that you can suspend your disbelief and are prepared for something closer to Quentin Tarantino’s highly fictionalized Inglourious Basterds over Bryan Singer’s stick-to-the-facts Valkyrie, Condor’s Nest will likely hold your interest. It covers an aspect of WWII most tend to forget about and will probably get you to at least check Wikipedia for more information, which is something any decently compelling war movie should do.

Who’s the director?

Someone new to the scene named Phil Blattenberger. His only other film before Condor’s Nest was a Vietnam War drama called Point Man, according to IMDB. I haven’t seen that one, but the description suggests that it’s a similarly low budget war movie and both works share a couple of cast members. I wonder if this is what will become his signature genre, but either way it’s pretty admirable that he was able to get two ambitious period pieces made despite having few industry connections.

According to a comment the director himself posted on Reddit, Condor’s Nest happened because he built a full-scale B17 bomber in a North Carolinian field to attract investors. Somehow this impressed them enough to back the film and a few reasonably big name actors ended up getting attached to the project. Again, you can’t help but admire the tenacity in this day and age. It isn’t clear how successful the film was, but I would certainly be interested in seeing what Blattenberger makes in the future.

Who’s in it?

Most of the marketing around Condor’s Nest focused heavily on the participation of Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy) and Michael Ironside (Top Gun, Splinter Cell). Ironside’s role, however, amounts to little more than a glorified cameo and I was disappointed to see that he didn’t play a more prominent character. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Vosloo turned in a committed performance as the main villain Colonel Martin Bach. It’s in line with previous villains he’s done and you buy the idea that he’s a ruthless Nazi commander.

A few other familiar faces like Jackson Rathbone (Twilight) and Jorge Garcia (LOST) are also part of the cast. These aren’t necessarily the biggest name actors, but Condor’s Nest being able to attract any talent apart from complete unknowns suggests that enough people had faith in the project’s concept. Even the unknown actors aren’t bad. Jacob Keohane as the protagonist Will Spalding totally sells the role of a traumatized soldier consumed by revenge. He conveys a lot through just his eyes and I hope he’s able to get bigger roles. Condor’s Nest features a surprisingly large cast and for a film of this caliber, it’s nice to see that most involved seemed to view it as more than just an easy paycheck.

The Foreign Perspectives review

In life there are some films that you would never watch under normal circumstances unless they were put in front of you by pure chance. I’m talking about the movies that you don’t seek out; they find you. Such an occasion fell into my lap during my trip back from the United States in February, which I wrote about earlier this year.

On the Delta flight returning to Japan, I was faced with a plethora of options to watch with the available movies, but for whatever reason decided to choose Condor’s Nest over what were probably better selections overall. Maybe it’s because the inner war film buff within me will never say no to anything WWII-related even if it’s rubbish or pure schlock. Count me in the category of people who liked Frankenstein’s Army. What can I say, I have a soft spot for the ridiculous.

Granted, Condor’s Nest isn’t anywhere near as weird as that, but I’d still call it one of the strangest war movies I’ve seen in recent memory. While probably not very stellar by any objective standards of modern filmmaking, I couldn’t help but feel inspired to write about it because it’s nothing like anything out now. It feels like a relic of a bygone age when you could go to the cinema almost every month and see a new war film. The plots often melded together and originality was slim, but you still had a good time with your mates because it did exactly what it said on the tin.

One shouldn’t go into Condor’s Nest thinking that they’re getting Dunkirk or 1917. The cinematography is rather pedestrian and the script itself is nothing to write home about, but what made the film enjoyable for me was its earnestness. So much of Hollywood today relies heavily on cynicism or tongue-in-cheek winking at the audience, but there’s none of that here. This is an old fashioned war movie about unfinished business with Nazis who escaped justice. It raises some interesting questions around the nature of revenge and closure, but it doesn’t try to be any deeper than it has to be. While far away from an Academy Award winning story, it knows its limitations and works within them reasonably well.

There are only a handful of action sequences, but the drama around them provides some decent buildup and the film thankfully never overstays its welcome at a lean 100 minutes. While the conspiracy theory stuff around a secret Fourth Reich was entertaining, I found the highlight to be the inner conflict faced by our protagonist Will Spalding. Jacob Keohane convincingly plays him as a man who has already lost everything and has no purpose other than to seek vengeance against the Nazi who executed his fellow soldiers. There were probably countless men like him who never found inner peace after serving in the war and the existence of living Nazis in South America would have only added insult to injury.

