#283: Where Eagles Dare
Even crazier than The Guns of Navarone, if you can believe it
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 29, 2020.
Initial release: December 4, 1968
Director: Brian G. Hutton
Look at this still from Brian G. Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare. Can you tell, just by looking, who are the Nazis, and who are the Allied spies? The answers may surprise you in this furiously twisty spy romp, screenwritten by Alistair MacLean, the man behind the book that The Guns of Navarone is adapted from.
It starts off simply: an American general, who’s part of the planning team for opening a second European front, has been captured. With little time to waste before the Nazis interrogate him, a team is put together and sent into Austria to infiltrate an impenetrable castle. Upon landing, one of the men turns up dead. The surviving members infiltrate the village of Werfen, but it’s not long before another team member is found dead as well. Clearly, there’s a traitor in their midst, but who? And why does the team leader seem to know more than he’s letting on?
If anyone knew how to write a World War II spy thriller it was MacLean, but more than Navarone, this might be the most bonkers, multi-layered World War II spy flick of the era. It’s obvious to me that Hideo Kojima has seen this film — there’s just too much I recognize from the games as having been lifted from Where Eagles Dare.
More than just a tight script, this is a film that is not short on action. Once the lead starts flying you can count on a lengthy escape that features such marvels as a fistfight atop a moving cable car, a road lined with TNT, and plenty of explosions and gunfire. The cinematography is some of the best of the era, as Hutton and his second unit director Yakima Canutt have an eye for good shot compositions throughout, particularly during action sequences. It never feels like it drags during its two and a half hour runtime, unlike Navarone.
There’s been movies like this being made for a decade or more by the time this film came out; so why has this one remained a classic like Navarone, which came out seven years earlier? perhaps because of how subversive it was by the standards of late 1960s cinema. 1968 was the year that gave us Night of the Living Dead, a film that helped revolutionize the use of violence in film; while Eagles doesn’t have the same level of chocolate-syrup gore as Romero’s zombie classic, it was by no means a bloodless affair like Navarone was. The back half of the film is nearly a full straight hour of action and violence; an extended sequence where the American character (played by Clint Eastwood) stands off against a pack of Nazis ends about as brutally as you can imagine; Eastwood kills dozens throughout the film, amassing a bodycount that might be higher than some of his messier westerns. There’s also not one, but two female characters in the film, both of whom, in spite of the objectification that 1960s film indulged in, have crucial roles in the infiltration plan and get in plenty of Nazi murder themselves. And yes, the film passes the Bechdel test, somehow.
This is arguably the film that, alongside James Bond flicks, redefined action movies for the coming decade or so. The final act of the film is ludicrous, and yet still manages to be thrilling and beautifully shot; it feels like an antecedent to the finale of Metal Gear Solid 3.
There’s a lot to like about this film. While the script is perhaps very much like any other of MacLean’s stories, this is perhaps the quintessential example, and easily as good as, perhaps even better than, The Guns of Navarone.
