Les Canons de Navarone

"The Dirty Dozen" may have updated the film's premise for the cynical late '60's, but as much as I love that old hard-boiled film, even I have to admit that it doesn't hold a candle to "The Guns of Navarone". Though it may be hard to remember now that the premise has been used so much, the impossible mission theme was NOT a common staple in action films until this movie. The question of whether or not the team is going to pull it off is, for once, not as simple as many other simple-minded movies have made it. There are moments where the mission is endangered by just about everything imaginable: the CO being critically wounded, suspicious enemies, personality conflicts, wrenching moral dillemas, a traitor in the ranks, being captured by the enemy. The storyline plays out like the most extreme manifestation of Murphy's Law: everything that can go wrong DOES go wrong.

The team put together here couldn't be more incongruent with each other. Gregory Peck's world-class mountain climber who becomes the team's reluctant CO, David Niven's hot-tempered, authority-defying sapper, Anthony Quinn's Greek ex-Colonel who has promised to kill Peck at war's end, Stanley Baker's weary soldier who's tired of the unending slaughter, a young Greek national who wants more and more of it...the real miracle is that they manage to get as far and as well as they do. For every step forward, they wind up paying for it. Be it in blood, moral anguish, or pain, no one comes out of this mission unchanged or unscathed. I honestly feel that it is this theme of sacrifice that is the key to the greatness of "The Guns of Navarone".

The Greek part of the Mediterranean Theater of World War II was strictly a British show. They fought a pitched seesaw battle with the Germans until almost the end of the war. A great deal of debate about the feasibility of the whole operation has raged with military historians. The reason that the British Army and forces from their Commonwealth countries was to keep Turkey in the position of benevolent neutrality. At least this was one of Winston Churchill's stated aims and The Guns of Navarone makes the case for it.

But specifically this film deals with a pair of menacing looking naval guns embedded in a cliff with a big rock overhang. The RAF can't get at the thing to destroy from air, so a commando team is put together under the charge of Anthony Quayle. A couple of native Greeks are along, Anthony Quinn and James Darren, an explosives man, David Niven, a tough anti-fascist resistance man whose service dates back to the Spanish Civil War, Stanley Baker, and a mountain climber, Gregory Peck.

Peck has to get the team to climb a forbidding cliff which is the only area of the beach the Nazis don't guard because they think nobody can land over there. Peck gets the job done, but Quayle becomes injured and Peck gets the responsibility for the whole mission.

The Guns of Navarone is filled with tension as the men keep getting into and out of one situation after another. The film crackles with excitement and really should be seen on the big screen, it's the only way you can appreciate the special effects which got The Guns of Navarone its Oscar.

The film marked a screen partnership of Gregory Peck and director J. Lee Thompson, they did four films together. Thompson specialized in these action adventure films. Later on Thompson partnered with Charles Bronson in some of his best films of the seventies and eighties.

To get the young into the theater, current teenage heart throb James Darren is in the cast. We even gets to hear him sing in Greek which is in fact Darren's own ancestry. Irene Papas is also in the cast as his older sister and Gia Scala is her silent friend.

Despite setback and betrayal our team continues on. The climax of The Guns of Navarone is exciting and unforgettable and should not be missed.

I won't repeat what others have said. My short take: It's one of the best action films and one of the best ensemble films ever made.

What I noticed on first viewing was how quiet it is. Many scenes take place without dialog or score, merely background noises like wind, feet crunching gravel, and the like. Some of the tensest scenes are made more so by our hearing only what the characters would hear. For example, early on in the film, the lead characters undergo a storm at sea and approach a dangerous narrows, and until the scene's climax, all we hear are howling wind, driving rain, and slamming waves.

A musical score tells viewers how they are supposed to feel and often telegraphs shifts in plot or mood. As used in this film, the absence of music heightens the drama and makes the action more immediate. What score there is is thus more effective, earning its composer an Academy Award.

"The way I see it we have three choices - take him with us, leave him here, or kill him."

This simplistically summarizes the moral dilemmas at the heart of Alistar MacLean's classic novel and the superb Carl Forman film from which followed. The Guns Of Navarone at first looks like a basic mission - in 1943 a key channel in the Aegean Sea is commanded by two gigantic German siege batteries on the island of Navarone; these guns prevent the reinforcement of a British island garrison nearby, and if the garrison falls, it will persuade Turkey to join the Axis powers, an outcome Berlin is counting on as the war in Russia has turned against it with the defeat at Stalingrad.

The guns cannot be bombed by air, despite heroic efforts by the RAF, and so is brought in a key Allied operative who has been working in occupied Crete since its fall to the Germans in 1941. Captain Keith Mallory not only can speak the languages of the area with superb fluence, he is "Keith Mallory, the Human Fly," the best mountaineer in the world. He feels he cannot climb the 400 foot precipice atop which the German batteries sit, but he likes nothing better than "a well-organized setup" upon seeing that he has no choice.

With the help of his closest combat comrade Stavro (Anthony Quinn), Mallory is assigned with Major Roy Franklin to ferry British commandos - one of the a wise-cracking explosives expert, Corporal John Anthony Miller (David Niven)- on the perilous journey to the back door of Navarone. But the infiltration is fraught with danger, and when Franklin is badly injured, the real crest of the story unfolds, the moral dilemmas of the team as they must complete the mission while deciding how to handle an injury they cannot treat.

And as if that were not enough, one of the Greek resistance operatives helping the team turns out to be a traitor after Miller finds his explosive equipment has been tampered with. It leads to yet another of the several arguments that ensue through the film between Miller, the soldier who does not want the responsibilities involved, and Mallory, who is determined to finish the job. While one of the arguments doesn't make much sense - Miller is horrified when Mallory admits lying to Roy Franklin so that upon eventual capture Franklin will give away inaccurate information; this is by far the most humane solution to the intolerable dilemma the team has faced - overall the clash between Mallory and Miller adds enormously to the film's tension, thanks in no small part to the excellent performances of Gregory Peck and David Niven.

The sets and props of the film are superb, and overcome the comparative cheesiness of some of the special effects.

A beautiful Dmitri Tiomkin score resonates throughout this definitive "allies-out-to-blow-up-the-enemy-stronghold" film. Top actors of their day, in strong performances, play second fiddle to the story itself, which moves the viewer inexorably along to the final assault against "The Guns".

I first saw this film in the theatre at age 11. I've seen it dozens of times since. It's not Ben-Hur, nor even Citizen Kane. It's just my favorite film.