Where Eagles Dare (1968)

Starring: Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood
Grade: B

Imagine a Sylvester Stallone action movie mixed with a slow war movie from the 1960s. This is the middle ground in which Where Eagles Dare lands in. It’s got the awesome finale with bombs, guns, hundreds getting shot, and car chases, but the first half drags its ass across the carpet like a dog.

Summary

To open the film, we see a group soldiers in a plane flying over the German Alps in the winter of 1943-44. Two of them are Major John Smith (Burton) and Lt. Morris Schaffer (Eastwood).

We then go back a bit ago to when they were debriefed for the mission by Col. Turner (Patrick Wymark) and Vice Admiral Rolland (Michael Hordern) of MI6.

Turner explains that in a town called Werfen, there is the Schloss Adler. It’s known as “The Castle of the Eagles”. It’s referred to as this because “only an eagle can get to it”. There, U.S. general Carnaby (Robert Beatty) has been taken captive by Nazis. Before he gives up any information, they’re sending in an Allied Special Operations Executive commando group, led by Major John Smith. The Schloss Adler is the headquarters for the German secret service in Southern Bavaria. Right away, Smith questions if he really is there, but Turner says Carnaby’s plane crashed landed 10 miles away from it. The Germans had to have taken him there. They carried out a saturation raid on Nuremberg the night before. Technically, there shouldn’t have been a German fighter within 100 miles of the Austrian border, but a wandering Messerschmitt patrol got him. Regardless, they have to get Carnaby out. One asks about paratroopers, but Turner tells them the Schloss Adler is so inaccessible, it would take a battalion of paratroopers to do it, but they don’t have the time.

“Stealth and secrecy are our only hope”.

The group has never worked together as a team before, but they’re familiar with each other. The lone exception is the U.S. Army Ranger, Lt. Morris Schaffer. An expert of surviving behind enemy lines, Smith will lead the group consisting of himself, Schaffer, Sgt. Harrod (Brook Williams), Sgt. MacPherson (Neil McCarthy), Captain Thomas (William Squire), Captain Berkeley (Peter Barkworth), and Captain Christiansen (Donald Houston). They all speak fluent German, so they’re the only chance Carnaby has. One suggests they just bomb the place, but Vice Admiral Rolland says that since Carnaby is American, there’s a chance President Eisenhower sends their second front against them instead of the Germans because it could be considered an act of war. One guy questions why Carnaby is so important for them to even go on this mission, so Turner admits Carnaby is one of the overall coordinators of planning for the second front. He set out last night to meet his opposite numbers in the Middle East to finalize the plans for the invasion of Europe. The rendezvous with the Russians was supposed to be in Crete. Importunely, his plane didn’t make it through. If the Germans were to get him to talk, the second front may not come this year.

Jumping forward to the opening when they were on the plane above the German Alps, the group parachutes into the snowy mountainous region. They all collect themselves, but Smith notices Harrod is nowhere to be found. They spread out and eventually find him dead, with a broken neck from the fall. Smith has the others go and collect the equipment. He then takes the radio and the code book on Harrod and leaves him to be buried by the snow. To check on their equipment, the group goes to a deserted barn, setting up camp for the night. While everyone unpacks, Smith tells them he “forgot” the code book, so he’s going to go back out during the blizzard to retrieve it by himself. He goes to a spot next door and meets Agent Mary Ellison (Mary Ure), a woman he’s in a relationship with and is a secret part of this mission. He tells Mary that based off the neck injury Harrod suffered, he had to have been attacked immediately after they landed, and it was made to look like an accident. He then tells her how he plans to take the group at dawn to the ridge in the next valley. They’ll stop in the woods for a bit. As soon as it’s dark, they’ll go into the village of Werfen. There’s a specific guest house there, and he tells Mary he’ll meet her there at the woodshed next to it. She starts to question why he knows so much about the area and how she’s entitled to know because they’ve been working together for three years, but he interrupts by kissing her.

Eventually, he goes back to the barn and Schaffer is still up, cleaning his gun. Smith inspects the radio, but he can’t get a signal. The next morning, the group treks through the snow and see the massive Schloss Adler from a distance. Schaffer questions why Turner thinks this can be possible, so Smith tells him how from 1940 to 1943, Turner worked undercover in the Wehrmacht and later in general headquarters in Berlin. He even worked closely with Adolph Hitler himself. This essentially makes anything possible. Shortly after, Smith reaches Rolland on the radio, updates him on their position, and Harrod’s death being no accident. Privately, Rolland expresses his doubts over this mission to Turner. Smith and Schaffer use their binoculars to scan the foot of the castle, and see Dobermans, a guard tower, and a large wire fence with more than likely 3,000 volts running through it. There’s also an army barracks nearby because this is also the headquarters for the Wehrmacht‘s Alpenkorps. Smith tells him that’s why they’re disguised as German troops because they could easily look like new recruits from the area. A helicopter arrives on base and General Julius Rosemeyer (Ferdy Mayne) shows up to greet Col. Paul Kramer (Anton Diffring), with Kramer introducing him to the rest of the team. One of them being Major von Hapen (Derren Nesbitt) of the Gestapo. Rosemeyer asks Kramer if von Hapen knows of Carnaby being kept there.

