Of all the UK or US films made using events that took place in Greece during the World War II, films such as The Angry Hills, They Who Dare and Ill Met by Moonlight, set respectively during the fall of Athens, the Battle of the Dodecanese and the occupation of Crete, the most commercially successful and perhaps the best known is The Guns of Navarone (1961).
The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.
The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.
Whereas in Ill Met by Moonlight and They Who Dare, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in The Angry Hills, what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.
Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.
Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.
The Guns of Navarone was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. Ice Cold in Alex and the original Cape Fear – an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after The Guns of Navarone.
Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.
‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’
The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.
The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.
Whereas in Ill Met by Moonlight and They Who Dare, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in The Angry Hills, what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.
Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.
Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.
The Guns of Navarone was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. Ice Cold in Alex and the original Cape Fear – an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after The Guns of Navarone.
Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.
‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’
