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Where Eagles DareWhen an American general is shot down over Germany and imprisoned in a forbidding Alpine castle commandeered by the SS, the Allies in Britain arrange for a crack squad of soldiers, led by Briton major John Smith (Richard Burton) and US Lieutenant Morris Schaffer (Clint Eastwood), to parachute into the area to conduct a rescue. If they fail, the general's knowledge of the plans for D-Day may be squeezed out of him.
Burton - who was desperate to appear in an action movie, and was the driving force behind this production - attempts to get in by cable car, has a Bond-style punch-up on the roof and jumps off just as it explodes in a ball of flame; Eastwood breathes lines like, "Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes..." and kills more people than in any of his other movies - offering a polite "hello" before pulling the trigger. It's a packed movie, that's for sure, and one that manages both to be simplistic and surprisingly complex in plot terms.
As the story progresses after the initial parachute drop, members of Smith's team turn up dead, he makes contact with female spies (Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt - thankfully portrayed as capable and formidable in their own rights), the nature of the US general is completely overturned, and behind it all is the question of who, if anyone, can be trusted.
Brian G Hutton didn't have a terribly impressive career as a feature director (he subsequently helmed the similarly enjoyable WWII movie Kelly's Heroes), and is somewhat workmanlike in his approach to the action, but he had a considerable budget at his disposal for this US-UK co-production. Significantly, the screenplay was by Alistair MacLean, from his own novel, so he retains plenty of detail and a degree of depth (however confusing; and viewers may not be the only ones - Schaffer at one point admits he's "about as confused as I ever hope to be").
The biggest criticism of this fun WWII drama is that it uses that dreadful ploy of having all the German spoken in English. So even when Eastwood and Burton are talking in their own "fluent German", their respective accents are intact, jarring with those of other German, French and British actors speaking wiv Cherman ackzents.
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