The Guns of Germany.

Rating: 6/10 (26 September 2008)

The two Allied impostors, Richard ("I've been through hell") Burton, and Ciint ("My Mule Don't Like You Laughin' at Him") Eastwood, have infiltrated a German fortress high atop a craggy mountain, accessible only by cable car. Their mission: discover the identity of a cabal of Nazi spies operating out of London. The two of them, along with three other British agents, are parachuted into the area at night and things, both little and big, begin to go wrong immediately. See "The Bridge on the River Kwai" for another example. Or -- better yet -- "The Guns of Navarrone." Burton is the leader, savvy and quick witted. Clint Eastwood is already a nascent Dirty Harry, the man who kills without passion.
I'm trying not to give away too much of the plot because there are several unexpectable twists in it.
First, though, the photography and setting are truly impressive. Gloomy, filled with foreboding, snow bound. Second, there can be few less likely American killers seconded to a British mission than Clint Eastwood. A Wehrmacht cap simply does not sit well on him. And his acting was to improve over the years. There is a scene in which Burton and Eastwood are frantically trying to escape from the aerie and find themselves trapped in a radio room with alarm bells clanging all over the place as the German soldiers search for them. Burton is doing all he can to reach his base on the radio. Eastwood is keeping a lookout down the hall. Eastwood looks through the doorway and announces, "We've got company." His tone is that of a man who's dinner has been interrupted by the doorbell. And the "company" is about three dozen machine-pistol wielding avid Nazis -- just about all of whom get slaughtered.
In fact there is a lot of slaughtering in this movie -- all of it suffered by the bad guys. I mean, this is one brutal movie when you come right down to it. Nobody hesitates to shoot a fleeing German woman in the back. And there is a terrific fight on top of the tram that is twirling wildly in mid-air. A boot-in-the-face kind of fight. The deaths of most of the victims is not at all bothersome, since most are as faceless as Dirty Harry's victims. But one handsome young soldier is listening to a sentimental tune on the radio while Eastwood creeps up behind him to slit his throat, and the scene raises hairs on the back of your neck. And when a bad guy takes a half-mile nose dive off the tram, his scream is as agonizing as those of the sailors that King Kong shakes off the tree trunk.
The movie was probably done as it was to satisfy the audience's thirst for a bloody but victorious Allied enterprise, but it is SO realistically violent that it winds up being insinuating. What if the Allies has lost the war? We would all be sitting around watching German or Japanese agents slaughter an equal number of dim-witted Americans and Brits.
However, if your search is for war-time action, this is it. But it's only enjoyable if you keep in mind that it's all a fantasy, like the Rambo movies. Otherwise, you might contract a case of the creeps. Behind the gunsmoke, the movie is a shiver looking for a spine to run up.