150 GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE
Reception
The Guns of Navarone had its world premiere as a Royal Command Per for mance on
27 April 1961 at the Odeon, Leicester Square, in London’s West End, with Queen
Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in attendance. Opening in the United States
in June, the film went on to gross $28.9 million in international ticket sales. After
West Side Story, it was the second top- grossing film of 1961, earning a net profit of
$18.5 million. Guns won two Golden Globe awards (for Best Picture and for Best
Original Score) and garnered six Oscar nominations, winning for Best Special
Effects. Notices were mostly favorable, but the anonymous reviewer who was at
the movie’s London premiere astutely noted that the film was short on meaningful
characterization: “The lesson to be learned from The Guns of Navarone is that a well-
told and exciting story does not require too many characters; nor does it need
psychological undertones. It can even dispense with women. All it needs is pace
and credibility” (1961, p. 18). Bosley Crowther voiced a similar judgment: “One
simply won ders why Mr. Foreman, who contributed to the screen play of The Bridge
on the River Kwai, didn’t aim for more complex human drama, while setting his
sights on those guns” (Crowther, 1961).Reel History Versus Real History
There is no island called Navarone. Though perhaps inspired by the Battle of Leros,
the story told by The Guns of Navarone is entirely fictional and more than a little
far- fetched. Nonetheless, another source of inspiration for novel and film might
have been Operation Brassard, the Allied invasion and capture of the island of Elba,
off the west coast of Italy (17–19 June 1944). Part of that operation involved
87 men from the Free French Bataillion de Choc Commando landing at Cape Enfola
in rubber dinghies, scaling the crest of the 1,300- foot Monte Tambone Ridge, and
successfully taking out four gun batteries. The superguns depicted in the movie
are fictional, but the Germans did possess two superguns that were used to destroy
Rus sian fortifications during Operation Barbarossa: “Schwerer Gustav” (“Heavy
Gustav”) and “Dora.” These were massive Krupp- made railway guns— almost twice
the size of the biggest guns on WWII battleships— weighed nearly 1,350 tons, and
could fire projectiles 800 mm (31.5 inches) in dia meter, each weighing 7 tons, to
a range of 47 kilo meters (29 miles). In the movie the fictional superguns have been
installed in a capacious mountain cave on a small Greek island. Their size is hard
to gauge, but if they were anywhere near as huge as “Schwerer Gustav” and “Dora,”
such an installation would have been a logistical nightmare, if not altogether
impossible.