The Guns of Navarone
All team (110)
Short description
During the Second World War, two thousand British soldiers are stranded on the small Aegean island of Kheros, with German forces preparing to attack them. Rescue by sea is impossible because the approaches are covered by two long-range guns mounted on the neighbouring island of Navarone. An Allied team is assembled to land on Navarone, climb the cliffs protecting the battery and destroy the guns before the trapped garrison runs out of time. Gregory Peck plays the mountain climber leading the group, with David Niven as the explosives expert, Anthony Quinn as a Greek resistance fighter, Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle and James Darren among the six men sent on the mission.
The film was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the fourth of twenty-one features he made in chronological order, following Tiger Bay and preceding Cape Fear. Carl Foreman wrote the screenplay and produced it for Columbia Pictures and Highroad Productions. Made for about six million dollars, it returned roughly twenty-nine million worldwide, a strong result for its time, and it runs 160 minutes with fifty credited cast members and 110 credited crew.
On IMDb it holds 7.5 out of 10 from more than fifty-four thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.3 from around nine hundred. A critics' rating of 7.9 from twenty-six reviews places it slightly above those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on the novel of the same name by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote the screenplay.
- The film was shot on one of the Greek islands – Symi – near Rhodes.
- The trash metal band Channel Zero has a song of the same name, “Guns of Navarone”.
- One of the Rhodes locations used in the film was renamed “Anthony Quinn Bay” after the actor Anthony Quinn purchased property nearby.
- The only time David Niven ever smoked cigarettes on screen.
- It is mistakenly believed that the island's guns were those from the dismantled Russian battleship "Volya" of the "Empress Maria" type. After the revolution, this ship was taken to the French port of Bizerte and, after a long lay-up, was sold for scrap. Its 305mm guns were shipped by cargo steamer to Finland during World War II, but were intercepted by the Germans, repaired, and installed as part of the "Atlantic Wall" as coastal artillery. In reality, the film used 283mm guns from the German battleship "Gneisenau", removed after damage sustained in 1942 and used to create a coastal battery near Rosenburg (Hoek van Holland area) in single LC/37-type turrets.
- The climax of the film (the destruction of the gun casemate) was used by George Lucas in his film "Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi" (1983), in the episode of the rebels capturing the shield control center of the Death Star 2. Many details coincide – the appearance of the armored gates, the special form of the German artillerymen (like the stormtroopers in "Star Wars"), the fleet coming under fire ("all back, the field is not disabled!"), and the final explosion.
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