The Guns of Navarone (1961) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / October 7, 2014

The Guns of Navarone is one of those films that has clearly aged in a lot of aspects and still offers a lot of replay value even 50 years down the line. Directed by action/adventure expert J. Lee Thompson and written by High Noon scriptwriter Carl Foreman, this film is a peculiar example of the adventure genre done right.

            The film presents a straightforward goal: WWII is raging on and two enormous German cannons are placed in a cave on the Greek island of Navarone, sinking all ships that enter its firing range. Rather than attempting a frontal assault, a small team of six Brits and Greeks are ordered to infiltrate the island by boat and blow up the cannons. We follow them as they narrowly survive mother nature and encounters with Germans and along the way their dispositions toward the mission and each other change.

Like I said, this film has aged…mostly well. There are a lot of things that you can’t really watch with a straight face. Peck’s acting is a bit hammy at times and the way the tension between Peck and Quinn’s characters is resolved is as symbolic as me shouting in your ear is subtle, but overall, this film manages to excel in terms of action without disregarding character development as so many modern-day action flicks tend to do.

According to the trivia section on IMDB, Gregory Peck was disappointed by how many viewers failed to properly identify Navarone as anti-war and though I can understand his frustration, I think this has more to do with the style of the film than the intended message. When I think 'anti-war', I think of films like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with its clearly delineated anti-war morals. Navarone however, is first and foremost a bundle of (exciting) action set pieces. Of course there is drama, some of it still really effective, but the film’s many action sequences are crucial as they define the film as just that – an action film – because these scenes tend to lack some sense of symbolism, underlying the futility of war, etc. In other words, there's anti-war stuff to be found here, but it's overshadowed by the amount of Hollywood spectacle.

            In the end, not every war film needs to be a politically correct, anti-war film. The Guns of Navarone is first and foremost an exciting adventure film, excelling at many of the tropes that made the genre popular. Even 50 years later, Navarone as a lot of replay value and (though occasionally campy) is still a lot of fun to watch and genuinely exciting.