Operation Petticoat/Guns of Navarone
No Bank Holiday is complete without a classic war film and on Friday I watched two.
I was new to Operation Petticoat (1959) directed by Blake Edwards.
Edwards is best known for the Pink Panther movies but, aside from comedy, he also directed the hard-headed film on alcoholism Days of Wine and Roses starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.
Operation Petticoat is billed as a comedy and stars Cary Grant as the wartime captain of submarine Sea Eagle and Tony Curtis as his number two, a resourceful operator.
Cary Grant was nearing the end of a career in which he was at his best at Rom-Coms, as in To Catch a Thief , whilst Tony Curtis – having just appeared in ‘Some Like It Hot – was at the zenith of his career.
Ironically, in the Billy Wilder comedy, he became celebrated for his Cary Grant impersonation.
At one stage in Operation Petticoat Curtis arranged for a bevy of attractive but dippy nurses to come on board.
It’s a light frothy comedy in which you have the impression Cary Grant is not exerting himself and already had retirement in mind.
In switching on my telly on Film 4, The Guns of Navarone was being shown.
This satisfied the description of a classic film as you watch it for a few minutes and get drawn in. In some ways it is of its time.
It’s a band of brothers, team, film with much action.
Gregory Peck takes a break from his liberal character in To Kill a Mockingbird as the cool-headed but ruthless leader of a team that has to knock out two huge German guns in Greece.
On the team are David Niven (the explosive expert) Antony Quayle, Anthony Quinn and Stanley Baker as well as two Greek female partisans played by Gia Scala and Irene Papas.
Because of his rôles in this film and Zorba the Greek, Antony Quinn is often taken for a Greek whereas he was in fact Mexican.
There is the inevitable traitor and sadistic SS interrogator but also some excellent local shooting, notably of a village wedding.
I knew the ending but went along with the action for an agreeable couple of hours.
