Nostalgia trip: Where Eagles Dare - all action and no talk
They don't make 'em like Where Eagles Dare any more. Or at least they didn't until Quentin Tarantino did Inglourious Basterds in 2009, a descendant of this and 1970's Kelly's Heroes, his favourite "men-on-a-mission" movies. The moral quandaries of Vietnam might have made war seem a lot less fun in 1968, but you could still have a smash hit as long as Nazis were on the receiving end.
Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure
Brian G. Hutton
An American general key to winning the war has been captured and is being held in Eagle Castle high in the Bavarian Alps. It's up to Clint Eastwood, Richard Burton and Burton's secret agent girlfriend, Mary Ure, to parachute behind enemy lines, infiltrate the impregnable fortress, and rescue him before the dirty krauts get their torture equipment out. Over the 2½ hours it takes to do so, a whole town's worth of Wehrmacht is gleefully shot and exploded, mostly by Eastwood.
The logic-free plot is like an 11-year-old boy's "greatest war movie ever" concoction, and all the better for it. It's easy to see how Tarantino was inspired.
The making of the film seems to have been as much boys-will-be-boys fun as the plot. Burton was AWOL on the lash for days at a time in Paris with Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole, and Eastwood more interested in his female co-stars than a script he branded "terrible".
Written by thriller author Alistair MacLean (Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra), it was packed with exposition and clunking dialogue. Eastwood's character says about four lines, changes facial expression once and is basically a Nazi-slaughtering machine, racking up a body count probably not overtaken until the 1980s action movies of Schwarzenegger and Stallone.