Friday, Jun. 30, 1961

Those Poor Devils

The Guns of Navarone (Highroad; Columbia), a World War II military exercise of the those-poor-devils-haven't-got-a-chance school, is the most enjoyable consignment of baloney in months. The mission that cannot be pulled off is the spiking of two enormous German guns before a lost British battalion can be evacuated from an Aegean island. The man who can pull it off is Gregory Peck. "Why me?" asks Peck, his deer's eyes regarding his gruff, lovable old commander (James Robertson Justice) with reproach. "Well," the G.L.O.C. answers reasonably, "you speak German like a German, Greek like a Greek, and before the war you were the greatest mountain climber in the world."

Before long the moonlight is glinting off Peck's jaw as he leads a crew of ruffians up an unclimbable rock face in a pelting rain. Suddenly he slips. In best White Tower tradition, the man who grabs Peck's wrist is his blood enemy, a dour Cretan guerrilla (Anthony Quinn) who has sworn to kill him when the war is over. Quinn's eyes flash. Will he let Peck fall? Not, the viewer may be sure, while there are still old war movies left to anthologize.

Carl Foreman--once blacklisted by Hollywood and now able to relish the sight of his name in the seven-league titles that proclaim him writer and producer of Guns--has left out nothing but the butterfly from All Quiet on the Western Front. There is the cracked-up veteran who has seen too much (Stanley Baker), the wounded hero who begs to be left behind (Anthony Quayle), the American immigrant G.I. returning to his native village (James Darren), the cynical explosives expert (David Niven), the unresisting resistance heroines (Irene Pappas and Gia Scala), the good German, the bad German. There is also more than the usual helping of battlefield oratory, most of it delivered by that least martial of musical instruments, Peck's voice.

None of this matters in the least. Too much respect for tradition never hurt a fairy tale; the important thing is the telling. Film Maker Foreman and Director J. Lee Thompson (Tiger Bay) send their Jacks up the beanstalk at double time, and keep them moving by setting off enough gunpowder to supply South America's politicians for a decade. The saboteurs, especially Quinn and Actress Pappas, are an agreeable lot of brigands, and if their destruction of the giant and their eventual escape down the beanstalk are thoroughly predictable, what perverse child would have it otherwise?

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