The Guns of Navarone

A mission film set in the Second World War. There are two enormous German guns on an island in the Aegean. They close the strait, which makes it impossible to evacuate two thousand British soldiers stranded on a nearby island. Air attack does not work; the guns are set inside rock. A small team is assigned to get onto the island and destroy them. The team includes a mountaineer, an explosives expert, a Greek resistance fighter and an assassin. What interests the film is less the mission than the conflict inside the team: who gives orders, whether a wounded man is left behind, and the possibility that one of them is an informer. The source is Alistair MacLean's novel; Carl Foreman wrote the screenplay. The narrative became the template for the genre: an expert team is assembled, an impossible task is set, the plan falls apart on the way. Dozens of later films repeated the structure. Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn lead. It was shot on Rhodes and along the Greek coast. The film won the Oscar for visual effects and was nominated in several categories including Best Picture. One of the foundational examples of its kind for anyone who likes war films and mission narratives. It runs past two and a half hours and the pace drops in the middle section.