Should anyone mention "The Eagle Has Landed", we're guessing there'd be a long silence (while everyone pondered)......followed by a slowly dawning....."Oh...yeah....right......that one..."
This lack of interest or enthusiasm doesn't come from any deficiency in the film's production values. It's a big budget thing, anchored by movie stars. In its final third, it duly delivers lengthy pitched battles between American and German soldiers. Grenades detonate. Bodies fall.
And it simply lies there like a dead, beached whale.......with no sense of urgency, excitement or suspense. This movie plays out as if its director was either sleepwalking or constantly checking his watch to see how close he was to 5 pm Happy Hour........
The culprit is none other than veteran action-adventure director John Sturges, turning in his last directorial assignment before retiring.
Sturges was at best, a better than average journeyman-craftsman...... when lucky enough to get a good script and a great cast ("The Great Escape", "Bad Day At Black Rock", "Gunfight At The O.K. Corral", he smoothly functioned as an efficient traffic cop, moving things along and not getting in the way.
"The Eagle Has Landed" had a sturdy enough script by Tom Mankiewicz, who'd made a name for himself as the clever young guy who penned jokey, nonsensical Jame Bond movies......here he adapted a Jack Higgins bestseller about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill as the P.M. stops at a cozy English seaside village.
Yes, we know that never happened......but then neither did half the stuff in our favorite war movies. So nobody ever held the whole Churchill thing against the film.
Some young, hungrily ambitious director might have gotten some real rip-roarin' fun out of this material.....like Brian G. Hutton did with "Where Eagles Dare". (Nothing in that movie ever really happened either.....)
You can sense Sturges' disinterest in every slack, static frame of this movie. Similar to Clint Eastwood, Sturges was a one-take-only guy with no patience to coax anything deeper out of his actors........as long as they didn't blow their lines or bump into the furniture, he simply plowed ahead. He couldn't even rouse himself out of his torpor when it came time for the battle scenes........they look like dress rehearsals for a theme park stunt show.....
On the plus side, if you're a war movie completist.......you can pluck out the good stuff floating around in the movie.........Donald Sutherland's Lucky-Charms-Leprechaun performance as the IRA rebel in league with the Germans, Michael Caine and Robert Duvall as the.....uh....we guess you'd call them the sane, decent Germans caught up in Hitlerian madness.......and Larry Hagman as a ridiculous, spoofy U.S. army idiot who carries on like a character deleted from an early draft of "Dr. Strangelove"
And we dearly loved the quaint little village that all the opposing armies shoot the shit out of.......it reminded us of those cute little towns that Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg would visit in "Avengers" episodes.....where it turned out the whole population were Russian spies or assassins-for-hire....
For those actors and the picturesque setting alone, we'll land at least 2 stars (**), With a better director, it could have been a fondly remembered as something other than........"oh yeah.....didn't they try to kidnap the Queen or something?"
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