Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Guns Of Navarone [HD]



Columbia outdoes itself with new release of classic
The second movie in Columbia's newest wave of World War II movies (along with "The Caine Mutiny") is the 1961 Academy Award-winning film for Best Special Effects, "The Guns of Navarone," which stars Gregory Peck as Keith Mallory, the leader of a group of British commandos tasked with destroying two gigantic German anti-ship guns.
The British are desperate to evacuate 2,000 soldiers from the Aegean island of Kiros, with the only sea route through a stretch of water commanded by the guns that are encased inside a massive cliffside bunker that is immune to air attack.
Based on the best selling novel by Alistair (Where Eagles Dare) MacLean, Mallory has been working on occupied Crete for two years and as an expert mountaineer is the perfect choice to ferry the team to the only part of Navarone not monitored by the Germans - a 400-foot cliff.
Joining Peck is David Niven as explosives expert John Anthony Miller and Anthony Quinn as a Greek resistance fighter.
MacLean is...

"You've got me in the mood to use this thing..."
The Guns of Navarone is a wonderful film that touches upon the issue of how difficult it can be to make moral choices during the course of a war. The screenplay is fascinating in the sense that every major character in the film has their own notions of just how far they should go in applying the necessary force "to get the job done" in a war.

The movie is about six saboteurs who must destroy two gigantic guns, which present a danger to the Allied Navy. At the very beginning of the movie, viewers immediately have their first taste of a moral dilemma when Commodore Jensen, the organizer of the mission, has to decide between sending six qualified men to an almost disastrous and suicidal mission or simply scrapping the mission and leaving 2,000 trapped British soldiers to a certain doom. Commodore Jensen sees the choice as a foregone conclusion and thus resorts to lying to the leaders of the mission in order to boost their confidence. Jensen however does feel the pains of...

Guns still fire solid shells
The Guns of Navarone is, to film experts, a forgotten classic, but to the mass movie viewing audience that has continued to watch it during its numerous television dates, it remains a favorite among war movies. Why a forgotten classic? Because the American Film Institute didn't even consider it among its 400 nominated movies, and I've yet to see any other "Top 100" list that includes it. Maybe this DVD will awaken some of those so-called experts to a movie with both action and intellectual depth. As for the DVD itself, it is the best transfer yet of this magnificent film. Yes, there are flaws. It will not look like a movie made in 1999. It was filmed 40 years ago and it shows it. But if the viewer isn't one of those people who take a magnifying glass to the screen or who view it in stop-motion, scene by scene, it holds up well. As for the sound, it is the best yet. The 5.1 Dolby enhancement is great -- much better than anyone could possibly expect from a movie...

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