He does, but he doesn’t know of Carnaby’s importance. Surprisingly, Rosemeyer wants to keep it this way until after they get the information they want because he doesn’t want the Gestapo “cluttering things up with their torture chambers”. He wants it to remain strictly an army matter for the time being. He then goes to rest before they set up the meeting with Carnaby.

Smith and the crew get into Werfen and switch their white clothes for army fatigues, with Smith and Schaffer wearing clothing resembling higher-up officials. They sneak on base, and they all go to a bar to spread out and see if they hear anything about Carnaby. Smith spots waitress Heidi (Ingrid Pitt) and sits over at a table with other officers. He pulls her onto his lap and tells her to meet him in the woodshed in five minutes. Clearly, he knows her. He then has Heidi slap him to keep the façade up. Once she leaves, one of the officers criticizes Smith’s behavior as conduct unbecoming of an officer, but Smith quickly shuts him down saying he’s a Major and brother of Heinrich Himmler. Smith goes back to Schaffer at the bar and though he doesn’t tell him about the specifics regarding Heidi, he tells him the conversation he had with the officer. By himself, Smith goes to the woodshed and meets with Mary again to tell her the plan.

She is to go undercover to work at the Schloss Adler since there’s a staff shortage everywhere. She will be arriving on a bus as “Maria Schenk”. She had tuberculosis and was forced to give up her job, and she has a cousin named Heidi who works in Zum Vinden Hirsch. It’s because of her she got the job in the castle. Along with her travel papers, Heidi will give Mary her identity papers later.

Here’s the kicker: they’re in a hurry to get to the castle because General Carnaby isn’t actually General Carnaby. He’s American corporal Cartwright Jones. He knows nothing about the second front. He’s an ex-actor who looks like Carnaby and volunteered for the mission.

They are interrupted by Heidi who enters the woodshed, and Smith gets them familiar with each other and the details in which they are to portray. Heidi has been one of their top agents in Bavaria since 1941. After Smith leaves the two, he finds MacPherson dead on the ground outside. He goes and talks with Schaffer back in the bar who knows Harrod wasn’t killed by the drop. He wants answers, threatening to leave the mission. Smith relents and tells him the actual mission, as the camera shifts to Mary entering the bar in character as “Maria”. Heidi is flirting with Major von Hapen, but she leaves to greet Mary, telling her secretly von Hapen is Gestapo. Hapen flirts with the both of them and is excited to have both women work with him at the castle. Next, Mary goes with Heidi to a room where Heidi gives her instructions and a map of the Schloss Adler. Back in the bar, German officers bust into the place and say there has been a group of four or five Alpenkorps deserters. To escape, they killed two officers and a guardroom sergeant, and they were last known to be headed this way. He demands the senior officers of drafts 13,14, or 15 to come up at once, sending a solider to check everyone’s papers. Smith is completely out of ideas, so Schaffer suggests they have a better shot outside rather than in the bar. Agreeing, Smith takes his crew directly to the main officer in charge and surrenders. Thomas, Berkeley, and Christiansen are taken away for questioning, but Smith and Schaffer are taken specifically with the officer.

As Mary and Heidi are taken by von Hapen to the castle via cable car, we see Smith and Schaffer in a regular car with the German officers that arrested them. There, they’re able to overtake the Germans and force a collision into some rocks. Smith and Schaffer then push the car, the bodies, and the evidence off the mountain. At the castle, von Hapen introduces the two women to Lt. Kernitser (Olga Lowe) who is the secretary of the colonel. She’s in charge of all the female staff. She immediately asks for their papers. After receiving them, she walks them into a different room. As von Hapen curiously takes a look at the papers when they’re gone, Kramer enters and asks about the disturbance in the village that night. Hapen passes it off as deserters being arrested, but Kramer tells him they were actually five British agents disguised in German uniforms. The two get into a heated argument because von Hapen is mad he wasn’t told of this ahead of time, and Kramer storms out in anger. In a private room, Heidi gives Mary some equipment she’ll need and leaves her be. Elsewhere, Smith and Schaffer are operating under the idea that the Germans know about the operation. They stuff all the backpacks with dynamite, as Smith goes on the radio to update Rollan on McPherson’s death and Thomas, Berkeley, and Christiansen being captured. Rolland orders them to pull out and save themselves, but Smith refuses and ends the transmission.