We unfortunately live in a time where antisemitism is on the rise and something once obvious like the Nazis being among the worst regimes of the 20th century is being forgotten. That fact may have become trite at one point due to the sheer amount of WWII movies that were being released in cinemas and video rental stores, but I think we need that reminder again. Something like Condor’s Nest calls back to an age when WWII was closer to living memory, which is why I found myself enjoying it far more than I thought I would.

Interesting facts

It’s estimated that as many as 9,000 Nazi officers and sympathetic collaborators made it to South America in the years after WWII. Brazil, Chile, and especially Argentina became the new homes of these Third Reich escapees. Over three million people in Argentina are of German descent, most of which can be traced to the waves of post-WWII immigration. Imagine the awkward family gatherings.

With a controversial legacy to put it lightly, Argentinian President Juan Perón was known to be a sympathizer of fascists and Nazis. His willingness to provide a safe haven for ex-members of Hitler’s regime allowed notorious SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann to escape justice for decades. Perón believed he could use the best minds from the Third Reich to benefit his own developing country, which is why he helped Nazis get to his country through secret networks facilitated by diplomats and intelligence officers. It’s understandably a very sore subject for Argentinians today, but like the U.S. recruiting Nazis for its space program, Latin American countries also made pragmatic moves within the context of Cold War geopolitics.

With that said, there’s little direct evidence to suggest that Heinrich Himmler was among the thousands of Nazis who fled Europe for South America. In the context of fiction like Condor’s Nest, such a narrative lends well to a compelling story, but real life is nowhere near as glamorous. In his book SS-1: The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler, writer Hugh Thomas lays out the best case for a plausible scenario where the head of the SS in fact did not commit suicide, though Thomas is a surgeon by profession and should not be confused with the late English historian of the same name. Still, there are some compelling little-known details and a full biography of Himmler’s life, so it’s worth a look even if the overall thesis is shaky at best.

Condor’s Nest is follows a long tradition of fictional works entertaining the idea of the Nazis secretly planning to come back. Robert Ludlum, who was the author of the original Jason Bourne novels, explores the idea of a grand Fourth Reich conspiracy in The Holcroft Covenant. Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil follows a similar theme and was even adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele, though I haven’t seen it yet myself. Certainly something that may be covered in a future edition of Bonus Perspectives.

Should you see it?

This is a tough one because while I enjoyed my time with Condor’s Nest, both for legitimate reasons and because of some of the cheesiness on display, it’s not necessarily a film I can wholeheartedly recommend like The Guns of Navarone. It’s cheaply made, you can see when the seams start to come apart, and it’s hardly going to win any points for originality. At the same time, I think it’s impressive that such an old-school war film like this exists at all in the modern landscape of Hollywood which long stopped trying to do works like these ages ago.

If you’re a war film enthusiast like me or someone who simply likes to support underdog projects, you’ll definitely get some entertainment out of it. If the low budget vibes are too distracting for you, the aforementioned Operation Finale and The Devil Next Door are probably better options. Still, I’m glad that Phil Blattenberger got his vision off the ground. With more resources at his disposal, I hope this isn’t the last we see of him when it comes to this genre.

Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far as a new reader or free subscriber, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

War, what’s it good for? Apart from fueling the military-industrial complex, it’s also the perfect subject for a thrilling narrative. Despite having no military background myself, the war film is easily my favorite genre of cinema and I find myself returning to it constantly.

Whether it’s stories of heroism or cynicism, bravery or cowardice, there’s something about war which brings out the best and worst of the human condition. And what better medium of exploring the human condition than film? A Bit of Film and War is a new column series here on Foreign Perspectives dedicated to covering war movies.

In each article, I’ll be providing a spotlight on classic masterpieces, hidden gems, and even complete duds. Not all war films are about just the fighting either. Some explore complicated geopolitics and some are about the aftermath of war. A good war film may feature lavish battles and action-packed set pieces, but my favorite ones are often more psychological and center around the human aspects of deadly conflict. Through this series, I hope to provide readers with the historical context of both the films themselves and the wars they center around.

As many of these movies grow older with time, it can become difficult for younger generations to appreciate what they were trying to accomplish. Only about 119,000 veterans of World War II are still with us and their numbers are rapidly dwindling with each year. Film is thus how many will end up remembering their legacies, though it is important to separate fact from fiction.

This column series is structured differently compared to how I’ve typically written about film on my Substack. Each entry will follow a pattern of me breaking down a movie’s release information, the war covered, the plot, the director, and the cast into separate sections, with my own review and remarks on interesting facts to follow. Finally, I will summarize if the film is worth seeking out or not overall.

