With a bunch of weighty stars, terrific special effects, several socko situations plus good camerawork and other technical okays, Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson have sired a winner." "Harrison's Reports" gave a grade of "Excellent," raving, "The script, direction, acting (by a brilliant cast) and photography are all prizeworthy." Richard L. Coe of "The Washington Post" called the film "a magnificently detailed cliff-hanger of spectacular settings and deeds of impossible derring-do ... What makes this one of the good ones is superlative photography of the storied Grecian isles, a crackerjack cast and a yarn about WWII in which unlikely incident succeeds unlikely incident with rare largesse." John L. Scott of the "Los Angeles Times" called it "the best adventure movie to hit the screen this year," adding, "Some viewers will deplore a lack of character motivation—the origins of the six heroes are passed by rather quickly at the beginning—and women may yearn for more romantic passages in the film—but most of us, I am sure, will be satisfied with the epic suspense and sweep of this highly pictorial adventure." Brendan Gill of "The New Yorker" called it one of those movies "that are no less thrilling because they are so preposterous ... Let me also confess that I was held more or less spellbound all the way through this many-colored rubbish." "The Monthly Film Bulletin" thought the film fell well short of its ambitions, finding that Foreman's script had "too much diffusion, too much talk, and too many themes raised and dropped, so that the adventure story is not lifted to another plane but overstretched, robbed of the tight narrative concentration needed for a mounting tension." The review also criticized director Thompson for lacking "the ability of the Hollywood veterans to hold a long picture together" and instead moving the action forward "in a series of jerks." , the film held an approval rating of 91% on the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 23 reviews, with an average score of 7.93 out of 10. Won  Nominated  The film is recognized by the American Film Institute in the following list:  In 1968, author Alistair MacLean reunited Mallory, Miller, and Stavros in the best-selling novel "Force 10 From Navarone", the only sequel of his long writing career. That was in turn filmed as the significantly different "Force 10 from Navarone" in 1978 by British director Guy Hamilton, a veteran of several James Bond films.