The Germans try to attack the woodshed they’re in, but Smith and Schaffer ignite the dynamite and blow up the building with many Germans inside. They escape the camp and begin their race against time to infiltrate the impenetrable Schloss Adler to save Carnaby and their crew. It goes without saying however, that this mission will be as tough as they said it was going to be.

My Thoughts:

Where Eagles Dare has a litany of cool things about it that filmmakers, critics, and fans have talked about fondly over the years since its release in 1968. We have Richard Burton leading an action film with Clint Eastwood playing second fiddle for a change, awesome location shots and cinematography, very exciting action, and a daring rescue mission that lives up to the hype. What drags the film down are the intricacies of the mission. It gets to be so complicated that the details start to bore you.

The screenplay consists almost entirely of the mission details. Besides one scene where Smith and Mary kiss, there is almost nothing in this script that gives us any sort of insight into the personalities, motivations, or quirks of our leads. All we know is their official job titles. We are relying entirely on the mission, star presence, Nazis, and hot women to carry the story. This can work for a regular action movie, but considering the exorbitant length of this film, they had no excuses for not developing these characters more. However, this is far from the problem. For the most part, I could get past this because I love a good action movie and Word War II team-up movie. Where they lost me was the big reveal scene before the climactic shootout began. If you’ve seen this movie, you know exactly which scene I’m talking about. It gets so convoluted and confusing as to what Smith’s actual purpose in the mission is and who’s side he’s on, as well as the rest of the members of the team sans Schaffer, that Schaffer himself says, “Major, right now you got me as confused as I ever hope to be”.

The initial twist of Carnaby being actor Cartwright Jones was enough of a twist in the story, but when Smith makes us think he’s a German double agent to get the names and addresses of the British agents that are traitors, only to try and pull the reverse card when von Hapen came into the room, I was completely lost as to what was true and what wasn’t. Even in the initial explanation to Rosemeyer and Kramer, I’m still fuzzy on what the actual truth was. Were the real Thomas, Berkeley, and Christiansen captured months ago like he said, or were the double agents really those three and this was all a part of the lie? Also, why in the hell was Cartwright Jones so willing to go on a mission to get captured and tortured, knowing he didn’t know the actual plan for the second front? Even if he gave up fake information, there’s a chance the Nazis would kill him anyway! I need to have a better reason for him to go other than this may be the “role of a lifetime” for him if he pulls it off. Otherwise, they would need to show how crazy his real personality is to make us believe this crackpot is willing to go on a mission that was almost impossible to pull off in the first place and would more than likely result in his death. On top of that, why are these Nazis so diplomatic in their way of interrogating Jones? They don’t even punch him. They just demand he tell them the information, and he smugly refuses. Why would he say something? You’ve done nothing to force his hand at all! They threaten to inject him with some serum, but it seems way too professional for these bad guys to not even try to convince him with violence beforehand!

I guess Smith’s explanations make sense if you sit down and map the whole thing out, but did any of it feel truly necessary to make Where Eagles Dare the movie it is? Hell no! We came to see the shoutouts, the action, the explosions, a daring infiltration and escape from a fortress in the German Alps, and Clint Eastwood’s hair! We didn’t need twist upon twist upon twist to make the story exciting. It was already exciting to begin with! If anything, Richard Burton’s boring, monologue-like explanations to each occurrence within the story brought the movie down a few notches.

As the lead, Burton conducted his role as Major John Smith with no energy or enthusiasm at all. He was so unemotional in every scenario, it either made him look like he possessed the confidence of Hercules regarding this nearly impossible mission, or he just didn’t want to be on set. It was hard to tell. No matter the situation, no matter the danger they were in, he stone-faces everything, speaks in a monotone manner, and offers a solution. At some points, it was impressive like when he blurted out a well-researched and detailed answer on the spot to keep his undercover role going. However, when he had chances for some humor or to show a little personality, like with his scenes with Mary Ellison, he changes the subject back to the mission and refuses to show any lighthearted or romantic sides of him. He’s about the mission at all times. I understand Smith is a professional and is the only one capable of leading this mission, and he proves that throughout the course of the story, but you need to give a little extra in terms of personality if you’re the star of the movie. Even when his team looked like they were about to be caught soon after they got to the bar at the German base, with the German guard asking everyone there to prove their credentials with papers, he looks at them with a shit-out-of-luck expression asking, “Well gentlemen, any suggestions?”. It was still funny considering the circumstances, but it was small stuff like this where he could’ve shown some emotion. The only time he does show it was in that awesome fight on the roof of the cable car where he fights two of the traitors off with an ice axe.

