Yakima Canutt pulls some new tricks and many, many old ones

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2007)

There is a fetish among generation x and their late boomer parents for WHERE EAGLES DARE, especially in Britain. Well, I grew up with this movie too, in America, and when I was ten it was the best film ever made. But our tastes sometimes change.
This movie has more facile escapes, unsurprising reversals, and exploding trucks than any two eighties Bond movies. Also it has better photography. Machinery and personnel fall majestically into wide-angle mountainscapes. Eastwood shoots men and women in the back, in the face, stabs them, with psychopathic indifference. Nazi uniforms, guns, helicopters, airplanes, cable cars over snowy crevasses. Castle on fire. Parachutes. Wild chase on windy roads. Much tying of dynamite charges around pylons. Many, many gunfights and scrambles over the edges of roofs.
No doubt there is first-class spectacle here, but if many of the live stunts are more impressive than their modern computer-generated counterparts might be, then it may also be said that many are not. I like it this way. The action was always a plus in John Ford movies, and his old second unit man brings it on with a whole well-seasoned bag of chases and shootouts around corners. I happen to like seeing the dummy go through the windshield. Seeing the dummy defenestrated. Seeing the model bridge blow up. Seeing the real flaming staff car go over the cliff and crash into the real river.
And yet it is boring, and since I grew up I've found that a deadly failing in an action movie. The uneven director, Brian Hutton, seems to fear this time out that to present information succinctly is to miss the opportunity to seem like a roadshow director - never reveal in one shot what you can orchestrate into three scenes. It's too bad, because this kind of movie can be great. THE WILD BUNCH, DELIVERANCE, TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, APOCALYPSE NOW, other sadistic or amoral boy's-adventure films I grew up with, have not become as hard to watch as this one.
One of the primary elements of adventure is timing, and this movie is an hour too long. Burton nearly falls asleep during his own monologue, and Eastwood sits placidly on the roof of the tram, dangling half a mile in the air as if he's sitting on a park bench, for almost two minutes, apparently thinking about his laundry. If it were the just the second hour that sucked, it would be forgivable: one could turn it off when it became too dull, like the aforementioned Bond movies, which are top-loaded with thrills and degenerate nearly always into elaborate yawn machines. Sadly this movie wastes an hour over the course of its entire length, so that we have action roughly every twenty minutes for the first two-thirds of its bloated running time before it becomes consistently watchable.
It is interesting from a sociological perspective to see Clint Eastwood play an American soldier of the 1940s impersonating a Nazi officer in Jim Morrison sideburns and a pompadour. I had the time to spare when I was ten.