1961 - THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, big budget, big stars, Alister Maclean story.

This film was another in a series of big budget all star cast films from the late 50's and early 1960's.  These types of films were usually war films with basically "everything but the kitchen sink." thrown into them. Lots of action and other stuff going on to keep the audience engaged.

Carl Foreman was the producer and writer.  Foreman was a blacklisted screenwriter, a quasi liberal hack at best.  Probably his most notable writing credits were for High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai.  Kwai's director David Lean always felt that Foreman contributed next to nothing to that film.  For The Guns of Navarone, Foreman put together a screenplay that kept the basic plot of the Maclean novel with the usual additions of a completely unnecessary love story and some hokey dialog about "the futility of war" right before everyone starts getting shot or blown up.  Foreman also switched directors during the production firing Alexander Mackendrick and replacing him with a competent studio man,  J. Lee Thompson. 

For a big budget production The Guns of Navarone is kind of a shoddy looking film.  The model and miniature work can be pretty poor at times and the climbing scenes up the face of the cliff look extremely phony. But overall the action scenes are fairly well done and the score by Dimitri Tiomkin adds a lot to the film.

Probably the best thing in the film is the cast.  Gregory Peck is the fearless leader of the saboteurs and if Peck was always kind of a stiff he at least had some screen presence.  David Niven pretty much steals the film with his sly performance.  Anthony Quinn was always a larger than life presence in movies and he is relatively restrained for him.  The singer James Darrin shows up as a sop to the teenage crowd and the rest of the cast is made of up the usual bunch of British actors that were frequently trotted out to appear in war movies, Stanley Baker, James Robinson Justice, Anthony Quayle and Richard Harris.

Rather oddly,  Greek actress Irene Papas who usually showed up in films like Electra, The Trojan Women and Antigone is one of the resistance fighters I suppose actors specializing in Greek tragedies have to eat as well.

158 minutes.