Incredible, Action-Packed, Mind-Blowing, Beautifully Made WWII Espionage Action Thriller

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2008)

During World War II, Major Smith is in charge of a highly dangerous mission to rescue a captured American general held in a remote mountain castle being used by the Germans as a command centre. As he and his men attempt to infiltrate this stronghold, it seems that double-agents are everywhere and the mission is doomed to fail ...
There are two types of war movies; the poetic philosophical ones and the ones where they blow up as much stuff as possible. This is the best example of the latter and for me the best World War II movie ever made. I think it's the unique structure that does it for me - there's an impossible mission to break into an impregnable fortress which lasts for eighty minutes, followed by a fifteen-minute dialogue scene that piles so many crazy plot twists on top of each other that it turns your brain into mush. Then there's an unparalleled fifty minutes of non-stop action as our heroes kill their enemies, destroy the communications, blow up half the castle, rappel down the walls, escape in a cable car, leap into a river, drive a truck through occupied territory, dynamite a bridge, smash up an airfield and escape in a fast-moving plane. I think this sequence is simply the finest non-stop action footage ever lensed. The great novelist Alistair MacLean wrote the story directly for the screen (although he also published it in book form) and came up with the most exciting wartime spy adventure ever written. There's just no flab in it; it's a long movie but it's all plot and action all the way, with no boring characterisation, love interest, waffly dialogue or padding. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the cast are fantastic in the low-key tone of their performances; grim, dogmatic, straight-ahead and focused, with Burton and Eastwood a brilliantly unlikely pair of leads, and kudos to the relatively unknown Nesbitt as the memorably creepy red-headed Major Von Hapen, the scariest Gestapo officer in the movies (until Ronald Lacey in Raiders Of The Lost Ark). The four key technical elements of any film - photography, music, editing and art direction - are all outstanding, particularly Ron Goodwin's big booming drummer-boy score, which pounds memorably along. This is that rare cinema treat; a brilliant story, brilliantly realised. Our appreciation must also go to the incredible stuntwork by Hollywood legend Yakima Canutt, who was the assistant director and supervised many great sequences like the hair-raising fight atop the cable-cars. Shot in fantastic Alpine locations in Austria (the Schloss Adler is really the eleventh-century Burg Hohenwerfen, south of Salzburg) and at Borehamwood Studio. Trivia - Clint Eastwood, as the charming Major Shaffer, kills about forty people up close and personal in this film, and about another forty indirectly via explosives - a Boy's Own comic-book soldier hero if ever there was. This movie is the best kind of entertainment - fast-moving, action-packed and dramatic without ever being stupid, a sensational story and superbly put together. Don't miss it.