Putting The Fun In Funicular

Rating: 8/10 (25 February 2006)

"You ARE pointing that gun at me, aren't you?" Richard Burton's archly posed question reveals much of the secret to enjoying "Where Eagles Dare," the fact it winks at the audience even as it thrills them with the sort of derring-do fiction most people outgrow at the age of 15.
I was lucky, being 14 when I thrilled to this singularly entertaining film. Burton plays Major Smith, a British commando sent into the heart of Bavaria to rescue an American being held in a Nazi fortress, Schloss Adler, who is expected to spill the beans about Allied plans for opening a Second Front. With Smith are several British soldiers, a mysterious woman only Smith knows about, and an American named Schaffer, who as he is played by Clint Eastwood, is one of those shoot-first, ask-questions-later types.
Eastwood and Burton was one of those movie partnerships that absolutely should not have worked, except here it does to remarkable perfection. While Eastwood squints as he hurls dynamite and fires his machine pistols into the torsos of unsuspecting Germans, Burton shows off pyrotechnics of a different kind, bearing a brandy glass as he confronts a group of Nazi officers with the evidence that their prize double agents are not what they seem to be. Burton calls Eastwood a "second-rate punk," while Eastwood suggests that Burton keep it "an all-British operation" next time out, and you smile not just because they are winning but keeping you entertained all the while.
The plot is fairly sharp and challenges you more than you expect, enough to appreciate the film's two-and-one-half-hour running time because it takes that long to sort out all its twists and turns. Screenwriter Alistair MacLean, working from the same story he made into a novel the previous year, 1967, doesn't insult your intelligence as much as he takes liberties with your indulgence, and that is the difference in why this film is so well regarded. I read somewhere that Quentin Tarantino is inordinately fond of this film, and I can see why, because the humor and thrills are kept in steady, logic-defying supply.
There's also a vibrant sense of atmosphere, not only with the mountain fortress and the Bavarian village beneath it but the funicular which connects it, and where Smith must face his most rabid adversaries in a sequence that is the most thrilling in this very thrilling film. As Smith, Schaffer and their companions wend their way through twisting corridors, dodging bullets and each other's quips, you feel yourself running alongside them, in a way few films manage to pull off.
A lot of what makes "Where Eagles Dare" special is the fact it does pull you alongside the heroes, making you feel their panic and elation first-hand. The back-handed compliment many offer here is that it is a "Boys-Own" adventure in the classic British tradition, forgetting that such a story requires as much if not more subtle brilliance than the "kitchen-sink" dramas more commonly embraced.
Is it better than MacLean's still slightly-better known film yarn, "Guns Of Navarone"? That earlier film does ask some interesting questions about man and warfare which "Where Eagles Dare" ignores, but given that the latter film is more entertaining and amusing, I feel at a loss to say one is better or worse. Maybe if there had been a film version of his greatest book, "H.M.S. Ulysses," the question would be moot. Let's face it, if World War II was good for anything, it was good for giving us a world that allows us to ponder such questions.
Why an anachronistic Nazi helicopter, especially when it adds nothing to the film? Why the annoying Gestapo officer, only slightly less superfluous? But even the weaknesses of this film lend a certain atmosphere to the proceedings, which one wishes were more common to such fare. Action films don't have to be low-brow when made with such care and joy.
Nice work also by Patrick Wymark and Michael Hordern as the overseers of Smith's mission, stiff upper lip and all that to the end. Hordern is every bit the mordant narrator he would be in the later "Barry Lyndon," while Wymark's plummy turn reminds me of Robert Osborne getting ready to introduce another Turner Movie Classic. However played with one feels watching this film, one never feels cheated with all the talent and intelligence on display.