Falls just short of being one of the classic war films

Rating: 7/10 (21 September 2006)

"Where Eagles Dare" starts off as a traditional war film. A group of Allied commandos (six British, one American) are being briefed for a dangerous mission. They are to parachute into the Bavarian Alps, where it will be their task to rescue a captured American general from a mountain fortress. The man is privy to details of the forthcoming D-Day invasion (which suggests that the film takes place in the winter of 1943-44), and the commandos will have to rescue him before the Germans can force him to talk. At this point, the audience must be thinking that they know, generally, how the story will work out. The men will succeed in infiltrating the castle and, after a number of setbacks and close escapes which test their courage and endurance to the limit, will succeed in freeing the general. In a nail-biting finale they will manage to get him to safety just ahead of the pursuing Germans.
That is not, however, what happens. It becomes clear that the man the Germans are holding is not a general, but rather (in a plot development taken from a genuine wartime incident which also inspired the film "I Was Monty's Double") an actor who closely resembles him and who is impersonating him. One of the commandos is killed shortly after landing, probably by a traitor among the group. The film now starts to resemble a spy drama of the type that were becoming very popular in the sixties ("The Ipcress File" is a good example)- the sort where every member of the cast is under suspicion of being a double (or possibly a triple or quadruple) agent, and where there is a new twist to the plot every few minutes.
The audience suddenly realise that they do not know how the film will work out- there are too many unanswered questions for that. Who is the traitor? Is it the group's leader, Major Jonathan Smith, who appears to be working for both sides? Is there also a traitor working for British Intelligence in London? Why have the Allies allowed the Germans to capture a fake general? Who are the two beautiful but mysterious young women working in the local Bierhaus? Why is an American taking part in an otherwise all-British operation? (The answer to this question is an important plot point- it is not simply "so Clint Eastwood doesn't have to bother putting on a British accent").
This concentration on the spy angle does not, however, mean that conventional military derring-do is altogether neglected. The mountain fortress is accessible only by cable car or helicopter, and, as the commandos do not have a helicopter, there are some cliff-hanging cable-car sequences, both while they are infiltrating the castle and when they are escaping from it. There are a number of shoot-outs, in which (as is normal in war films) the baddies come off second-best, firing off vast quantities of ammunition without ever hitting their targets. Had the Wehrmacht's marksmanship really been as poor as this, the Allied victory would have been much easier than it in fact was.
This is not generally the sort of film one watches for classic acting performances, although both Richard Burton as Smith and Eastwood as the American Lieutenant Schafer are very polished and easy on the eye. The film does, however, have its weaknesses. It is overlong and could probably have been pruned in length by fifteen or twenty minutes two hours or so being the optimum length for an action-thriller of this nature. The Germans sometimes seem implausibly gullible. Most importantly, there is not the depth of characterisation that marks the truly great war films such as "Bridge on the River Kwai" or "Ice Cold in Alex". As an action spectacular, in fact, the film is a reasonably good one but it falls just short of being one of the classic war films. 7/10