If I could change anything about this movie

I gave 8 for the film, for 3 reasons:

1- Some characters vanish from the movie and come back almost an hour later (and one died ... They could have show this.

2- The way the guy stab the fat one in the boat around 2:10, and the fat guy stab him after, thatb was silly.

3- Not 2 min after that (around 2:10 too), the guy with a machinegun is bullet proof against a german squadron, and kills everyone but the official. And then both kills each other, that was silly².

Wasn't this 3 things I would give 10/10 for the movie.

I think I could do with a little less Anthony Quayle closeups grimacing with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But I like him a lot here and as an actor elsewhere.

I came here to post about your #2 and #3... those two deaths at the end were really weird....

More Irene Pappas.

Too long. I don't buy the guys climbing up a sheer rock wall in the rain without 95% of them dying. Fights/deaths looked fake. Singing in the middle was silly.Gregory Peck's a little listless.

I love this movie, loved it the first time I saw it, went to see it again when it was first released at least three times. It's a "guy movie", and boys, prepubescent, especially, dug the fact that the presence of women in the movie was slight (no romance, to speak of, albeit an interesting vibe between the Quinn and Pappas characters). James Darren was a popular singer around the time the film was made. I guess he was there for the younger women and girls in the audience. He didn't take up much time.

One character who confused me was Stanley Baker's. I didn't know the actor then, being a young American boy, thus I was confused as to who "this Stanley Baker guy" was supposed to be in the movie. For a log while my best guess was Anthony Quayle, whom I liked as an actor. Wrong. When I realized who Baker actually was it was like a WTF moment for me, as in "why does this guy even get a credit?". He seemed like such a peripheral character (to this at the time nine year old kid). I scarcely noticed him at all. (Spoiler ahead: when he was killed at the end that seemed to be his purpose, his job, as it were, in the film: the good guy who died. Okay, Darren bought it, too, but I guess they had to show that the commando guys were human, after all, so the ones one cared less about were "sacrificed"). Anthony Quayle's character didn't get a lot of time for character development, though his presence was essential early on (he was the "lucky" guy after all).

But the film's flaws, such as they were, struck me as minor quibbles I had with Navarone. They didn't waste much time, nor did they slow the movie down. A minute or two more or less for Darren or Baker wouldn't have greatly harmed or improved the quality of this action-adventure picture, which to my way of thinking was close to perfect as it was.