Where Eagles Dare

Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 1:19 pm

Where Eagles Dare

TENSE AND SUSPENSEFUL WORLD WAR II ADVENTURE IN WHICH TWO ALLIESMUST RESCUE A CAPTURED AMERICAN GENERAL BEING HELD IN A FORTIFIED GERMAN CASTLE BEFORE THE NAZIS GET SECRET INFO ON HIM.Scorned by reviewers when it came out, this concentrated dose of commando death-dealing to legions of Nazi machine-gun fodder has acquired a cult over the years. In 1968 Clint Eastwood was just getting used to the notion that he might be a world-class movie star; Richard Burton, whose image had been shaped equally by classical theater training and his headline-making romance with Elizabeth Taylor, was eager to try on the action ethos Eastwood was already nudging toward caricature. Alistair MacLean's novel The Guns of Navarone had inspired the film that started the '60s vogue for World War II military capers, so he was prevailed on to write the screenplay (his first). The central location, an impregnable Alpine stronghold locked in ice and snow, is surpassing cool, but the plot and action are ultra-mechanical, and the switcheroo gamesmanship of just who is the undercover double (triple?) agent on the mission becomes aggressively silly. --Richard T. Jameson