WHERE EAGLES DARE: We Mustn’t Cheat the Hangman

Where Eagles Dare (1968) – Directed by Brian G. Hutton – Starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure, Patrick Wymark, Michael Hordern, Robert Beatty, and Ingrid Pitt.

Let me say this right at the start so there’s no confusion: WHERE EAGLES DARE is a very, very good movie, boasting a phenomenal performance by Richard Burton and a still-thrilling and still-massive final action sequence.

But.

But there’s something missing here that can be found in two other Alistair MacLean-derived films (THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, ICE STATION ZEBRA, and even the lesser FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE), and that’s a bit of passion, a bit of energy, a bit of spark provided by one of the characters to help mitigate the long, slow march to the final action sequence. In NAVARONE, this was provided by Anthony Quinn, who’s intensity wonderfully balanced Gregory Peck’s more stately approach to completely the mission. Patrick McGoohan filled this role in ICE STATION ZEBRA, his sharp tongue and rapid talking style countering nicely with Rock Hudson’s calm. And FORCE 10, released a decade later, gives multiple doses of this spark in the performances of Carl Weathers, Richard Kiel, and the constant bickering between Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw’s characters.

What we have then, with WHERE EAGLES DARE, is the least of all MacLean set-ups and the best of all MacLean finishes.

There are relative terms, of course, because none of the MacLean films is ever outright bad. Yet WHERE EAGLES DARE takes far too long to get where it’s going and clumsily sets up and executes the traitor angle.

British Major John Smith (Richard Burton) and American Lieutenant Morris Schaffer (Clint Eastwood) are paired with five other British soldiers to make a daring raid on Schloss Adler, a castle high in the Bavarian Alps, in order to rescue an American general. During their parachute jump, one of the soldiers ends up dead with a broken neck and so we’ve got a mystery of who on the team is the traitor. The problem is that I never believe it’s either Smith or Schaffer and neither Schaffer nor Smith believe it’s each other. That means it’s either an outsider, or one of the five Redshirts, and none of the Redshirts are, in any way, developed.

The film is so interested in following Smith around that it’s far more interested in his mysterious meetings with Mary Elison (Mary Ure) than it is in the killings.

Unfortunately for the opening half of the movie, the film mimics Burton’s laid back, professional cool and thus gives off the impression that there’s nothing to worry about because Smith is always in control. I needed some tension between Smith and Schaffer or some aggressiveness or humor from Schaffer or one of the Redshirts to give the film some tension. Burton and Eastwood are just a bit too similar for me. Perhaps if EAGLES had been Eastwood’s movie and we spent our time following the group’s one American around as he tried to piece together what was going on, the film could have created some more tension.

Here’s the best example of what I mean. The group parachutes into Bavaria and sets up shop in a seasonaly abandoned cabin. There’s a fierce snowstorm going on outside and Smith takes out the radio equipment to contact London when goes, “Oh darn, I must have left the codebook in the dead guy’s jacket. How silly of me. I’ll go get it.”

In a snowstorm.

Without any help.

And he’s the man in charge of the mission.

So he leaves and walks around back, where he meets Elison in the cabin’s barn, makes out with her, and after a little cozy time in the warm barn, heads back to the main cabin. He can’t have been outside for more than a minute or two between the barn and the cabin, which should be obvious when he walks inside as one’s face would look pretty abused being out in a blizzard for an hour. If Schaffer sees it, however, he doesn’t mention it and so there’s no tension created or raised between the two men. They seem oddly trusting of one another. Later, we learn that Smith trusts Schaffer because, as the only American on the mission, Smith knows Schaffer could not have been the British traitor he was sent to root out.

From the plane ride to the cabin to the town located at the base of the castle’s mountain, the action is solid but almost clinical. Eastwood might as well have been played by anyone, because the film doesn’t ask him to do a whole lot at this point – this is Richard Burton’s movie and while he’s always excellent, the rest of the film gets caught just watching him. There’s some movement with Elison as she goes undercover as a member of the castle’s staff but all that does is create a silly infatuation subplot with Gestapo officer Major von Hapen (Darren Nesbitt), which never goes anywhere successfully.

All of the relative sins are forgiven once Smith and Schaffer get to Schloss Adler and Smith reveals himself to be double agent Johann Schmidt (yes, the Red Skull), which comes as a surprise to the three remaining redshirts who are also double agents. Smith lays out this whole scenario about how he’s the real Nazi spy and that the three actual spies are really fakes that the British have inserted in hopes of springing the American general the Nazis have captured. It’s a fantastic scene because it speaks to how dangerous the spy game is – if no one really knows who anyone is, who can you trust? Smith has been pretending to be a double agent so he can put a phone call in to a high-ranking Italian who speaks on his behalf. Smith gets each of the three redshirts to write down a list of known Nazi agents inside MI6 as a means of proving their real identity, but he’s actually doing it so he can learn the identity of those traitors.