Without further ado, let’s start our maiden voyage of A Bit of Film and War with an acclaimed classic.

What’s the film?

The Guns of Navarone first premiered in the United Kingdom on April 27, 1961. It came out two months later in the United States on June 22 and two months after that here in Japan on August 15. The Japanese title is ナバロンの要塞 or “The Fortress of Navarone.”

It was based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean and while a reasonably close adaptation, there are some notable differences which we’ll get to later.

The film has a long history of home releases, but finally arrived on 4K UHD Blu-ray in 2021 for its 60th anniversary. A lot of movies released during the 1960s suffer from poor preservation, but thankfully The Guns of Navarone has managed to live into the 21st century with a surprisingly good restoration.

What’s the war?

The novel and film both take place during the 1943 Dodecanese campaign of World War II. While this particular naval battle is largely forgotten today among the general public, it was notable for being the first collaborative effort between the United Kingdom and Italy after the latter joined the Allies following Benito Mussolini losing power.

The Allies attempted to capture the Italian Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea to gain valuable strategic territory against the Germans, but the campaign was a complete failure. Thousands of Allied soldiers were killed or captured, while Germany suffered relatively light causalities and destroyed equipment.

What’s it about?

The Germans are planning to invade the island of Kheros where 2,000 British soldiers are marooned in 1943. Doing so would be a crippling blow to the Allies and an additional show of strength to convince neutral Turkey to join the Axis cause. Previous efforts to rescue the men have failed due to the Nazis having a tactical advantage on the adjacent Navarone Island with two large-calibre guns capable of blowing the Royal Navy’s ships to smithereens.

A team of elite commandos is tasked with infiltrating the Nazis’ tightly-guarded fortress on Navarone to blow up the guns, which would allow the Allies to rescue the British soldiers. The central protagonist is German-speaking American spy Keith Mallory who is reluctantly recruited, joining the mission’s team which consists of highly trained men holding individual special skills.

We later learn that Mallory has some troubled history with fellow team member Andrea Stavros, a colonel from the Greek Army. During their complicated past at a previous point during the war, Stavros blamed Mallory for the death of his wife and children. Vowing to eventually kill his former friend, the tension between Stavros and Mallory is an undercurrent throughout the film in addition to the seemingly impossible stakes the Allied commandos face.

Who’s the director?

English director J. Lee Thompson helmed The Guns of Navarone as a last-minute replacement for Alexander Mackendrick. It’s somewhat debated if Mackendrick left because of health issues or if he disagreed with the creative direction of the project. In any case, Thompson was not an unreasonable choice and the film turning out so well is no coincidence.

Though his name and work are mostly obscure today, Thompson was known for being flexible in the genres he approached, be they light-hearted comedies or thrilling adventure films. The Guns of Navarone is ostensibly a standard ensemble action flick, but the deconstruction of the protagonist’s attitude to killing harkens back to Thompson’s previous movies which explored a wide array of social problems.

His other famous work is Cape Fear which came out a year after Navarone and also starred Gregory Peck. Modern audiences will likely remember that film for the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake and The Simpsons episode which parodied the story with Sideshow Bob attempting to kill Bart Simpson.

Thompson’s later career produced few hits, while the direction of poorly-received sequels to Planet of the Apes did little to elevate his declining reputation. His collaborations with Charles Bronson only contributed to this even further, but they do have their fans. With a decent amount of hidden gems in Thompson’s filmography and maybe a few cult classics, perhaps a modern critical reevaluation is overdue.

Who’s in it?

Gregory Peck turns in one of his strongest performances as protagonist Captain Keith Mallory. Like most of his roles, Peck brings in a sense of calm maturity and stoic presence that instantly makes him likable. It’s not surprising that J. Lee Thompson worked with him again in Cape Fear, while today’s audiences will best remember him as Atticus Finch in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. If you want to know why Peck is regarded as one of the 20th century’s best actors, these three works are a good sampling.

Peck is given top billing on the film poster with David Niven and Anthony Quinn who play explosives expert Corporal Miller and Greek Army Colonel Andrea Stavros, respectively. While these names and other members of the principle cast like Stanley Baker and Anthony Quayle likely won’t mean as much to younger viewers, they represented some of the finest actors working in 1960s Hollywood at the time.

The Guns of Navarone was made when Hollywood had less sensitivity to hiring actors who were ethnically or racially accurate to their roles, which is made apparent when one sees that Anthony Quinn and James Darren play Greek characters despite neither actually being Greek. Both, however, do a good job with the material. Greek actress Irene Papas is also part of the cast, and she would go on to have a successful international career over five decades.

