"Fear lent them wings as the saying goes."

Rating: 8/10 (25 October 2015)

With Richard Burton's film career at a bit of a standstill in the mid-Sixties, he started looking for a property that would jump start things by way of a war time action flick along the lines of "The Guns of Navarrone". Going right to the source, he asked Alistair MacLean if he thought he could come up with a script built around him as the principal character, utilizing an American actor and a handful of British performers. MacLean came up with "Where Eagles Dare" in six weeks!
Considering that time frame, I'd say MacLean came up with a remarkable winner, though you've got to pay serious attention to the story or you'll wind up confused with all the double crosses. Burton's character Major Smith provided a real head scratcher at one point when he claimed he was really a German general at the Schloss Adler summit, proving that an ability to think on one's feet and successfully lie one's way out of trouble can be a real life saver.
I usually don't get too involved personally in most films, but I'd have to say that the roof top scare where Eastwood's Lieutenant Schaffer barely clawed his way back to safety was pretty tense. As for the action sequences, it was all very much over the top and impossibly fortunate that most everything went against the Nazis. Almost joined at the hip for most of the movie, Smith and Schaffer could do very little wrong on their way to whipping the German war machine. It almost made you feel like the real war could have ended much quicker if it had only been turned over to the screen writers.