We finally get all the pieces of the puzzle laid out – the American general isn’t actually the American general the Nazis think he is, and Smith’s entire mission wasn’t to save him but to expose the British traitors. It’s a fantastic reveal and Burton owns that castle scene, expertly manipulating the Nazi generals, the Nazi spies, and even Schaffer. When von Hapen intervenes and gets shot, it’s all out action from here to the end of the movie and every single inch of film reel is utterly fantastic.

From a massive interior castle battle (does fighting inside Nazi castles ever suck?), the group makes their way to the cable car that provides the only entrance to Schloss Adler from the town below. It’s silly for them to bring the double agents with them as they only prove to make the escape even more difficult, but they take them and the payoff is the legendary cable car battle, which is every bit as good as you’ve heard it is. After the cable car sequence, our heroes jump out of the cable car and into a river that runs into town, and then escapes in a bus. There’s not much in the way of plot through this section, but the film finally comes alive with real energy.

WHERE EAGLES DARE is a conflicted film for me. The ending is far and away the best of the four MacLean-based movies but that long set-up is the worst. It’s still a very, very good opening, but it’s the only time in all of these 2 1/2 hour-plus films that I wish they’d tightened things up a bit in the long lead-up to the action. That ending, though … WHERE EAGLES DARE presents one of the finest executed action sequences in cinematic history. For an hour or more the film offers thrilling action and Burton’s reserved performance as Smith pays off when he fingers Colonel Wyatt Turner (Patrick Wymark) as the Nazi’s top man in England during the plane ride out of Bavaria. Smith allows Turner to save face by jumping out of the plane without a parachute, which leads to one of the few genuine pieces of humor in the movie as Schaffer deadpans to Smith, “Do me a favour, will ya? The next time you have one of these things, keep it an all-British operation.”

Smith replies with a brief, simple, “I’ll try, Lieutenant.”

ICE STATION ZEBRA: You’ve Already Guessed That I’m Some Sort of Sneaky Bastard

Ice Station Zebra (1968) – Directed by John Sturges – Starring Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and Alf Kjellin.

It takes 90 minutes for ICE STATION ZEBRA to get to Ice Station Zebra.

I’m not saying that this is a negative, but I can’t imagine this film, if made today, would be 2 1/2 hours long or that it would take 1 1/2 of those hours to get to the location where the primary action occurs. What’s truly amazing about ZEBRA, though, isn’t the time aspect in and of itself, but the time aspect considering there’s only three primary characters: Commander James Ferraday (Rock Hudson), British spy David Jones (Patrick McGoohan), and Russian spy Boris Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine). Yeah, Jim Brown gets his name and face on the poster, but ZEBRA doesn’t give him much to do, to the point where I decided somewhere in the middle of this movie that one of my next novels is going to feature a character for 1960s Jim Brown to play in the movie adaptation.

So, get on that time machine, scientists.

Much of those first 90 minutes of ZEBRA is dedicated to getting Mr. Jones to Ice Station Zebra, and the bulk of this action takes place on the USS Tigerfish submarine that Ferraday commands. There is a ton of procedural stuff here: “Up this,” “Down that,” “Take us to X depth,” “30 fathoms,” “40 fathoms,” “50 fathoms,” “60 fathoms,” “70 fathoms,” “Yes, Captain,” “No, Captain,” “As you were.” Allegedly, Alfred Hitchcock once said that if you ever get stuck in a movie and don’t know what to do, just show the audience how something works because people love to see behind the scenes. Well, if you’ve ever wanted to know how to operate a nuclear submarine, join the Navy. But if you’ve ever wanted to pretend to know how to operate a nuclear submarine, watch ICE STATION ZEBRA.

All of this sounds like a negative (in total if not in particular), but ZEBRA just works for me. Despite the slow moving plot (and the inclusion of a musical overture to start the film and then a musical interlude during an intermission break), I was hooked right from the start and stayed that way right through the end.

The key to ZEBRA’s success for me is that everyone here is a professional and while they extend professional courtesies to one another, they’ve all got their own jobs to do. It’s striking that while clearly we’re set up to think that Ferraday is the protagonist (he’s introduced first, he’s the captain, and Hudson gets top billing), he’s kept in the dark about certain aspects of the mission. As Jones reminds him at one point, he’s actually in charge of the mission, he just hasn’t stepped on Ferraday’s toes because everything Ferraday’s done has been what Jones wants done. The implication, however, is clear: over the course of those first 90 minutes, Captain Ferraday is, in essence, little more than a bus driver.

