A review of the 1968 film “Where Eagles Dare”
This wartime adventure is something of an oddity. The strangeness starts with the writing of the screenplay in just six weeks by the novelist Alistair MacLean who went on to turn the script into a novel. Then there is the plot which contains more twists that a corkscrew and is so convoluted that one leading character declares “Right now you got me about as confused as I ever hope to be”.
Next there is the casting with the unlikely pairing in the two leading roles of the British character actor Richard Burton, who does most of the talking and is the only one who seems to know what’s happening, with the American Clint Eastwood, who is known for his laconic characters and here does a minimum of talking and the maximum of killing. In spite of an overwhelming number of German soldiers, Burton and Eastwood survive the odds, helped by an inexhaustible supply of readily available explosives. All this lasts 155 minutes.
And yet … the film was a huge popular success on its release and, when I revisited it more than half a century later, it was at the British Film Institute where the conclusion was greeted with applause. I loved the setting though: the 11th century Schloss Hohenwerfen in the Austrian Alps.