Reeling Backward: The Guns of Navarone (1961)

An old-school war picture, where men are men, women are tough (but not too tough!) and the Nazis are hiss-able bad guys.

Sometimes you just feel like a good ol’ rip-roaring war picture. And “The Guns of Navarone” is certainly that.

Stars Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn are part of a small commando unit sent to take out the titular big cannons on one of the Greek islands, which prevent the British navy from rescuing 2,000 soldiers trapped on Kheros. Taking place in 1943, the Germans’ show of strength is also supposed to push the neutral Turks the join the war on their side.

It was a big hit, the second-highest grossing movie of 1961, and eventually spawned a 1978 sequel, “Force 10 from Navarone.”

Of course, it’s all made-up hooey based on Alistair MacLean’s 1957 novel; there isn’t even an island of Navarone. But the backdrop is based on the actual Dodecanese Campaign, and the big-budget production shot on some of the real Greek islands that figured into it.

Quinn, who had Mexican, Irish and Native American ancestry and played virtually ever ethnicity under the sun during his storied career, loved the area so much he bought property on a nearby bay, which still bears his name to this day. Who knows, maybe it helped nudge him toward starring in “Zorba the Greek,” possibly his most iconic role, three years later.

Carl Foreman, who cowrote the screenplay for “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” emerged from his blacklist days after the fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy with a lot of mojo. He produced “Guns,” wrote the screenplay and wanted to direct, too, but the studio insisted on a British director. First choice Alexander Mackendrick and Foreman butted heads, so he was fired and J. Lee Thompson brought in just one week before production started.

The effort brought Thompson his sole Academy Award nomination; the film garnered seven total, including best picture, screenplay, editing, sound and musical score, and won for special effects — mostly owing to the blammo final scene where the mountain fortress explodes from within.

The film was marketed and is often described as a war epic, though it doesn’t really compare with large-scale pictures like “Kwai,” “The Longest Day” or even “The Great Escape,” which gathered casts of hundreds or even thousands, big backdrops and huge battle scenes. This is closer to a spy film, with a half-dozen commandos at the center with a few other characters who flit in and out of the story.

Richard Harris turns up in an early role as an Australian flight commander who tried unsuccessfully to take out the Navarone guns from the air. His bit is mostly notable for cramming a whole lot of “bloody” epithets into his short speech.

Peck is Captain Keith Mallory, who is recruited owing to the fact that he was the “world’s great mountaineer” before the war, and the initial plan is to have him scale the sheer cliff immediately below the guns. Interestingly, Mallory never actually climbs that particular mountain, instead sneaking in the front door of the base disguised as German officers.

He does get to utilize his climbing skills, though, when the Greek sailing ship they’d commandeered crashes during a storm. This sequence seems to exist mostly to add a little derring-do to the first act of the movie — which is mostly taken up with familiar “putting the team together” stuff — along with an excuse to sideline the commander, Maj. Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle), who breaks his leg during the ascent.

Franklin is an ambitious officer who dreams of becoming a general one day and goes by the nickname “Lucky,” based on an anecdote from Napoleon that it’s better to have officers who have a little luck on their side. Of course, Franklin’s turns out to be anything but, his shattered leg growing gangrenous and he becomes such a liability to the mission that he attempts suicide before Mallory stops him.

Franklin’s best friend is Cpl John Anthony Miller (Niven), a natty chemistry professor who became an explosives expert during the war. Niven was a mite long in the tooth to be playing a corporal, so he’s given a backstory of refusing an officer’s commission along with a streak of anti-authoritarianism.

Miller and Mallory get into a huge spat in the film’s last act, when Mallory feeds Franklin an invented story about their mission being a decoy for a naval assault on the other side of the island, right before he leaves the injured man in the Germans’ care. He knows the Nazi interrogators will give him a truth drug to spill the beans, so the false flag he plants with Franklin will make getting to the gun that much easier.

Miller finds it disgusting to use a man like that, and accuses Mallory of being a benign-seeming ruthless cutthroat. War is hell, and all that.

Quinn isn’t given a lot to do as Andrea Stavros, a Greek colonel whose unit was demolished by the Germans. He has a beef with Mallory, who at one time gave some wounded Germans safe passage, who then went on to kill Stavros’ wife and children. He has kindly decided to delay collecting this blood debt against Mallory until after the war.

My understanding is the novel did not contain any significant female characters, but this being a Hollywood picture they had to sex things up a bit. Irene Papas turns up as Maria Pappadimos, a freedom fighter from a nearby village who helps them and soon decides that Stavros is a suitable mate for her. (His returing these affections appears to be genuine but not absolutely necessary in her mind.)

Tagging along is Anna (Gia Scala), a short-haired young waif who fights the Germans after being captured and tortured by them. She no longer speaks, and is a mysterious presence who starts casting moony glances at Mallory.

The other two members of the unit are typical “background guy” types, each gifted with a single attribute to define them. “Butcher” Brown (Stanley Baker) is a bloodthirsty killer who favors a knife, but has started to lose his appetite for wet work. Spyros (James Darren) is a Greek-American chosen mostly because he spent his boyhood years on the island, and in fact turns out to be Maria’s brother.

At just over 2½ hours long, “The Guns of Navarone” doesn’t exactly tarry but does stretch out its storytelling to a languid pace. It’s not a character piece, focusing more on melodrama and a few good action scenes to carry the momentum. Peck is solid in familiar territory, an authority figure who tries to do good but is vexed by circumstances that present no easy choices.

Rather than continually outfoxing the Germans like you usually see in World War II pictures, Mallory’s team is actually confounded at most every turn. Their ship is stopped by a German patrol; they are spotted by aerial surveillance in the island countryside; and they try to disappear into the village where a big marriage celebration is taking place, but the Germans walk right up to them as if they’d been pointed out.

(If you haven’t seen it, you’ll eventually find out why.)

I found the last sequence interesting. Having successfully gotten into the German fortress, Mallory and Miller plant their explosives in the cannons as the enemy tries to break down the massive steel doors. Miller’s time-lapse fuses have been sabotaged, so he rigs up explosives tied to the ammunition elevator shaft. The idea is to let the Germans find the dummy explosives he planted on the cannons while they escape down a rope over the edge into the bay below, and when the Germans go to load the cannons it will set off his trap, using the ordnance stored in the base to blow it up.

Of course, the Germans don’t quite lower the elevator far enough on the first few tries to hit the kill switch, so the last few minutes are a Hitchcockian affair of tense back-and-forth shots of the elevator, the approaching British ships, the German artillery team and the commandos watching anxiously from the water below.

It’s curious because at this point, the heroes themselves are incidental to what happens next, relegated to mere spectators to see if their plan works out. It’s also entirely German dialogue that is spoken.

Imagine if at the end of the first “Star Wars” movie, instead of having Luke maneuvering to fire his photo torpedoes down the shaft, he’d already taken his shot earlier and it was just several minutes of black-helmeted Empire flunkies pulling levers and hollering at each other.

“The Guns of Navarone” doesn’t stand as one of the great mid-century war movies, though it has its charms as something closer to a heist movie.