ZEBRA constantly cuts Ferraday’s authority off at the knees: Jones doesn’t tell him the whole truth, Vaslov doesn’t tell him the whole truth, and Captain Anders (Brown) doesn’t tell him the whole truth. This makes Ferraday’s ultimate role as hero in the film’s final encounter with the Russians hit with greater impact because he gets to rise to the front of the film.

John Sturges is an excellent director in terms of keeping the story moving, but his camera placement deserves a bit of a discussion. With so much of the film taking place in the cramped quarters of a submarine (especially considering all of the U.S. Marines that are being transported alongside the normal crew), Sturges largely keeps the camera at a distance. It’s as if most scene are shot from the room’s far corner or opposing wall from the action. At least while the action is taking place on the sub, it almost feels like a mult-camera sitcom in that we, as viewers, spend the entire time sitting behind the fourth wall. It would be the easy decision to get the cameras in everyone’s face as much as possible because it would help to raise the dramatic tension, but by keeping the camera back we get to see more of the operations, and we get to feel Ferraday’s sense of not knowing who these people are that have come aboard his ship. Sturges and Cinematographer Daniel Fapp use their camera to make us feel what Ferraday must be feeling – Jones, Vaslov, and Anders are all unknown quantities to him who keep themselves at a distance from him.

Similarly to The Guns of Navarone (another movie based on an Alistair MacLean novel), the main character is professional, capable, and a bit boring. Just as the real star performance in Navarone is given by Anthony Quinn, in ZEBRA it’s Patrick McGoohan who gives the film its primary charge. McGoohan is fantastic. His quick, vocal delivery and quietly hawkish manner are more interesting to me than any of the decent action sequences. In fact, when we finally get a big action scene on the sub, I’m almost bored by it. I’d rather just watch these characters talk and interact with one another. Maybe one of the reasons why I like ZEBRA so much despite the length is that it’s very Tarrantino-esque in terms of being dialogue driven. There’s no heated, pop culture argument about Kirby’s Silver Surfer vs. Moebius’ Silver Surfer, but this is a very character-driven piece.

What is fascinating to me (and since this is the second MacLean-based film in which this is true, it must be at least partly because of MacLean) is that ZEBRA character-driven without being intimate. We don’t know about these characters’ personal lives or watch them fall into a military-induced bromance – these are just professional men doing professional work, and figuring out who they are, what makes them tick, and what their ultimate purpose is for being in the narrative makes them interesting. It gives a far greater emphasis on the characters’ actions, so when Vaslov spends an extra tick looking at a piece of the sub’s machinery or when Jones is startled awake and he jumps up with a gun in his hand, it has a far greater impact because we don’t know who these men really are. The puzzle pieces, as it were, take on greater importance because we have so few pieces and no idea what the overall puzzle is going to look like in totality.

ICE STATION ZEBRA isn’t a movie I’m going to watch over and over again. I think the film’s weaknesses would become increasingly evident with repeated viewings, and a decent action scene like some men falling through the ice would start to feel pointless because they’re not included to further the plot as much as to make sure the film doesn’t go too long without something happening other than dudes talking to one another inside a cramped room.

I do like this movie, though, and I like it quite a bit. While the action isn’t as good as in Guns of Navarone, I like the story and characters in ZEBRA better. Even little things like the way ZEBRA continually favors a blue and white color palette strikes the right chord with me. I wish the film had given Jim Brown more to do and I wish to God (and I’m not even religious) that Ernest Borgnine’s cartoonish Russian accent had been given less to do, but McGoohan’s performance more than makes up for any of the film’s weaker moments.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels, including Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, andAdventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitle Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE: The Only Way to Win a War is To Be as Nasty as Your Enemy

Guns of Navarone (1961) – Directed by J. Lee Thompson – Starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, James Darren, James Robertson Justice, Gia Scala, Irene Papas, Richard Harris, and Peter Grant.

Based on the Alistair MacLean novel of the same name, J. Lee Thompson’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE is the kind of war movie in which the war itself is almost irrelevant. Concentrating on a small Allied assault force attempting to destroy two massive Nazi superguns held inside a Nazi fortress on the island of Navarone, the film follows its small cast through their mission from start to finish. World War II is something happening in the world, but the film doesn’t try to oversell the importance of this mission in an effort to create extra drama.

