Tag Archives: Guns of Navarone

Manolis Paterakis and the Guns of Navarone?

2 Replies

220px-gunsofnavaroneAn interesting and fun observation by Jamie McCullum. Dig out your old copies of the movie and see for yourself?

Dear Tom,

Something just caught my attention which may interest the readers of your PLF site (I’ll let you be the judge!)

I was watching the Guns of Navarone this afternoon and in the scene when the heroes are captured in the village of Mandrakos (Ed: somewhere around 1 hr 50 mins?), the German officer flicks through a book of wanted andartes.
Remarkably the first photo is of Manolis Paterakis!

With best regards and thanks again for your continued brilliant work on the PLF site. I love it.

With best wishes,
Jamie

 

Was Paddy the inspiration for the hero of Guns of Navarone?

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The following was posted as a comment in Your Paddy Thoughts by Robert Seibert. He asks an interesting question so I thought I would elevate it from deep in a comments page to the main blog site to see if it provokes some debate.

I wonder if there is any connection between PLF’s WW2 deeds and the fictional work “Guns of Navarone”, Alistair MacLean’s 1957 novel and the 1961 film starring Gregory Peck as Capt. Keith Mallory leading a team to destroy German guns on “Navarone”-said to be the real island of Leros. In the movie Mallory is described as the “world’s greatest mountain climber” and “speaks Greek like a Greek and German like a German”-but was chosen mainly because he has survived for a year and a half as a guerrilla with the Cretan resistance. The parallels with Paddy’s exploits seem obvious. Of course “Ill Met by Moonlight” was published in 1950 and the film version in 1957-accounts of the actual Gen. Kreipe abduction. Would be interested in hearing others thoughts about this.

Over to you dear readers …