Where Eagles Dare, adapted by Alistair MacLean from his own novel and directed by Brian G. Hutton, looks a lot like a defining work of modern action cinema over forty years later. With its serial-like pace and virtually non-stop final hour of shooting, chasing, dangling and leaping, it seems to me to have defined a juncture, one of the last major adventure films to use a World War 2 setting, but looking forward even more than the early James Bond films to an age in which a total action aesthetic would take over. It anticipates any number of ‘80s-and-after adventure flicks, as disparate as John Woo’s oeuvre, Rambo, and the Indiana Jones entries: Spielberg has acknowledged it as one of his favourite war films.
MacLean’s novel, one of his most sheerly entertaining, and thoroughly ludicrous, yarns, was obviously written to be turned into a cracking good movie – he wrote novel and script simultaneously – and the spectacular, splashy production brought the goods. After an American General named Carnaby is shot down en route to Russia
The team, led by the suspiciously anonymous-sounding but ultra-competent Major John Smith (Richard Burton), and also including a hastily press-ganged American Ranger, Lt. Schaffer (Clint Eastwood), and five others (Donald Houston, Peter Barkworth, William Squire, Brook Williams and Neil McCarthy) drawn from the desk-jockey ranks of the service, is swiftly parachuted into the snow-crusted mountains. A more complex game is in action, however, it soon transpires. Another team member, Mary (Mary Ure), secreted on board the plane and parachuted after the rest, is one of Smith’s agents and his lover. He knows their supposedly hastily-arranged mission is bogus, that the General Carnaby the Germans have hold of is really an actor, and their actual reasons for penetrating the fortress are more complicated. It also becomes clear that there’s at least one traitor in the team, as members keep turning up dead.
One major difference between Where Eagles Dare and the likes of, say, Die Hard, is that it’s got a far more important, and intricate, plot. That plot unspools finally in a lengthy and well-orchestrated sequence where it becomes clear why an actor of Burton’s calibre wasn’t wasted in this role, as Smith and Schaffer, having broken into the Schloss Adler, confront the SS bosses Rosemeyer and Kramer (Ferdy Mayne and Anton Diffring) about to torture the fake Carnaby (Robert Beatty), commencing a series of head-spinning double and triple-crosses. Once all that’s out of the way, however, the coast is clear for wrestling matches on the tops of cable cars, machine gun duels and plentiful big bangs, and a school bus with a snow-plough nose retooled as the most effective weapon of mass destruction this side of an atom bomb.
None of this takes itself too seriously: what brilliant name does Smith assume as a German double agent? Why, Johann Schmidt, of course. And then there’s Ingrid Pitt as a busty barmaid/spy. The fights are replete with supernaturally good shooting from its heroes and amazingly bad shooting by the Germans – who’d have known a few good Schmeiser shots could take out an armoured car every time? There’s no bitter anti-establishment subtext or morally complex layering to the proceedings, a la Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, or Richard Brooks’ The Professionals.
Except, natch, for the traditional variety of class subtext where the aristocratic poise of the SS villains, promising nasty punishments and ready brutality whilst quaffing brandy and affecting cool courtesy, contradicts the ballsy prêt-a-porter attitude of the heroes. Nonetheless, neither Hutton nor MacLean was the type to play campy games, and the story’s roots in MacLean’s strongly physical sense of gruelling warfare and stoic, no-bullshit soldiering, a quality that defined his first, best, realistic novel HMS Ulysses and peppered even his silliest later works, is in evidence here.
That innate taciturnity is most apparent in the film’s very conclusion, when, after a traitor has hurled himself from their rescuing aeroplane, Schaffer gets up to close the hatch with dutiful distraction and the heroes all begin to fall asleep after another very hard day’s work. Superheroics for freedom and democracy, it seems, is just another shit job. A lot of the book’s banter is shaved away and what remains is a little thin on characterisation, or even memorable caricaturing, and humour. But an air of arch professional cool is a hallmark of late ‘60s genre cinema, particularly evident in Eastwood’s minimalist, utter badass performance, firing off machine guns in both hands and plugging sundry Krauts with cold efficiency with his silenced pistol, and rigging more explosives than were dropped by Bomber Command.
Also noteworthy is Ure’s steely action chick, one of the few genuine examples in any movie of the era, coldly gunning down Nazi motorcyclists and keeping up with the boys with barely a hair of her so-‘60s hairdo out of place. But wait, there’s more: the in-your-dreams alliance of Mayne, Diffring and Derren Nesbitt as Nazi villains, the third actor playing Von Hapen, an icily poised Gestapo officer whose power struggles with Rosemeyer and Kramer offers an interesting subplot, manipulated with cunning by Smith when it looks like missions might be blown by Von Hapen’s untimely intervention. Although Burton
Where Eagles Dare is however most impressive as a work of material film production. Whilst some of the back-projection used to augment the cable car battle is ropy, the film is filled with genuinely hair-raising stunt work (Yakima Canutt directed the second unit), and the whole project teems with the sort of real-shit-being-blown-up delight moviemaking doesn’t offer much anymore, as the running battle of the last third seems to leave about half of Germany ablaze. The photography, by Arthur Ibbetsen, is an enormous plus, capturing lustrous hues of twilight-tinted snow, the iron hues of Nazi war machinery and boiling bright flames, and strong, atmospheric portrayal of the locale and the alt schul chic of the Schloss Adler’s environs. Also indelible is Ron Goodwin’s high-flying, if slightly repetitive, score. It’s no intellectual or artistic classic, but as far as diverting shoot-‘em-ups go, it’s the top.
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