Many of our friends from the 60s-70s era would get that tinge of nostalgia mixed with excitement at the mention of old war films based on thrilling novels by iconic writers. Among dozens that we devoured in our youth, one of our all time favourites remains the best-seller by Alistair Maclean, ‘The Guns of Navarone’ written in 1957.
Himself a WWII veteran, Alistair Maclean served in the Royal Navy from 1941 to 1947, initially as an ordinary seaman and later as a leading torpedo operator. His wartime experiences saw true to life reflections in his other famous novel like ‘HMS Ulysses’ of a battle on high seas. It’s reported that Maclean apart from being a prolific writer who enthralled us with spell binding WWII adventures of the likes of ‘Where Eagles Dare’, ‘Ice Station Zebra’ and ‘Fear is the Key’, turned into a successful screenplay writer too.
Talking of ‘Guns of Navarone’ cannot be complete without mention of the magnificent film (1957) based on the book with an all-star cast led by Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and David Niven, which weaves an amazing tale of a bunch of reckless, intrepid men of steel, who are chosen to undertake a near impossible mission of destroying the deadly bombers which protect the Nazis from an attack from the seas by the Allies. ‘Netflix’ has now been able to transport us to our days of adventure movies with such classics !
At one time we were regulars of the ‘war movies’ club which drew on the WWII stories of the real & fictional victories & exploits of the Allied Forces against all powerful ruthless Germans and heroics of the undaunted Allied soldiers in fighting the Nazis. There were , plenty in the 1960-70’s decade apart from Maclean, we had been weaned on Frederick Forsyth’s ‘Day of the Jackal’ and “The Odessa File’ to Ken Follet’s ‘Eye of the Needle’, all made into gripping war movies. Then there were the war classics like ‘Bridge on River Kwai’, ‘The Longest Day’, ‘The Great Escape’, ‘Battle of the Bulge’, ‘633 Squadron’, ‘Patton’ and many others, it was a magnificent genre of untold courage and bravery.
The craze for war novels and consequently such epic dramas on celluloid diminished in last four decades or so which saw the post-war re-emergence of many strong nations like Japan and China, the ensuing Cold War of super-powers, sweeping liberalization by economies, use of new technology and special effects in films and advent of Sci-fi flics, the ‘Superman’, ‘Spiderman’ cult, ‘Harry Potter’ mania among the youth and now with OTT platforms that changed the landscape of film-making !
For old-timers there was something inspirational and stirring in those epic sagas of war-time valour and sacrifice and the ‘larger than life’ characters that give us ‘goose-bumps’ even now ! In the last scene of the film ‘Guns of Navarone’, Peck says to Quinn ‘The mission is over, why are you not coming with us- how will you survive this place ?’ And Quinn says ‘It takes a lot to kill someone like me’ !
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