What makes war films of its era like The Guns of Navarone so compelling, however, is knowing that much of its cast actually did serve in or lived through World War II. Many actors, directors, and screenwriters in Hollywood during this time had experience either being in the military or even participating in combat, which added a sense of visceral realism that’s hard to find in a lot of cinema today.

The Foreign Perspectives review

This is one of those classic films that I had on my radar for years, but for whatever reason never got around to. I have an old hard drive of movies I torrented back in high school (don’t tell anyone) and the date on the file listed was 2015, though I knew about The Guns of Navarone long before that. Since I didn’t want to have a terrible viewing experiencing watching a dubiously downloaded compressed video file blown up on my 4K television, I did the responsible thing and rented it off Amazon Prime.

What initially led me to the film all those years ago was in fact the video game Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. The opening to it features protagonist Big Boss scaling up a rainy cliff in order to infiltrate a tightly-secure enemy base. Sound familiar? That’s because director Hideo Kojima fully admits to taking inspiration from The Guns of Navarone, which isn’t surprising at all considering that the man is basically the George Lucas of video games when it comes to his cinematic homages.

So here I am over a decade later having finally watched The Guns of Navarone, older and wiser than I was when I first heard about the movie as a teenager. Did it live up to all the hype I had built in my head? More or less yes, though I wouldn’t necessarily place it in the same category as some of my favorite war movies like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence or King Rat. What I will say though is that The Guns of Navarone is fully deserving of its reputation as a classic and the overall influence it would have on war cinema cannot be ignored.

You can essentially bet that any film, television series, or video game which deals with infiltrating an enemy base is paying some kind of homage to The Guns of Navarone whether intentionally or not. Wolfenstein and Metal Gear for example owe their existence to the film. Indeed, the overall plot of Navarone inadvertently feels somewhat like a video game today due to how many times its formula has been copied over the ensuing decades. It’s not an exaggeration to say that The Guns of Navarone is to ensemble cast war movies what Mad Max is to post-apocalyptic wasteland movies.

Gregory Peck’s performance is easily the best aspect of the film. Captain Keith Mallory stands out as the protagonist because he isn’t a generic do-gooder hero. He’s instead someone who’s tired of war and fully knows that there’s nothing glamorous in the killing he has been ordered to do, but is aware that it’s an unpleasant necessity to win. I expected a standard action film with The Guns of Navarone, but Peck’s character gives it much-needed psychological depth that was somewhat uncommon for war films of its era.

The latter half of the 1960s would lead to deeper deconstructions of war in cinema due to America’s greater role in Vietnam, but audiences would not have been as disillusioned in 1961 with World War II having ended just 16 years previously. The Guns of Navarone ultimately pushes the deep thinking aside for tense drama and thrilling action setpieces that make the film closer to typical escapism. The last act in particular delivers on all fronts with how it keeps viewers in constant suspense thanks to some tight editing and cutting between scenes. You want these guys to succeed, you truly feel the time limit they’re under, and the film gets you fully behind them thanks to a generally strong script.

But still, The Guns of Navarone isn’t perfect. We only get some hints of the conflict between Mallory and Stavros, with just a couple of moments suggesting that the latter hates the former because of the death of his family. This aspect wasn’t even in the original novel and it feels underbaked here. Considering that there’s already a ton riding on the success of the main mission, the revenge subplot is largely an unnecessary story thread. I get that the intention was probably to up the tension even further, but sticking to the source material would have been plenty.

The other weakness is the tacked-on romance aspect which also wasn’t in the novel. Midway through the film, the group of commandos gets into contact with two Greek resistance members on Navarone Island. In the novel, these were two men named Louki and Panayis, but in the movie they are two women named Maria and Anna. The point of this was to create a romantic relationship between Maria and Stavros. While that could have been an interesting aspect, it really doesn’t get fleshed out much beyond the point of needing two characters to embrace each other before the credits roll.

It’s understandable that some things get changed in the transition from novel to film, but the additions to The Guns of Navarone are largely unnecessary when the original source material was interesting enough on its own. It isn’t exactly a short movie at two hours and 38 minutes, and there are times when the pacing feels off. If the script had stuck closer to the novel, this could have easily been a much leaner story running closer to two hours with the superfluous additions excised. As is, we simply have a good war film that is well-acted and well-directed, but also one that feels a bit slow at times with some ideas under-explored.

