Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Guns of Navarone
1961 · J. Lee Thompson · The Guns of Navarone on Sightlines
A handful of men on a sheer rock face, with the sea working below them. The film has already told us this cliff cannot be climbed, and Oswald Morris's wide CinemaScope frame makes us believe it. The figures are tiny and the stone takes up the screen. Nobody is talking about the war. The only question is the next handhold.
That image holds most of The Guns of Navarone, and it is a good place to bring in Gilles Deleuze, because he wrote at length about the kind of cinema this film perfects. He called it the action-image. In plain terms, a character faces a situation, the situation presses on them, and they act to change it. The world says “impossible,” and a body answers. Deleuze saw this loop as the engine of classical Hollywood: perception leads to action, and action produces a new situation. He gave its grandest version a name, the large form. A whole milieu is laid out, pressure builds, and a decisive act transforms the situation.
Navarone sets out its large form in the opening minutes, almost as a formula. Two thousand British soldiers are trapped. Two enormous radar-directed guns stand in the way of their rescue. A fleet is coming, and the clock is running. You know the shape before the team sets sail, and the pleasure is in watching it fill.
Deleuze's word for the milieu that surrounds a story and calls forth its action is the encompasser. J. Lee Thompson's film takes the idea almost literally. The Aegean is not scenery. The storm-lashed crossing, the cliff and the hard ground of the island are staged as opponents, and the wide frame keeps reminding us how small and exposed the men are. The film's structure comes from the same place. The editor, Alan Osbiston, lays the mission out as a chain of separate obstacles: the sea, the cliff, the island, the town, the guns. Each one is its own life-or-death problem, solved and then replaced by the next.
Deleuze also describes how the large form breathes. It alternates the vast space of the milieu with the taut line of the action. Navarone breathes like that. We get open seascape, then a cramped interior where the ensemble is packed into the narrow anamorphic band and the suspense is staged in depth, then the landscape again. Thompson always keeps the geography readable. You know where the objective is at every moment, and the suspense depends on it.
Then there are the guns. Thompson houses them deep in the rock, monstrous barrels behind rolling steel doors in a chamber the size of a cathedral. Deleuze points out that the large form tends toward a duel, force against force, and he calls this the binomial. Here the enemy has no single face. It is an object, given a physical and almost mythic weight, so the film plays as a duel between a few men and a machine.
If that were all, Navarone would be a superb machine and nothing more. Carl Foreman, who wrote and produced it, put a grain of sand in the gears. Deleuze takes from Bergson the idea that a living being is a center of indetermination, meaning a gap between what it perceives and how it responds. Simple organisms react instantly. Thinking beings hesitate, and choice happens in that interval. The action-image usually closes the gap fast, because heroes see and then do. Foreman keeps prying it open.
When one of their own is badly injured and slows the team down, the film doesn't brush the problem aside. It turns it into an argument. David Niven's Corporal Miller, the explosives expert, is the hinge. He speaks with a bitter articulacy against Gregory Peck's grave, pragmatic Mallory, and each time he asks what the mission is costing them, the reflex from situation to action stalls. The suspense changes shape. We still wonder whether they will make it, but a second question opens beside the first: what will making it require them to become?
Deleuze has a name for this as well, the imprint. It is the bond by which a situation and a character mark each other. In a simpler war film the heroes change the situation and come through unchanged. Navarone suggests the situation is changing them too, and it lets Niven say so out loud.
Foreman knew this machinery from the inside. He wrote High Noon, which joined a near-real-time ticking clock to the moral cost of duty and set it to a martial theme by Dimitri Tiomkin. Navarone is that engine refitted at epic scale, with Tiomkin back on music and his theme working almost as a second narrator of the mission. The film's other debts are just as specific. Objective, Burma! codified the small commando unit sent behind enemy lines to destroy one target. Sahara established the typed multinational ensemble whose clashing temperaments drive the drama across a punishing landscape, and the casting here follows it: Peck, Niven, Anthony Quinn's Greek partisan carrying his own grief and vendetta, Irene Papas, Gia Scala. The Wages of Fear supplied the obstacle-by-obstacle suspense of a lethal journey. Thompson had rehearsed that himself in Ice Cold in Alex, building dread out of terrain and a survival clock. The Bridge on the River Kwai was the prestige model, a demolition mission shot widescreen on location that smuggled anti-war unease inside the spectacle.
Navarone fused all of this into a template. After it, the men-on-a-mission film had a fixed shape: the impossible objective, the differentiated team, the countdown, the escalating setbacks. The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes are still measured against it. That matters in Deleuze's terms. By his account, the action-image was heading into crisis in these years, as postwar filmmakers let the link between seeing and acting go slack. Navarone moves the other way. It is the large form at full confidence, made for roadshow screens at a time when studios were answering television with spectacle. Its moral undertow is a hairline crack in that confidence, though. The interval Miller opens is small, and the film shows how a genre can carry a doubt without stopping.
So watch it as a clock, and watch for the gaps in the clock. Notice how the frame makes the rock bigger than the men. Notice that you never lose track of where the guns are. And when the arguments start and Niven's voice sharpens, notice the film slowing down on purpose, letting the action wait while someone asks what it's for.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — The situation is announced up front: 2,000 trapped soldiers, two guns blocking their rescue, a fleet on a deadline. Everything builds toward one decisive transforming act.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Morris's anamorphic exteriors turn the storm-lashed sea approach and the vertical cliff into a hostile geography that calls forth action, with compositions stressing smallness and exposure.
- respiration-space — The film alternates epic Aegean seascape with confined interiors where the ensemble is packed into the wide band and suspense is staged in depth. Osbiston's chain of discrete obstacles is the taut line running through it.
- binomial (the duel) — The guns are monstrous barrels behind rolling steel doors in a cathedral-like rock cavern, given a physical, almost mythic presence as the force the team must meet.
- the interval (center of indetermination) — Foreman stages real ethical arguments, such as what to do with a badly injured comrade who slows the mission. Niven's Miller argues against Peck's pragmatic Mallory, and the reflex from situation to action stalls.
- the imprint — The film's dramatic spine is what success will require the men to become. The mission marks the characters even as they work to change the situation.