A Bit of Film and War: "The Guns of Navarone"
The first entry in a new column series all about war movies.
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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Great job!