WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) C widescreen 156m dir: Brian G. Hutton

w/Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure, Patrick Wymark, Michael Hordern, Donald Houston, Peter Barkworth, William Squire, Robert Beatty, Brook Williams, Neil McCarthy, Vincent Ball, Anton Diffring, Ferdy Mayne, Derren Nesbitt, Victor Beaumont, Ingrid Pitt

Adventure yarn about a dangerous mission during WWII. Agents Burton and Eastwood attempt to free an important American officer being held prisoner in a supposedly escape-proof prison.

From Variety's review of the film: "Alistair MacLean wrote an original screenplay that was treated with respect for the writer's unusual abilities as a master of actionful suspense. The resulting film is highly entertaining, thrilling and rarely lets down for a moment. ...

"Although the film is replete with killings and explosions, they're so integrated into the story that they never appear overdone. It's more of a saga of cool, calculated courage, than any glorification of war. Burton never treats his role, though full of clichés, as anything less than Hamlet. Eastwood seems rather wooden in the early scenes, but snaps out of it when action starts piling up."

From the website www.theguardian.com, this article about the film by Geoff Dyer:

"I keep waiting for the day when Where Eagles Dare begins to pall. I mean, how many films can stand up to multiple viewings over such a vast span of time (about 40 years)? In fact, the opposite seems to be happening --- it gets better, yields deeper layers of meaning, every time I see it.

"Adapted from the novel by EM Forster ... no, hang on, that's Where Angels Fear to Tread, but there's a point here. Where Eagles Dare is a great title, anticipating the widespread popularity of the SAS motto 'Who Dares Wins,' even though it was made years before the storming of the Iranian embassy in 1980, of which the film could be seen either as a prophetic allegory or a direct inspiration. And the title is not just a sonorous bit of rhetoric plucked from Shakespeare. No, the castle scaled by Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood et al is called the Schloss Adler, the Castle of the Eagles. So the title is literally true, thereby cleverly inverting or --- as is said in the world of agents and double agents --- 'turning' the intended sense of the lines in Richard III: 'The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.' How cool is that!

"I last watched Eagles the day after seeing Disgrace, the latter serving as a textbook demonstration of everything that is wrong with a certain kind of dutiful film-making. What a plod! JM Coetzee's great novel is ploddingly translated into a script that is in turn ploddingly transferred to celluloid. It's not a movie at all, it's a ploddie, whereas Eagles is a piece of perfect cinema, in that the script dissolves into the film. (Alistair MacLean wrote the script and then turned it into a novel.)

"But what a script it must have been! What a plot! How do people dream up twists and turns like that? The key turnaround comes in the castle's Great Hall and involves Burton crossing, double- and triple-bamboozling everyone in sight. In the script the dialogue was divvied up more evenly between Eastwood and Burton, but it ended up with Eastwood doing more of the shooting and Burton more of the talking. Good call. Burton admired Clint's 'dynamic lethargy,' but in this scene calls him a 'punk --- and a pretty second-rate punk at that.' It's a devastating bit of verbal jujitsu since, effectively, Burton takes Eastwood's signature line --- 'Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?' --- and turns it back on him, before Clint's even landed the part of Dirty Harry.

"As for Burton, was he ever better than in Eagles? It's a masterly display of how to boss people around. Do this, do that! Everyone else --- Mary Ure, the German agents, even Eastwood --- they're all just Burton's bitches. Like all bossy people, Burton ultimately resorts to 'I'd better do it myself' mode. So when the German agents kick Eastwood unconscious and escape by cable car, it's the ageing, alcoholic Welshman who jumps on the roof and settles their hash --- big time! One gets an ice-axe in the arm, the other falls into the valley after clinging so desperately to one of Burton's legs that it must have ended up a foot longer. Naturally, it's Burton who drives the bus at the end --- and even then he's still barking out orders: 'Take out the control tower!'

"Clint and Mary duly obey. That's another forward-looking aspect of Eagles: from King Kong onwards the role of women was often just to swoon, scream, look threatened and, ideally, get their kit off; here Mary Ure blasts away with a machine gun like she's the Baader Meinhof Gang's Gudrun Ensslin. In fact, now I think about it, I see that the film is a premonitory account of the impending guerrilla war on the impregnable fortress of the German state apparatus with its concealed roots --- all those twisting tunnels and corridors --- in the Nazi past.

"In keeping with this, although the concealed intention of the mission is to weed out top-ranking double agents, its most immediate consequence is gratuitous murder and mayhem on a huge scale. They trash the schloss, wreck the surrounding infrastructure (the cable car is a write-off) and, by the end, are so addicted to the thrill of vandalism that, instead of driving politely through the entrance to the airfield, Baader --- I mean Burton --- smashes through the perimeter fence (I love the way it gets dragged along after the bus) before achieving the ultimate goal of any self-respecting 1970s terrorists: destroying some stationary planes.

"And here we get to the most intriguing paradox of the film. If Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, then the writers, cast and crew of Eagles were secretly on the side of the Germans, whom they ostensibly outwit, terrorise and slay in large numbers. Everything in the film is German. It's practically an advert for the superiority of German manufacturing. They fly in and out on a Junkers Ju 52. They rely exclusively on German weaponry (predominantly the MP40 Schmeisser submachine pistol). We do not see a British gun until they're on the way home and Patrick Wymark pulls a Sten on Burton. And guess what: the firing pin's been removed --- it doesn't frigging work. Finally, and most stylishly, the stars all wear German uniforms. How come Hugo Boss has not reissued those super-cool --- i.e. cozy --- retro winter anoraks? Vorsprung durch Technik!"