#281: The Eagle Has Landed
Madcap wartime spy caper from the other side’s perspective
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 26, 2020.
Initial release: December 25, 1976
Director: John Sturges
The second world war, by nature of it being a years-long, multinational conflict that resulted in millions dead, has a lot of stories to tell; even now, nearly eighty years since the conclusion of hostilities, we’re still uncovering things the war has to tell us. But sometimes, if you’re just trying to thrill your audience, a made-up story will do just as well: enter John Sturges’ 1976 classic, The Eagle has Landed, a daring caper about a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. Directed by the same man who directed The Great Escape in 1963, it lacks the epic scale of that film but makes up for it in a tighter character drama that focuses on a comparatively smaller cast, including the venerable Michael Caine as a disgraced German paratroop colonel. We also get Robert Duvall as Oberst Radl, the man behind the plan; Donald Sutherland as a troubling Irish Republican Army agent, and Donald Pleasence, of all people, as a creepy take on Heinrich Himmler himself. Rounding out the cast is Treat Williams as an American army captain.
The setup is deliciously simple for how plausible it is: with the Germans on the back foot, Hitler randomly demands the kidnapping of Churchill as a show of strength. Hitler demands a lot of things, and usually forgets them, but Himmler does not; to save face, Admiral Canaris orders a feasibility study. It’s a stupid idea, really, absolutely audacious, and Canaris knows it; but his staff officer, Radl, begins to believe it might actually be possible, due to a lucky confluence of circumstances: Churchill is visiting a small town seven miles from the British coast in a matter of weeks, putting him in relatively easy reach for a daring mission. Radl’s choices for the operation: Liam Devlin, an IRA agent currently working as a teach in Berlin, and Colonel Steiner, currently serving in a penal unit along with his men in the Channel Islands for defying the SS. They’re aided by Joanna Grey, an Abwehr agent in England.
The first part of the plot goes off without a hitch — Devlin lands first and works as a sleeper agent, setting things up for the arrival of Steiner and his men, who, posing as Polish soldiers, make preparations to intercept Churchill as he makes his way through the village. Unfortunately, the plot is exposed when one of the paratroopers is killed rescuing a little girl. The Germans round everyone up and hold them hostage in the church, but word gets to the local American unit, and everything goes pear-shaped.
A lot of World War II movies aren’t what you’d call fun. They’re tough, gripping works, full of tension and tragedy. But Sturges has a talent for taking a heady topic like Big Two and turning out a suspense-filled caper with excellent casts and scripts. What makes the film interesting to me is the focus on the Germans; setting it in England reminds me of the 1939 Conrad Veidt classic The Spy in Black, in which a German submarine captain in the First World War is tasked with infiltrating a small English town in a mission to sink the British fleet.
The film tries to separate Nazi ideology and Steiner, to make him more sympathetic. Steiner and his men are explicitly shown as having more scruples than the explicitly villainous SS; the whole reason Steiner was punished was for trying (and failing) to rescue a Jewish girl on the run. In the end, it’s not the chance to force a negotiated peace with the Allies that has him taking the mission, but the lives of his men, who have been suffering attrition in their suicidal mission of using human-guided torpedoes against Allied ships.
Whether or not the film succeeds in making Steiner sympathetic is up to the viewer; regardless, he’s without a doubt the best character in the film, acting-wise. But this is a film that’s driven by strong roles, especially by Sutherland and Duvall. On a technical level, the film does quite well: Sturges’ cinematography had improved since 1963, and it shows. The score is a bit generic, but there’s certain melodies that made me think Bobby Prince might have lifted them when he was writing the soundtrack to Wolfenstein 3D.
It’s the script that really shines, though; any good actor can make a bad script work, but good actors deserve good scripts, and Caine and Sutherland both had a lot to work with. The result is a film that is sometimes tense, sometimes funny, but always a good watch.
All in all, if you’re looking for something a little off the beaten path in terms of 1960s and 70s World War II cinema, The Eagle Has Landed, with its twists and turns (and a surprise ending), might not be the worst choice you make.
