#282: The Guns of Navarone
The ultimate wartime espionage action movie
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 27, 2020.
Initial release: April 27, 1961
Director. J. Lee Thompson
War movies come in all types; from epic recreations of real battles like The Longest Day to character-driven dramas like A Walk in the Sun, the genre has a lot of overlap with many other genres. But if there is a war movie more influential on spy movies than The Guns of Navarone, I don’t know it.
It’s 1943. Two thousand British troops are trapped on the Greek island of Kheros with no means of escape, for the only access to it by the Allies is guarded by a pair of huge coastal guns situated on the island of Navarone. In six days the Nazis will storm Kheros as a show of strength. When it’s clear that an air assault won’t work, the Allies quickly put together a plan: infiltrate the island with a small team via climbing a cliff (in the dark), find a way into the bunker from which the guns operate, and destroy them by any means necessary.
A team is assembled: Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) as team leader; Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck), an American spy and former mountaineer; John Miller (David Niven) as the team’s explosives expert; Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn) as the guide, and two others. (You’ll note I didn’t name the other two; it’s not just because I ran out of room in the tweet when I first wrote this review, it’s also because they receive far less characterization compared to Mallory, Miller and Stavros, or even Franklin, who gets virtually written out a third of the way into the film.)
While the film’s two hours and forty minutes suffers from some slight pacing issues — though better than screenwriter Carl Foreman’s earlier World War II outing, The Bridge Over The River Kwai — it still manages to be gripping throughout. The three key characters all get a chance to show off their acting chops, for example a scene where Miller voices his suspicions of a saboteur is right out of a detective flick; and in an amazing moment, Quinn acts for two as his Stavros puts on a big show to put the Germans off guard.
While the film lives and dies on its tight script and sharp character dynamics, it’s also technically impressive; the cinematography could almost double as a travel brochure for the Greek isles, and it rarely has that boxy soundstage feel that many films of the era suffer from. Indeed, the set for the gun room itself is intimidatingly spectacular — it’s quite large and impressively put together, complete with working parts for the system that loads the enormous shells the guns use as ammunition. All the more satisfying to see them fall into the sea.
The legacy of this film is obvious in the influence it has on the spy and action genre. You can see the roots of James Bond movies in this film; heck, you can even see the influence on Metal Gear (insertion by climbing a sheer cliff was lifted for the series not once, but twice!)
At nearly 60 years old, The Guns of Navarone is now a forgotten classic, rarely brought up except in the context of old war movies. The special effects don’t always hold up (for example, a truck exploding comes after a particularly shitty cut) and its runtime might intimidate modern audiences, but it’s still one of the finest in its genre.
