A two-fer today: A Top 5 and a pick for tomorrow when TCM airs “The Guns of Navarone” at 2:15pm PST.
Director J. Lee Thompson’s epic 1961 World War II adventure is my favorite Men on a Mission film. “The Great Escape” might have more star power and “The Dirty Dozen,” The Mighty Lee Marvin and The Mighty Chuck Bronson, but “Navarone’s” complex and realistic look at the emotional toll of war, and more specifically, the killing of another human being, on the noble warrior makes it something much more than a series of suspenseful and exciting set pieces. [some spoilers ahead]
Unfortunately, all of these moments aren’t available on YouTube, but here’s the transcript with necessary context:
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1. Gregory Peck plays Capt. Keith Mallory, the leader of a small team assigned to go behind German lines and destroy two massive gun emplacements that make passage through a channel impossible – a passage that will be necessary if thousands of lives are to be saved. One of the men assigned to Mallory is Colonel Andrea Stavros, a somber Greek played by Anthony Quinn. Mallory and Andreas once fought the Germans together as friends and allies, but now they share an uneasy truce. Mallory finally explains:
About a year ago, I gave a German patrol a safe passage to get some of their wounded to a hospital. I guess I still had some romantic notions about fighting a civilized war. Anyway, they wanted Andrea pretty badly, even back then. As soon as they got behind our lines, they shot their casualties, went over to his house, and blew it up. He was out on a job at the time, but his wife and three children were in the house. They were all killed. I helped him to bury them. And then he turned to me and said that as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t the Germans who were responsible, but me. Me and my stupid Anglo-Saxon decency. Then he told me what he was going to do, and when.
What Andreas is going to do is kill Mallory after the war.
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2. David Niven plays Corporal Miller, an explosives expert and cynical smart ass who lords his cool detachment over the rest. This is his way of pretending to keep his hands clean when all he’s really doing is allowing others to do the dirty work.
When a young woman, a member of the underground assigned to help them, is discovered to be a spy, in this brilliant and revealing piece of dialogue, Miller’s true colors finally show themselves. Here, he speaks to Mallory, still angry that the Captain left behind one of their injured comrades to be captured by the Nazis. Knowing the man would be tortured, Mallory gave him misinformation to throw the Nazis off their trail in order “to get the job done.” Miller refuses to see the big picture and Niven has this character speak with pure indignation while his eyes reveal someone slowly coming to terms with the hard decisions required to fight evil:
Now just a minute! If we’re going to get this job done she has got to be killed! And we all know how keen you are about getting the job done! Now I can’t speak for the others but I’ve never killed a woman, traitor or not, and I’m finicky! So why don’t you do it? Let us off for once! Go on, be a pal, be a father to your men! Climb down off that cross of yours, close your eyes, think of England, and pull the trigger! What do you say, Sir?
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3. The woman spy is shot and then, finally, Mallory turns on Miller:
You think you’ve been getting away with it all this time, standing by. Well, son… your bystanding days are over! You’re in it now, up to your neck! They told me that you’re a genius with explosives. Start proving it! [points pistol at Miller] You got me in the mood to use this thing, and by God, if you don’t think of something, I’ll use it on you! I mean it.
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4. Sometimes direct and simple is the most effective way to express a film’s theme: Burdened with the terrible choices that come with leadership, Peck’s Mallory does that here:
The only way to win a war is to be as nasty as the enemy.
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5. Finally, one of the most important parts of the Men on a Mission genre is the explaining of the stakes to the audience. A young up and coming star named Richard Harris was given that task in a delightfully entertaining first act scene. Harris plays British Australian Squadron Leader Barnsby, who’s just returned from an aerial attack on the German guns that proved futile and cost him eighteen men:
As you can plainly see, it was ruddy awful. But we’d love to go back. Wouldn’t we, boys? [The men cheer] Just as soon as we can! BUT – we’ve got one condition. We want the joker who thought this one up to come with us. And when we get there, we’re gonna shove him out at ten thousand feet – without a parachute.
When asked if he’s sure the guns can’t be taken out by air, Barnsby responds:
First, you’ve got that bloody old fortress on top of that bloody cliff. Then you’ve got the bloody cliff overhang. You can’t even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns. And anyway, we haven’t got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock. And that’s the bloody truth, sir.
Harris wrings every bit of juice possible from this small role with a wonderful mix of truculence, loyalty, bravado, honor, and masculine humor. Just a few years later, in Sam Peckinpah’s flawed but fascinating “Major Dundee” (1965), Harris summons the same and more up against Charlton Heston.
So tomorrow, along with a magnificent war film as relevant today as it was nearly fifty years ago, you have the added pleasure of watching a star being born.
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