1961 war, dir. J. Lee Thompson, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn:
IMDb. The guns on the Greek
island have to be destroyed, and only a small team…
Well, yes. Alistair MacLean, whose book this adapts, was a master
of the artfully-deployed cliché, and has been very widely imitated.
But the film opens with a solid explanation of just why this needs
to be done: ships can't get close, bombing raids have been tried
unsuccessfully until the crews are on the point of mutiny, so only
going in covertly (and climbing the cliffs that "everybody knows" are
unclimbable) has any chance. And of course there's an impossibly tight
deadline.
But first we have Gregory Peck, looking a whole lot more energetic
than he was two years earlier in On the Beach, as Malory the
mountaineer who has to get the team where they need to be. (He's a New
Zealander in the 1957 book, probably inspired by Edmund Hilary's
ascent of Everest in 1953.) And one of those actors I love to see and
especially hear even in a small part, James Robertson Justice,
provides the briefing.
This film was almost directed by Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell
of Success); he left just before filming started, supposedly because
of illness, but perhaps from artistic differences; J. Lee Thompson
replaced him; I know Thompson from his previous big hit, Ice Cold in
Alex (1958), also with Anthony Quayle.
And there's another actor I like to see, David Niven, as Miller the
explosives expert, in the book the only American.
There's a good sense of paranoia and possible information leaks, and
then what struck me as a rare avoidance of cliché. The team's sneaking
in on a fishing boat, and a German E-boat stops them for inspection.
While I would usually expect this to be a slow build and slow release
of tension, as the Betraying Thing is very nearly spotted but not
quite, here it tips into violence (in a way that I can't help thinking
would probably be noticed pretty quickly by the opposition). There's
more of this later: there's a running fight after the climb, and then
somehow our heroes break contact and aren't pursued.
(The cliff climb itself is well staged and dialogue free, but it's A
Bit Dark. Fortunately I'm not in a cinema and I can turn up the
brightness.)
Were there still Stukas in service this late in the war? In the
Balkans, I suppose.
But we filmed this village wedding (on Rhodes), and dash it all we're
going to use the footage!
There's another relatively early cliché here, the Good Nazi (he's the
opposition but he's basically honourable) versus the Bad Nazi (he's
simply evil). To be fair, that is more subtlety than many films
managed.
There are no women in the book, and the subplot with the supposedly
tortured and mute Anna feels like a misstep; a commando force on a
mission might still care about her finer feelings, but they would
surely want to check the scars that are a key part of her cover.
But anyway, the film bowls along and doesn't pretend to be any more
than it is, manly adventure with a bit of sneakiness (and a Mexican
standoff with submachineguns, which goes about as well as one might
expect).
1968's Force 10 From Navarone (book) is a sequel to the film more
than to the original book. And then MacLean borrowed from the 1978 film of
Force 10 for 1982's Partisans.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.