The Guns of Navarone (1961)

	Directed by: J. Lee Thompson	COUNTRY USA GENRE Action/War NORWEGIAN TITLE Kanonene på Navarone RUNNING TIME 157 minutes
	Produced by: Carl Foreman
	Written by (based on the novel by Alistair MacLean): Carl Foreman

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Capt. Mallory	Gregory Peck	½
Cpl. Miller	David Niven	½
Col. Andrea Stavros	Anthony Quinn
CPO Brown	Stanley Baker
Maj. Franklin	Anthony Quayle
Maria	Irene Papas	½
Anna	Gia Scala
Pvt. Pappadimos	James Darren
Jensen	James Robertson Justice
Barnsby	Richard Harris

Review

This morality-soaked wartime drama believes itself to be a tale of heroics filled with some human and ethical truths. Unfortunately, it's mostly painfully staged gabble wrapped in banal, unrealistic WWII action. Alistair MacLean adaptations range from the brilliant to the mediocre, but rarely do they lack suspense to the degree that The Guns of Navarone does. The reason isn't the story itself, or the payoff, for that matter, but rather the poor directing and acting leading up to it.

Director J. Lee Thompson's pacing leaves a lot to be desired, lingering for minutes at parenthetical moments and overdramatised interpersonal scenes, before rushing through important strategic aspects of the mission – presumably for lack of the acumen and knowledge needed to take us through them decently. As Thompson stumbles ahead, the performances become proportionally worse. Gregory Peck and David Niven both drag themselves through embarrassing emotional outbursts that don't have the needed dramatic foundation, while every actor in non-Anglo-Saxon parts is helpless against thoroughly stereotyped characterisations. In the first couple of decades after the war, few films boasted anything resembling objectivity or depth in their depiction of the "bad guys" of WWII, but in The Guns of Navarone, these characters are more inauthentic and biased than in most of them. If you want to see a good adaptation of MacLean's WWII stories, choose Where Eagles Dare instead. It has largely the same dramatic structure but vastly superior execution.