I appreciate that. It soaks the entire film with a sense of men trying to make a small difference in a big world. The goal of the mission – which no one in command thinks will be successful – is to take out those superguns so the Allied forces can mount a rescue mission on the nearby island of Keros, where 2,000 British troops are being held prisoner. The Nazis are due to kill the prisoners in a week as the film opens, and Commodore Jensen (James Robertson Justice) calls in Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) to help execute a mission conceived by Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle). Said plan involves them scaling a seemingly unscalable cliff and then moving through Nazi-infested Greek territory just to get to the allegedly impregnable fortress to destroy the guns. Franklin and Mallory are joined by an international contingent of Corporal Miller (David Niven), Casey “Butcher of Barcelona” Brown (Stanley Baker), Private Spyros Pappadimos (James Darren), and Colonel Andrea Stavrou (Anthony Quinn).

There’s some history between some of the men which adds to the tension. Stavrou has promised to kill Mallory after the war because he blames Mallory for the death of his family. This shared history is a perfect example of how Thompson and screenwriter Carl Foreman use personal relationships to create conflict without having to resort to actors yelling at one another, and how they’re willing to create well-rounded, complex characters. Stavrou blames Mallory because earlier in the war, Mallory helped some injured Nazis make their way to a hospital and the uninjured members of that contingent ditched their injured comrades and ended up killing Stavrou’s family. Mallory confides in Franklin that this occurred earlier in the war, when he still held out some hope of a gentleman’s war being fought.

Franklin, of course, wants to know why Stavrou doesn’t just kill Mallory now, and Mallory relates that he’s counting on Stavrou wanting to kill Nazis more than he wants to kill him.

It’s a small moment, told on the bridge of a small fishing boat as the two men look out the front window to where Stavrou is working hard in a storm to keep the ship afloat. NAVARONE expertly balances the action and character moments in this manner throughout the film – if the action is big (as it is here in a massive sea storm), the character moments are often quiet, but when the action moments are quiet (like when they’re camped in an abandoned building inside Navarone, almost ready to make their assault on the guns), the character moments are large.

That the movie is made with such obvious skill helps me get through it. NAVARONE moves with the assured patience of a film that knows it doesn’t have to hurry. It knows you’re out at the theater for the entire night so it’s going to give you an entire night’s worth of entertainment. Clocking in at a robust 2 hours and 38 minutes, NAVARONE gives you plenty of spectacle and not a whole lot of characterization, but it would be wrong to categorize the movie as nothing more than a big, dumb action film. What NAVARONE does in between all that spectacle is allow for serious men to deal with serious issues.

Countering the Mallory/Stavrou conflict, Franklin and Miller are BWB: Bestest War Buddies. When Franklin gets injured during the ascent of the ocean cliff, Mallory steps into the leadership role, which Miller questions but doesn’t create a huge fuss over. It’s a smart move on the film’s part because it allows a growing tension to develop between Miller and Mallory. Franklin’s injury is so severe that he’s slowing the group down and thoughts are given to putting a mercy bullet in his brain. Franklin serves as the trigger for Miller’s eventual explosion at Mallory, but the real issue here is the conflict between leaders and followers. Miller has never sought promotion because he doesn’t want to make the big decision that Mallory has to make throughout NAVARONE. When Miller and Mallory have this argument deep in the film, it recontextualizes Miller’s actions through that point – throughout the film, Miller has had a more relaxed air about him. When others start to work, Miller makes a joke about claiming the room’s only bed. When the sea storm is threatening to sink the boat, he’s bringing coffee to Franklin and Mallory.

Peck and Niven are very good, but it’s Anthony Quinn’s movie. He provides the desperately needed spark of life throughout the film; where Mallory is grimly determined to see a mission through to wherever it’s inevitably going to fall apart, Quinn really makes me feel like Stavrou wants to kill Nazis. It would be wrong to say he’s enjoying what he’s doing, but Stavrou attacks life where Mallory studies it. Miller, in contrast, just sort of hopes the bad things go away.

What really wins me over is NAVARONE’s moral complexity – the group is on a mission that can’t possibly succeed (and it eventually succeeds only because the Nazis leave their front door open and their next empty), the group is faced with sacrificing Franklin for the good of the mission (Mallory eventually lies to him and leaves him with the Nazis knowing they’ll interrogate him and give up the plan he thinks is real), and when a traitor is revealed in their midst, it’s a woman (and the film wimps out by having another woman kill the traitor instead of Mallory, who’s being dared to kill her by Miller).

NAVARONE definitely moves slowly, but if you’ve got the time, it’s a satisfying watch. In less assured hands, we’d probably get a scene where Stavrou and Mallory have a big heart-to-heart, but that would betray the film’s quiet complexity. As mentioned, this is a serious movie with serious men. Today, they’re successful. Tomorrow, another mission surely awaits – even if time off has been promised, the war is rolling on.