Two-Disc Set:
The Guns of Navarone: Collector’s Edition
The Caine Mutiny: Collector’s Edition
May 2007–“The Guns of Navarone” is released on DVD with all-new special features including commentary. This film brilliantly portrays the heroics and bravery soldiers faced when tasked with impossible missions during War. The 1961 Oscar-winning film for Best Special Effects, “Guns of Navarone” boasts a stellar cast, headed by Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and David Niven.
DVD Bonus Features
Two part documentary
o Genre discussion of the film being the first caper-style WWII epic
o Carl Foreman and J. Lee Thompson discuss the general production history and style of the film, including the special effects and stunts.
* Two Featurettes
o Dimitri Tiomkins score for “The Guns of Navarone”
o UCLA Restoration of “The Guns of Navarone”
* New commentary from historian Sir Christopher Frayling
Film Review
Director J. Lee Thompson (“King Solomons Mines,” “Battle for the Planet of the Apes”) brings Alistair MacLeans best-selling novel about allies saboteurs, who are assigned an impossible mission, infiltrate an impregnable Nazi fortress and destroy two enormous long-range field guns to life.
With the battle of Stalingrad turning the War against them, the Germans are attempting to bully neutral Turkey into joining the Axis. To that end, they have trapped 2,000 British soldiers on Kiros, an island in the Aegean, with only one sea route for evacuation, a sea route commanded by two gigantic German antiship batteries deployed in a massive cliffside bunker on the island of Navarone.
Immune to air attack and too much for Allied battleships to suppress, the British muster Keith Mallory (Peck), a commando officer who has been working on occupied Crete for nearly two years and who is an expert mountaineer, is assigned to ferry a team of British commandos to the only area of Navarone that is not monitored by the Germans, a 400-foot cliff.
Greek resistance is to meet the team inland and guide them around German patrols to the area of the German guns. However, the commanding officer of the British team suffers grave injury in the climb, and Mallory must take control of the mission, despite clashes with explosives expert John Anthony Miller (Niven), who upon the arrival of the night of the raid finds his equipment has been sabotaged, thus exposing a traitor in the teams ranks.
“Guns of Navarone” has a run time of 157 minutes and is not rated.
Oscar Alert
Oscar Nominations: 7
Picture, produced by Carl Foreman
Director: J. Lee Thompson
Screenplay (Adapted): Carl Foreman
Editing: Alan Osbiston
Score: Dimitri Tiomkin
Sound: John Cox
Special Effects: Bill Warrington, visual; Vivian C. Greenham, audible
Oscar Awards: 1
Special Effects
Oscar Context:
In 1961, the musical “West Side Story” swept most of the Oscars, including Picture and Directors (actually co-directors). The other Best Picture nominees were the old-fashioned melodrama “Fanny”; the downbeat and poignant pool drama “The Hustler”; and the courtroom drama “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which was the most nominated film of the year.