Besides the details regarding the mission, I can’t help but wonder how this group didn’t get caught sooner. It’s explained in the opening scene that the team was put together because they all spoke fluent German. For those keeping track, there wasn’t a single scene during the mission where any one of the seven members of Smith’s team had the opportunity to speak German. How is this possible when they were in Germany?! You would think when they order a drink or two at the bar, they could’ve at least done that in German to not give themselves up, but no! Instead, Burton continues with his British accent, despite being the stealth fox he is, and Eastwood is the most American looking American ever. Again, I ask, how did these guys not get caught sooner? Even while walking by the crossing guard, Smith comes up with a plan on the spot to just start talking to Schaffer as they walk by, hoping the guards will just let them through because they’re officers. It was humorous and a clever way to get past at a surface level, but when you think about it, don’t you think the ever-so-suspicious Nazis would wonder why two supposedly German officers are speaking English to each other? Obviously, I want most of the movie to be in English because I’m English-speaking, but for these small instances where they have to stay in character as undercover German officers, while the audience was told they speak the language fluently, scenes like this should’ve had the characters saying a sentence or two in German to make us believe the Nazis weren’t absolute morons that didn’t suspect a thing!

No one’s asking for Richard Burton to go on a soliloquy in German, but why couldn’t he order his cognac using the language? At the very least, he could’ve attempted the accent, right? Am I missing something?

In regard to the loss of realism, throughout the entire climax, our heroes didn’t reload a single fucking time while mowing down every Nazi that came near them. Don’t get me wrong, the action is exciting, but even John Rambo had to reload his gun or pick up another weapon at some point! This crew however was apparently lucky enough to be armed with the most outrageously handy machine guns of all time.

If you’re centering the whole movie’s mission on how difficult this “Castle of the Eagles” can be to try to get to, and escape from, it better be noteworthy. Thankfully, the Schloss Adler’s design was as glorious as it comes. In terms of memorable bad guy bases, the Schloss Adler is up there with the Death Star. I loved it. The design of it, the look, and the insides were all distinctive and vivid, and the scenery surrounding it really set up the dangerousness of the action. Nazis running a terrifying castle fortress just makes sense. How have we not put this to film more often? The addition of cable cars being the only way to access the castle was a very nice touch as well, and all the action stemming from it was very dramatic. When you combine this with the shootouts and the explosions in the climactic ending that took up such a major part of the running time, it gives us a rousing third act that was worth the buildup and doesn’t stop until the final minute of the movie.

The idea of stealth was the key to the first part of the mission, and I enjoyed the suspense of it all. They did a great job of letting us feel a sense of danger the entire time, as our heroes try to be as discreet as possible. If one person messes up, they’re dead, and you can feel it in the air. Smith and Schaffer take the saying of, “Act like you’ve been there before” to a whole new level. The feeling of anticipation early on, especially in the bar scene does get you anxious. It’s just all the extra stuff added in with Mary and Heidi and all the aforementioned details that ruin the momentum of the story when they do so much else right.

The novelty of Eastwood taking a few “L’s” was pretty cool. He’s one of my all-time favorite actors, but I couldn’t help but enjoy seeing him get tripped up a few times during this mission where it almost costs them. Burton’s Smith has to save him on a couple of occasions, and it’s just fun to see because you know if Eastwood had the clout he would get later in his career, it never would’ve gone down like that. Don’t worry though, Eastwood gets all the best action sequences and kills more people in this finale than he arguably does in any Dirty Harry film, but it was cool for him to not be invincible for a change. As I mentioned before, as soon as the dynamite starts going off and Schaffer starts firing on the incoming Nazis, the excitement is nonstop to the ending. It really feels like the characters are running on pure adrenaline trying to reach the finish line. When they board the plane in the end, the exhaustion in Smith and Schaffer’s faces is so pure. Even though the ending with Turner might have been one twist too many (amongst a sea of them), and because it made Smith look like the smartest man alive to the point of unbelievability, it was a highly memorable finish to an exhilarating film to the point where you sit there and feel just as fatigued as our main characters do by the time the credits roll.

What could’ve been a fast-paced, two-hour, World War II action movie with incredible suspense and death-defying action is stretched out another half hour to add plot twists that bloated the story into something it didn’t need to be. It’s exhausting to understand at times and when you start to think about the actual plot when things are revealed, you stop caring. Thankfully, the action saved the movie, as we get everything we would want out of a war movie reminiscent of one of those high-octane action movies that wouldn’t be out of place in the 80s or 90s. It becomes a lot of fun to watch by the end of it, you just hope they get to the fun parts a bit sooner. For the time period, Where Eagles Dare is a badass movie, but the plot details are detrimental enough for me to not grade it any higher.

I respect Alistair MacLean’s skill as an author, but he wrote this screenplay like a book.