I know I missed a day of Blaugust because I was all being sick and unconscious in bed and stuff, but that’s no excuse. I’m going to make it up to you all with a couple of movies I watched yesterday.
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
I think I first heard of The Guns of Navarone the way I most always heard about old movies when I was a kid; in a Mad Magazine parody. My dad had a huge collection of old Mad magazines and I treasured those.
In WWII, 2,000 British troops are stranded on the Greek island of Khebos, an island about to be overrun by the Nazis. They cannot be rescued because the Nazis have built a huge cannon emplacement protected by a cave on the (fictional) island of Navarone. The British must send an elite commando crew into Navarone to disable the guns before they can be used to destroy the British flotilla coming to rescue the troops.
Gregory Peck stars as Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn stars as Anthony Quinn, and David Niven stars as… someone quite unlike David Niven’s normal characters, here as a chain-smoking explosives expert. I had a bet with myself that he would sacrifice himself in the end to ensure the explosives went off, but he did not.
It was a fun enough movie, but I think by this time audiences were getting over the square-jawed heroes of the Allies outwitting the moustache-twirling machinations of the Nazis. There were a lot of war movies out that showed the heroes in more realistic lights, but this wasn’t one of them.
The Wikipedia article mentions a couple of times that The Guns of Navarone was the second-highest grossing movie of my birth year, 1961. The first-highest grossing movie? West Side Story. I guess it sucked to be The Guns of Navarone that year.
Wanted (2008)
Marc Miller follows up his movie adaptation of Kick Ass with this one of his Wanted book, where a nebbish office worker is inducted into a fraternity of supervillains who have managed to convince the world that superheroes never existed, after they killed them all.
In the movie, there’s no mention of superheroes or supervillains, and the Fraternity is a group of assassins who all have the ability to bend bullets and make incredibly accurate shots. James McAvoy plays a young Wesley Gibbons, who gets bullied at work while his best friend, Barry, is sleeping with his girlfriend.
Wait, this Barry actor looks familiar. OMG. THIS IS HOW THEY GET YOU.
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