Real Saturday morning boy's own stuff!

Rating: 10/10 (8 June 2008)

This reminds me as above, playing it in the streets before the PC brigade can ban it or have it cut on the TV. Eastwood's excellent as the laconic, unwilling Ranger Battalion gun-toting dynamite-tossing soldier and with his chum the ever-so refined older heartthrob Burton casually cutting his way through every situation. The cable car scene may seem a bit old-hat compared to later movies, but it's still well-done and there's some fine backup from Anton Diffring, the excellently creepy Derren Nesbit, Donald Houston, and Mary Ure. Nice to see Ingrid Pitt departing temporarily from her usual blood-sucking roles in the Hammer films also.
We're all ecstatic as Nesbit deservedly cops a good one in the head especially as his annoying trait other than being an SS (Gestapo?) nit is slime-ily chatting up Mary 'I seem to remember, ze cazzedral vas on ze ozzer side of ze square' etc. Plenty of intrigue added too, with the US 'General Carnaby' being rescued coupled with an underlying plot of infiltrating the traitors amongst MI5 etc. The machine-gunning from the back of the bus is a bit special, too as is plenty of delayed-action dynamite. (In the bus scene especially, it's always amazing how the bad guys are always the worst shots!). Mr Eastwood DOES actually put a new clip on!
My favourite scene is Eastwood standing at the top of the stairs in the Schloss Adler, the Nazis running up towards him, pausing for a second (Probably thinking along the lines of:) 'is that er...um... er... he's aiming a gun at us' and Eastwood lets rip on them. He handles two machine guns very good as well by the way. One annoying thing, is, when you imagine yourself among this blood-fest is where Burton, after exposing the three British traitors, takes them with him, roped up. I'd have shot them, but that may be because they're some sort of insurance, I don't know. They happily get the chop anyway. You get your money's worth with this (Or licence fee's worth as it's always on the BBC and on TCM).
There WAS mention on UK Channel Four's '100 Greatest War Movies' (Can't remember offhand what number it checked in at) that Burton and Eastwood despatched about 86 Nazis in it. Add a thousand to that I reckon.
Great stuff and always nice to see so many Nazis deservedly destroyed in spectacular fashion! The almost anti-climax-like ending where Burton exposes the wretched Colonel Turner is a nice icing-on-the-cake end to the action and they all lived happily ever after. Shame about Schaffer's (Eastwood's) comment on keeping it an 'all-British operation next time', WED 2 could have been an nice D-Day exploit!