THE GUNS OF NAVARONE

The setup for this World War II action film is that a group of six men are sent on a seemingly impossible mission, to sabotage some enormous large-calibre guns on the fictional island of Navarone, so as to enable British destroyers to rescue some 2,000 soldiers trapped on another Greek island.

In a film like this a lot of the enjoyment is going to depend on the six characters and who plays them, and to be honest it's a mixed bag.

Leading the team is Anthony Quayle as Major Franklin.  His nickname is 'Lucky' so it's no surprise that he suffers a bad injury early on and spends the rest of the film on a stretcher.

He is replaced as leader by Captain Mallory, played by Gregory Peck.  He's one of the world's best mountaineers, which is useful since the group is going to have to get up a vertical cliff face on Navarone.

Mallory has a sticky relationship with two of the team.  

Greek Colonel Stavros (Anthony Quinn) blames Mallory for the death of his wife and three children, and has vowed to kill Mallory at a suitable moment.  And explosives expert Corporal Miller has an antipathy to the officer class in general.  

David Niven plays Miller and he had reservations about his casting given that he hadn't been thought of as an action hero up to this point in his career.  Notwithstanding that he gives a typically competent performance my reservation about his casting is that he doesn't seem sufficiently working class.  The original choice for the role was Kenneth More, which I'm not sure would have been an improvement.

Making up the numbers is Stanley Baker as Chief Petty Officer "Butcher" Brown and US pop star James Darren as Spyros Pappadimos.   Brown is a bit of a liability on the mission because he has lost his nerve, which is reminiscent of Robert Vaughan's character in 'The Magnificent Seven' but nowhere near as compelling.  James Darren thankfully says and contributes very little throughout, before his inevitable death.

The injury to Franklin gives Mallory a difficult decision to make.  Whether to carry him along, jeopardising the mission, or to kill him so that he can't provide any information to the Germans.  Stavros is all for the latter, but Mallory is a decent sort who doesn't go in for that sort of ruthlessness.

Later on, Mallory turns the situation to his advantage.  He gives false information to Franklin which he is banking on being passed on to the Germans when they torture or drug the Major.  For some reason Miller, who is hostile anyway to Mallory, takes real umbrage at this treatment of Franklin.

This story being based on an Alistair Maclean novel, it is no surprise that there is a traitor jeopardising the mission.   In this case it is one of the two female Greek resistance fighters who have joined the group on Navarone.  Again Mallory has an awful decision to make, and this time there is no alternative to him having to kill the woman in question, which is especially tough given that a romantic relationship was starting to develop between them.

Miller, again unreasonably to my mind, takes a real pleasure in Mallory being put in this position.

In the novel the two Greek resistance fighters are men;  changing their gender was one of many changes made by the screenwriter Carl Foreman.  I imagine that he was probably responsible for creating the leadership dilemmas for Mallory, as a way of adding some psychological depth to the story.

However he doesn't find a satisfactory way of resolving the relationship between Mallory and Stavros.  At the end of the film the latter simply forgives Mallory for no good reason I could see other than that he is now feeling happier with his lot given that he is eying up the other resistance fighter as a replacement wife.

The action sequences in this film didn't do a lot for me, and the film is quite long.  However it does benefit from some nice location shooting which helps give the whole thing an air of verisimilitude.

The director was J. Lee Thompson who only stepped in a week before shooting started after Alexander Mackendrick dropped out in somewhat mysterious circumstances, so it's a credit to all involved that the final product is as entertaining as it is.