The Guns of Navarone

I am in no way, shape or form one of those old fogies (or young ones) who likes to bitch about the good old days of cinema and how today's young whippersnappers with their digital film and CGI and hula hoops ruined film. Hollywood has always made shit along with the great stuff, and only a fool would think otherwise. Still, one can still look at the great films of the past as blueprints for making a successful movie without sounding like an old fogie. And since I'm twenty years old, I'm going to try my damndest to do just that.

The Guns of Navarone is perhaps the epitome of the action film. Along with For Whom the Bell Tolls and Hitchcock's North by Northwest, it was instrumental in the shaping of the genre, from a vaguely-defined off-shoot of well-established genres like war, epic, crime, etc. True, you could argue Errol Flynn's early films were action movies, or any number of Westerns or war films would fit the bill, but the nature of the genre, as a collection of set piece action scenes, improbable heroics and big name stars originated around this time. It's very easy to see The Guns of Navarone's direct influence on the action genre: the epitome of the Man on the Mission film, directly inspiring works like The Dirty Dozen and innumerable James Bond films. Although long, it's brisk, fast-paced, well-acted, well-shot, and a stellar production all around.

The plot is straight-forward enough, and will be familiar in its generalities if not specifics to any movie buff. The Germans plan to launch a military demonstration against a small cadre of British troops stranded in the Aegean Sea to bully Turkey into joining the Axis side, and construct a pair of indestructible, radar-operated guns in the cliffs of the island of Navarone. Commander Jensen (James Robertson Justice), a crusty intelligence operative, assmebles a crack team of specialists to destroy the guns. Our team: heroic tough guy Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck), allegedly a New Zealander but showing no sign of a Kiwi accent; leader Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle), who is injured early on and proves a great liability to the team; Andreas Stavros (Anthony Quinn), a glowering Greek Resistance fighter who has a grudge against Mallory; Corporal Miller (David Niven), the group's resident wiseacre who happens to be an explosives expert; Spiro Pappadimos (James Darren), a psychopathic Greek soldier; Brown (Stanley Baker), a fearsome killer who has grown tired of his trade; and Anna and Maria (Irene Pappas and Gia Scala), a pair of Greek islanders who help our intrepid heroes overcome impossible odds to - well, see the film.

The Guns of Navarone established an innumerable number of precedents. The Nazis are simply cannon-fodder, easily duped, outwitted, unable to even properly aim a rifle, and mown down like flies. The superhero-like endurance of our heroes is something to marvel at: they brave a vicious gale, scale a four hundred foot cliff, escape German custody, and fight their way out of innumerable scrapes and shootouts, even ferreting out the group's resident traitor along the way (gasp). Other than the movie's lack of a strong villain (though Walter Gotell's brief appearance as a sympathetic German officer is quite welcome), this film has set-down the framework for pretty much every action extravaganza of the last fifty years. And it does so with such glee, for the most part; this is a fun film, more than anything else, and seeing how our intrepid heroes get out of these predicaments is of course the biggest part of the fun.

If there's one thing that Navarone doesn't quite sell us on, it's the posturing as a serious exploration of war. The film was produced and written by Carl Foreman, the blacklisted leftist writer who also gave us High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai. For Kwai, Foreman did an expert job of weaving a typical commando adventure film into the larger framework of an ironic satire of the madness of war. But here such touches seem hamfisted and disingenuous, to say the least. The movie depicts its violence as great fun, but then we get David Niven's lengthy whining about the pointlessness of it all and the callousness of his officers, Stanley Baker's war-weary and shell-shocked Brown (a character archetype present in Kwai, and also resembling Robert Vaughn in The Magnificent Seven), and James Darren's psychotic Greek freedom fighter Spiro. These attempts to give the film an air of seriousness seem rather odd and out-of-place in the midst of what is otherwise a straightforward action movie. The anti-war message is sold in more subtle ways; after a Greek town helps the commandos escape German custody, it is burned to the ground by the Nazis in retribution, and even as our heroes celebrate their deed, Maria warns that there will be further retaliation ahead. Still, when James Darren mows down an entire platoon of Nazis with a single burst of machine-gun fire, or when our heroes survive a whole barrage of mortar and machine gunfire, plus bombing and strafing from German fighters with nary a scratch, it's a bit hard to take the film seriously.

Navarone also excels in the technical aspects. The design of the cave is simply stunning; Bond villains of the future would be green with envy at the huge, cavernous rock with the two giant cannon pointed out to sea. The movie has an impressive. Dimitri Tiomkin gives an impressive, suitably heroic score, and J. Lee Thompson, often a bad director, handles his stars and action scenes with admirable plomb.

The cast is mostly excellent, save Baker and Darren's underused characters. Gregory Peck's stiff and mannered acting style perfectly suits Mallory, the rock-jawed, righteous action hero. David Niven is alternately amusing and annoying, which I suppose is the point of the character, and Anthony Quinn gives one of his very best performances as the no-nonsense tough guy Andrea (whose method of escaping from German custody is quite ingenious). Irene Papas and Gia Scala are both beautiful and deadly as the female resistance fighters. Tertiary roles are well filled-in by Anthony Quayle, James Robertson Justice, Walter Gotell, and a young Richard Harris.

The movie's influence is clear enough to see. The scenes of our intrepid heroes infilitrating a supervillain's lair and destroying an enemy doomsday device in the nick of time could come from any James Bond film, from You Only Live Twice to The Spy Who Loved Me to GoldenEye. The Dirty Dozen added even more extreme cynicism to the formula, its cadre of improbable heroes criminals escaping death sentences for a variety of crimes. (Where James Darren is our gang's resident psychopath, that label could apply to any number of the Dozen, particularly the Bible-thumping Telly Savalas.) Late '60s Westerns like The Professionals, Major Dundee, and The Wild Bunch also owe a great deal to this film with their cynical combination of angry cynicism and extreme violence. Where Eagles Dare, also based on an Alistair Maclean story, went the opposite direction, embracing and enhancing the cartoonish aspects of Navarone and turning it into a shoot-'em-up with an invincible Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood knocking down Nazis like ten-pins (leading to a memorable scene where Burton's absurd explanations of the plot cause a Nazi official to scream "THIS IS PREPOSTEROUS!") - a route taken by more and more action flicks as the political climate of the '60s faded into the blockbuster, mass-market era of the late '70s (the gleefully cartoonish Raiders of the Lost Ark being perhaps the ultimate example). This is not be the first man/men-on-a-mission film (that honor probably goes to For Whom the Bell Tolls), but it's no doubt the most influential.

The Guns of Navarone is the right way to do an action film. It's perhaps unfair to compare it to cookie-cutter fluff like The Transporter and National Treasure, since it's a big event picture rather than a waste of two hours, but I can't think of an action film of recent years this well-made, this gripping, this fun. I hate to use such a hackneyed phrase, but they really don't make them like this anymore.

Rating: 9/10 - Highest Recommendation