Featuring an intrepid and handpicked team of deeply flawed yet highly skilled commandos tasked with destroying deadly and conveniently impossible to destroy Nazi super guns, the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone is either the best or the second best World War II movie based on a script or novel by Alistair MacLean. It’s also the best or second best World War II movie directed by J. Lee Thompson (Ice Cold in Alex), depending on who you ask and on what day.

Regardless of where one might rank it among these movies, you should watch it; it is very entertaining and the most thematically interesting of those movies.

To be fair, the theme of this movie isn’t that important–the fun is its twists and turns that probably aren’t actually innumerable, but there are lots of them, and a traitor, probably, and that is a lot of the appeal of this film—that and really big guns firing.

The title characters

Early on after killing a number of Germans, Gregory Peck’s (Twelve O’Clock High) character says he’s afraid “we’ll wake up one morning and find we’re nastier than they are.” David Niven (The Way Ahead, Spitfire) plays an explosives expert who is this sort of outsider questioning the morality of a mission that will save many thousands of lives, but everyone else lives in this gray area that isn’t really gray—it’s utilitarian.

At one point a man (Spoiler Alert) is injured climbing the impossible to climb mountain, and now he has to be carried or if we leave him, he will talk, so maybe we should shoot him. And this is the moral question of the movie, and Niven has a few good speeches about it, but it’s really just another complication—another obstacle our intrepid and relatively ragtag band of misfits must overcome. the moraltiy of the action is part of the puzzle–how can we avoid becoming as nasty as they are?

Who cares—let’s go blow up some super big guns with a cleverly hidden bomb that might not work, but of course it’s going to work, and try to make a daring escape in a suicide mission that of course the heroes will survive.

But first we have to handpick our intrepid team of deeply-flawed yet highly-skilled commandos. To say Gregory Peck’s character, Captain Keith Mallory, is uniquely qualified for this mission is paradoxically an understatement. Mallory has already fought behind enemy lines and is a former world class mountain climber who speaks Greek and German fluently. The mission is to climb a mountain on a Greek island held by the Germans and then sabotage the super cool guns.

Of course, the only one way to get on the island is to climb the mountain that the Germans don’t guard because no one could possibly climb it, and of course only Mallory can do it, and of course he says he wouldn’t try it in “broad daylight” but tries it any way, and does it—in the dark—in a torrential rainstorm, of course, so his earlier assessment may have been faulty.

But before we can successfully climb the unclimbable mountain, in a scene that The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare echoes, our heroes, traveling in a rickety fishing trawler like spies do, are stopped by a German patrol boat. They end up in a firefight, which culminates with the German ship exploding impressively. This was apparently so impressive that it sank the ship the Greek navy had loaned out—which they did not appreciate. This is one of several reasonably well staged and exciting action sequences in the film.

Nothing is easy in this film. After the shootout with the German patrol boat, the weather is so bad when they land on the island that they barely make it ashore; one character (Stanley Baker, Yesterday’s Enemy) has developed a hesitation about killing Germans; one (Anthony Quinn, Back to Bataan) has sworn he will kill Mallory—not right this minute but eventually—which seems like a thing that could undermine unit cohesion.

Of course this women is related to one of our heroes because that can make things more complicated. Is that the coolest gun of World War II?

Always with the complications; if they try to get a sandwich, Panera is out of tomato basil bread, and who wants a Bacon Turkey Bravo on wheat? Can we fashion our own tomato basil bread with the tools at hand? Why is there no tomato basil bread? Because there’s a traitor among us. All I wanted was a Pepsi, but we in the SIS think it in your best interest to . . . . The point is: there are a lot of complications–and at least one traitor.

This is a well-composed shot in a well-directed movie–and there are between zero and three traitors shown.

Who is the traitor? (Is it Anthony Quayle? See Ice Cold in Alex and Operation Crossbow–seriously see both of those.) Will the bombs get triggered? Will the ships make it through? You know it’s going to work and yet . . .

MacLean is a formulaic writer, but he’s really good at it, and this film is well acted and directed, so even though when the Germans are furiously sledgehammering huge doors to capture our heroes (which happens here and in Where Eagles Dare), and you know they won’t get through in time, and when the hastily-rigged detonator doesn’t get tripped by the unsuspecting Germans while dozens of German gunners operate the super cool guns in a Busby Berkleyesque dance, menacing the approaching British fleet, and you know it’s going to be fine, you’re tense anyway. Of course this is the trick for every movie like this; The trick works here: it’s exciting.

You know the good guys are going to win, but you don’t know how or when, so there is tension and excitement. And the characters are complex enough that anyone (other than Niven and Peck) could be the traitor. More than one German is honorable; the traitor is a human being. Obviously, the SS guy is evil—he’s the SS guy.

It also has a surprising humanity for a thriller that has these pieces that must move around the board. In Where Eagles Dare, we just see pieces being moved around. We don’t have to think about the morality of a clever plan to appreciate its cleverness, but we do discuss it. Here all the pieces are human beings, and their attitudes and pain are meant to matter.

It is light entertainment—it’s a twisty thriller where things blow up good, but it also has a theme and a larger question to look at. So if you want a little more of a morality play in your thriller, it does okay at that. And this difference may be the key to whether you like this or Where Eagles Dare more. This, while still hugely implausible, is far more grounded in the morality and reality of war.

Recommendation

I’m not a big fan of words like “classic.” See this; it’s fun; it has drama and tension and some humor–and really cool, super big guns that are operated by a great many Germans in a manner that’s entertaining all by itself.