World War II epics

Tonight's Essential on TCM, at 8:00 PM ET, is The Guns of Navarone.

Released in 1961, The Guns of Navarone was part of an emerging genre, that of the long, long action movie about World War II, that was a decided break from earlier war movies. Hollywood made these movies with a lot of stars and a lot of action, presumably in an attempt to get people away from the little screen at home and back into theaters. Movies like The Longest Day, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, or a dozen others like them, might be better-remembered today, but The Guns of Navarone came before most, if not all, of them.

As for The Guns of Navarone, the plot involves a joint operation between the British and the Greek resistance during World War II to destroy a mountain-top Nazi gun that's perfectly situated for destroying any unwanted traffic in the sea lane below. The movie has a lot of the action that viewers would have wanted, but also some of the tropes of the war genre, and especially the epic genre: a long exposition at the beginning building up conflicts between the main characters; an extraneous love interest who's really not important to the story; lots and lots of famous names (Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn lead the cast); a few up-and-coming actors who may or may not be able to act designed to bring in the younger demographic (in this case, that's James Darren); and so on.

If you don't mind sitting down to a two-and-a-half hour movie, The Guns of Navarone isn't a bad one. But if the great movies from the studio system days, like Captain Blood or Battleground could tell their stories in two hours, why couldn't the war epics from the 1960s?