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In 1943 a British force is pinned down on Kheros, an island off Turkey, under imminent threat of German bombardment. The only escape is by sea; and the only route is dominated by the two giant guns of Navarone, set into the cliff so that they are impregnable against air attack. As an almost desperate measure, a sabotage team of six is sent to Navarone: Major Franklin, Mallory, an expert mountaineer, Miller, an explosives expert, Andrea, a Greek officer, and Brown and Pappadimos, trained killers. Their boat goes down in a storm, but they land safely with their equipment and scale the almost sheer cliff face which is the only unguarded approach to the island. Franklin falls, however, breaking his leg, and Mallory takes over command. After crossing the island they make contact with the local resistance, in the form of Maria, a sturdy partisan, and Anna, a girl who has been literally struck dumb after Gestapo torture. But the Germans are alerted to their presence and the entire group is rounded up. Through a trick, Andrea overcomes the guards and they manage to escape in German uniform, leaving Franklin behind primed with false information which he believes to be true. Just before the raid on the guns. Miller discovers that Anna is a traitor. Angered by Mallory's treatment of Franklin, Miller tries to goad him into shooting Anna, into assuming the most brutal form of responsibility. But the bullet is finally fired by Maria. Together, Mallory and Miller sabotage the guns, while the others stage diversionary actions. As the British destroyers approach the straits, a gigantic explosion shatters the cliff. The survivors watch it from the sea; but Brown and Pappadimos are dead - destroyed as much by temperament as by the enemy.

Carl Foreman, as writer and producer, puts so much into the films he works on that they belong at least as much to him as to their directors. The Guns of Navarone takes up themes that have concerned him before: questions of courage, responsibility, men's responses to the actions they have to take to survive in war — issues which probably mean much more to Foreman than the adventure story context in which they are set. But he has not managed to integrate these points into the action itself, and the result is a desperate imbalance. The moral arguments cut into the action without extending it; there is too much diffusion, too much talk, too many themes raised and dropped, so that the adventure story is not lifted to another plane but overstretched, robbed of the tight narrative concentration needed for a mounting tension. A monumentally impassive performance from Gregory Peck, and the miscasting of David Niven as the disgruntled member of the team, make it more difficult to accept the relationships of mistrust and misunderstanding underlying the dialogue.

The failure of integration extends beyond the script. J. Lee Thompson has not the ability of the Hollywood veterans to hold a long picture together. Individual scenes - the storm, the first approach to the fortress, across a quiet square with a song coming over a radio, the surrealist moment when the guns are fired and the crews in their protective clothing line up behind them, hands to their ears — are dramatically staged. But the sense of topography and timing, of where on the island we are at any given moment, is confused and the action instead of building up a steady impetus moves in a series of jerks. The storm, for instance, is followed by a cliff-scaling sequence which looks both too easy and too theatrical; the capture and interrogation of the group by a blond beast of the Gestapo is crudely managed; and the final sequences are again muddled. The Guns of Navarone sets its sights high: the introduction defines the epic scale of the undertaking, and the investment of time, money, effort and sheer talent has been enormous. But the gap between intention and achievement is as wide as - in the circumstances - it is sad.

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