AWARDS & HONORS

In its annual poll of critics and other industry reporters, Film Daily named The Guns of Navarone the best picture of the year.

Motion Picture Exhibitor Magazine gave the film its Golden Laurel for Top Drama and voted Gregory Peck third place for Top Male Dramatic Performance.

The Hollywood Foreign Press voted The Guns of Navarone Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Score (Dimitri Tiomkin).

The Guns of Navarone was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Association (BAFTA) Award for Best British Screenplay.

J. Lee Thompson was nominated for the Directors Guild Award.

The Guns of Navarone received seven Oscar® nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. It won for Best Visual Effects.

Dimitri Tiomkin's soundtrack album was nominated for a Grammy.

The Critics' Corner: THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961)

"Guns is the sort of spectacular drama that can ignore any TV competition and, even with its flaws, should have patrons firmly riveted throughout its lengthy narrative. With a bunch of weighty stars, terrific special effects, several socko situations plus good camerawork and other technical okays, [producer Carl] Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson have sired a winner."
- Rich, Variety

"This big, robust action drama...is one of those muscle-loaded pictures in the thundering tradition of [Cecil B.] DeMille, which means more emphasis is placed on melodrama than on character or credibility....However, for anyone given to letting himself be entertained by scenes of explosive action and individual heroic displays, there should be entertainment in this picture, for there is plenty of that."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"Peck may seem at times a trifle wooden and his German accent too obviously American...but his not too introspective, somewhat baffled manner is manly and fitted to the role he plays."
- Paul V. Peckley, The New York Herald Tribune

"...the most enjoyable consignment of baloney in months..." -- Time Magazine.

"...one of those great big bow-wow, or maybe I should say bang-bang, movies that are no less thrilling because they are so preposterous....Let me confess that I was held more or less spellbound all the way through this many-colored rubbish...."
- The New Yorker

"The Guns of Navarone doesn't hesitate to proclaim its fake mythic status, beginning with James Robertson Justice's plumy narration...The direction of a complicated film is certainly efficient, and the grand adventure, however improbable, continues to hold up. Yet possibly because the producer was disinclined to waste expensive location footage, the action slows at times to a crawl, like an unedited documentary. Many scenes have no tempo at all. Foreman, who wrote the script, added many thumb-suckers about war, but in the nuttiest scene, he throws the bathwater out with the baby, as Gregory Peck, in perhaps the worst line-reading of his nobly uneven career, lectures David Niven on his responsibility to the team. Niven's response is priceless: You can't tell if his character is chagrined or if Niven himself is wondering what the heck got into Greg. Either way, this is the kind of antiwar film that could double as a recruiting tool. Navarone is a librative theme park, each episode another ride."
- Gary Giddens, New York Sun

"Ambitiously produced Boy's Own Paper heroics, with lots of noise and self-sacrifice; intermittently exciting but bogged down by philosophical chat."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"Behind the derring-do and the often clunky mechanics of the plot lies solid craftsmanship. Journeyman director J. Lee Thompson, who has made some genuinely atrocious films, handles the story with a finer touch than he normally displays...Credit for the film's perennial popularity should be shared by production designer Geoffrey Drake, who gives the production a realistic, lived-in look that's associated more with "serious" black-and-white World War II films than with escapism."
- Mike Mayo, Videohound's War Movies

"Producer Carl Foreman specialised in downbeat movies questioning the nature of wartime heroism. But the on-going debates about the morality of warfare that are scattered through this Alistair MacLean adaptation only serve to drag out the action climaxes, in which our WWII heroes take out two big gun-posts on a Turkish cliff. Lots of studio rock-climbing, and everybody gets very wet."
- Tony Rayns, TimeOut Movie Guide

"The way producer-writer Carl Foreman (High Noon, 1952) fleshes out the characters from Alistair MacLean's 1957 page-turner, the movie is about weighing ends and means, testing personal and national loyalties, and measuring one's capacity for sacrifice. That's why, when director J. Lee Thompson detonates the action set pieces, they're not just thrilling -- they're cathartic."
- Michael Sragow, Salon

"Gregory Peck, as Mallory, gives a wonderfully unperturbed performance, outdone only by the versatile coldness and comedy of Anthony Quinn. David Niven is the subservient but stylish chemist Miller, rounding out a film that ranks among the best war movies-for mayhem, fighting and a simple, sanctimonious story about heroism when it's war at all costs."
- Arthur Ryel-Lindsay, Slant Magazine

"The Guns of Navarone, a World War II military exercise of the those-poor-devils-haven't-got-a-chance school, is the most enjoyable consignment of baloney in months."
- Time magazine

Compiled by Frank Miller