Where Eagles Dare

Where Eagles Dare (Brian G. Hutton, 1968) Another one of those movies that I've just never seen—amazing how many of them are written by Alistair McLean—although they have been readily available, I have had ample opportunity to see them, and when I did come across them on "the tube" I always seemed to hit the same point in the movie (in this case, Burton and Eastwood are riding the roof of a cable-tram heading for a mountain-top castle over-populated by Nazi's).

The history of the production was a case of need—Richard Burton wanted to make an action movie his kids could see. Producer Elliott Kastner thought an Alistair McLean novel would be good, but film-makers had, by this time, run out of Alistair McLean novels (or Ian Stuart novels, which McLean wrote under a nom de plume if they veered off the "heroic adventure" genre-line)—all of them having been filmed, bought for filming, or about to be filmed. The solution (you might think) would be to find a really good adventure yarn by another author, but, instead, the producers asked McLean to write an original screen-story upon which they could base their film.

McLean was given the instructions "a World War II story, a group of men on a rescue mission, a ticking clock and a couple of females," a down payment of $10,000 (with $100,000 to come later) and screenplays by William Goldman (probably Harper) and the writers Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington (probably Kaleidoscope) as format guides. McLean, rather famously, hated writing—but thought the money was good—so undertook the screenplay assignment (screenplays being notoriously more skimpy to write than novels), although he would subsequently type out a "tie-in novel." 

Where Eagles Dare involves a group of British commando's, lead by British Major John Smith (Burton)...and one American recruit, U.S. Army Ranger Lt. Shaffer (Clint Eastwood) ...to rescue an Army Brigadier General whose plane was taken down not far from the German stronghold, Schloß Adler, in Austria—where he has been taken for interrogation. The urgency is that the General is a major planner for the Western Front, and Smith's group must rescue him before he cracks under torture.

And that is all the description you'll get out of me because anything else would give away any of the enumerable "secrets" that the film has enfolded in it.  It's just one of the weaknesses of the film—the castle isn't nestled on a mountaintop so much as on a flimsy house of cards, that, if a logical finger was applied to it, would send the thing crashing in on itself. 

One may wonder, for instance, why a U.S. Ranger is involved in the Mission devised by MI6, as he sticks out like Clint Eastwood in a Parliament of Brits. It's a big question. Eastwood, himself, found the script "terrible," and subsequently requested a lot of his lines cut—he was never a great expositioner and the type of actor who was better the fewer words he said—which is why one gets the impression that Burton's Smith yaps and yaps and yaps, while Eastwood's Shaffer just squints and glowers.

My reactions were similar.

I wanted to like the film. One of the reasons why is that the second unit director doing the action sequences is the fabled Yakima Canutt—first director Brian Hutton doing rather dull work, hampered perhaps by Burton's erratic schedule and Eastwood's lack of initiative (he's a bit like Chewbacca in this, just running and shooting...re-loading and shooting some more). The two stars took to calling it "Where Doubles Dare" as Canutt's second unit of stunt-people did more and more of the movie, probably to its betterment. But, for all the splintering near-misses of perimeter guards and check-point Charlies from escaping vehicles, nothing prevents them from running into the middle of the street to become easy targets for Eastwood's retreating machine-gun.

Truth be told, it bored the socks off me. It would have bored the socks off me even if I were wearing Army boots. Burton is less than compelling throughout and, sadly, he has the M-G-M lion's share of the dialogue, and Eastwood becomes the recipient of too many "Why is he even THERE" questions, as any of the commando's must have been trained to shoot. At one point, Eastwood is knocked unconscious and he doesn't recover for the longest time, merely to give Burton an extended sequence on the castle's sole transport—that dodgy air-tram.

It just boils down to McLean's conceit of the purpose of the mission itself—a lot of planning and a lot of people being killed for something that a cyanide capsule could have fixed. And those of you who have seen the movie know that I'm just being facetious on that last point. But, McLean seems to be of the mind that "the best kept secrets are military secrets" and that one should go to the most elaborate lengths to prove something so obviously wrong. It is one of those movies where the term "military intelligence" really IS mutually exclusive.