The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Here is a film that knows precisely what it is and has no interest in being anything else. A team of Allied saboteurs climbs a cliff, blows up two enormous guns, and goes home. J. Lee Thompson directs with the efficient indifference of a man assembling furniture. The picture runs long, the dialogue is functional, and the suspense is engineered with the honesty of a carnival ride. It won an Academy Award for special effects, which tells you where the ambitions lay. Nobody in this production was attempting to improve the audience.

The cast is a monument to a particular era of Hollywood: Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, and a supporting roster of British character actors, all of them white, all of them stiff-upper-lipped. Greek performers Irene Papas and Gia Scala appear as Greek resistance fighters, a decision that reflects geography more than any modern casting philosophy. The source novel contained no women whatsoever. Producer Carl Foreman added two, a tortured schoolteacher and a young partisan, largely to supply romantic interest for the male leads. They carry rifles and they die, but they are not there to make an argument.

Search this film for a thesis and you will find only gunpowder. The enemy is the Axis, the cause is the rescue of two thousand stranded soldiers, and the moral universe is settled before the opening credits. There is no class critique, no environmental anxiety, no interrogation of empire, no sermon delivered from behind the camera. It is a machine for producing tension, and it produces tension well. In an era that has trained audiences to expect instruction with their entertainment, the film's refusal to lecture reads almost as a novelty. Almost.