Interesting facts

Despite the backdrop of the 1943 Dodecanese campaign, the overall events of The Guns of Navarone are largely fictional. It takes place in the same area and time period, but the central location of Navarone Island does not exist in real life and the story element of 2,000 British soldiers being marooned on the island of Kheros is also invented. It was, however, filmed on Rhodes and other surrounding Greek islands, which means that the locations are at least somewhat close to where the real fighting took place.

Gregory Peck’s character Mallory is depicted in the film as an American spy fluent in German, but the character in the novel was actually written as being from New Zealand. A problem arose during filming when it became apparent that Peck couldn’t convincingly speak German, which lead to those lines being dubbed by Robert Rietty. I didn’t even realize this upon my first watch, as the German dubbing was a largely seamless experience that captured the same deep tones of Peck’s voice. Rietty had a long career of dubbing films, providing numerous voices in films like Lawrence of Arabia and the James Bond series when an actor couldn’t speak a foreign language well enough.

David Niven as the explosives expert Corporal Miller likely had the worst experience out of anyone else on the film. The final sequences required his character to set up charges on the large guns hidden away in a cave on Navarone Island. The detonator is attached to an elevator above a pool of dirty water, but exposure to it resulted in Niven contracting some kind of infection that left him seriously bedridden. Several of his scenes remained unfinished, yet Niven forged on to complete the shoot. This led to his infection only worsening, but he managed to live for over 20 more years before dying of unrelated causes in 1983.

While The Guns of Navarone ends on a positive note with the mission accomplished, the actual Dodecanese campaign was an utter disaster for the Allies. The British lost considerable men and equipment over two-and-a-half months, while the Germans suffered far less casualties. It remains one of the more notable Axis victories, but did little to change the course of the war. The island territories that Hitler gained control of were in retrospect viewed to be a waste of resources and manpower, especially as the Nazis suffered bitter defeats at the hands of the Soviets thousands of miles away.

The Guns of Navarone also does not cover the fact that thousands of Jews lived on the Dodecanese Islands and in Italian-occupied parts of Greece. While Italy was pressured by Nazi Germany to adopt the same antisemitic policies, these were not strongly enforced, and Jews who lived in territory controlled by Italy had a far better chance of surviving the war. That all changed when the Nazis won the Dodecanese campaign, which resulted in thousands of Jews being sent to concentration camps to be slaughtered as part of the Holocaust. This is understandably outside the scope of the film, but viewers should know that its seemingly happy ending is not the whole story.

After the commercial and critical success of The Guns of Navarone, author Alistair MacLean followed up his novel with a sequel called Force 10 from Navarone. It continues immediately after the events of its predecessor, but interestingly follows what happened in the film adaptation and not in the original text. The novel became a bestseller, and there were plans to adapt it into a film sequel with Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn returning, but years of development hell prevented this from happening.

A film called Force 10 from Navarone eventually did come out in 1978, but it bore almost no resemblance to MacLean’s book apart from the title. While James Bond director Guy Hamilton helmed the project, the cast members from The Guns of Navarone were deemed too old to reprise their roles. It’s really only notable for being the first movie Harrison Ford appeared in after his success in Star Wars the previous year, but even he admits that he only really did it for the money and to avoid typecasting. Don’t ask me about Force 10 from Navarone though, as I haven’t watched it and don’t really have much desire to do so.

Should you see it?

Back to the original Guns of Navarone though, is it still worth watching today? I would give it my recommendation, but with the caveat that new viewers should expect some familiar territory. As I alluded to previously, Navarone is responsible for influencing the next 60 years of war cinema. Watching it now is like seeing Citizen Kane for the first time and wondering why so many people gas it up as the GOAT when other films have improved upon its cinematography techniques and approach to visual storytelling. That doesn’t take away from what an important film Citizen Kane is, but you need to be aware of the context to fully appreciate it.

The same holds true for The Guns of Navarone. It set the standard for countless “impossible mission” films to the point where one could easily mistake the modern Mission Impossible series as a loose remake of its concept, though it is interesting to note that the original television series first aired just five years later in 1966. Other works at the time were obviously toying with similar ideas, but few ended up coming together as well as Navarone did. Given how ambitious the source material was, the film adaptation being as good as it is despite some flaws is no small miracle.

With that in mind, The Guns of Navarone is genuinely an enjoyable watch elevated by an all-star cast of some of Hollywood’s greatest stars and the direction of J. Lee Thompson. This kind of war movie isn’t really made anymore because the industry eventually became oversaturated with them, but nowadays it’s the kind of Sunday afternoon fare your parents or grandparents will probably enjoy watching with you.

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