The Eagle Has Landed

Year 13, Day 163 - 6/12/21 - Movie #3,869

BEFORE: Robert Duvall AND Treat Williams both carry over from "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper". And this film came out five years before they faced off in that 1981 very weird film that didn't happen, not that way, not in any way, really.  I've also got questions about today's film, which is about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, and I have a feeling that didn't really happen either.  It's almost like you can't count on movies to reflect reality or something...

THE PLOT: A German plot to kidnap Sir Winston Churchill unfolds at the height of World War II. 

AFTER: OK, so I've got some big problems with this film, HUGE problems, and I'd like to start with the casting.  We'll get back to whether it reflects reality in a bit.  Robert Duvall is the first big star we see here, and he's cast as a Nazi.  OK, I believe in Robert Duvall, I think he worked hard to get some form of German accent down, even though since this is an American movie, he was just speaking English with a German accent, not speaking German.  But I'll allow it, because movies.  But next we've got MICHAEL CAINE as a Nazi, and I'm not saying he's not a good actor, but the problem is that he just can't do a German accent, not at all - instead he just sounds, well, a little less like Michael Caine.  But, still quite a bit like Michael Caine, if you know what I mean.  Later on, his Nazi character has to go to the U.K. and pretend to be British, so that familiar Cockney (?) accent kicks into high gear then, and that's when you realize hiring Caine was a good idea, but only for the second half of the film.  First half, terrible idea. (For God's sake, he pronounces the German name "Hans" as if it's the word "hands", just without the D!)

I should point out here that Caine plays Oberst Steiner, and h's not your typical Nazi, he's one of the "good ones" who doesn't quite understand why Hitler wants to round up and kill all the Jews.  He tries to save one Jewish woman from going to the camps, and his superior officers shoot that woman, then imprison Caine's character, and his whole paratrooper unit, just to make a point.  Trump was way off base when he talked about the NeoNazis and KKK in America, saying there were "good people on both sides", and there's a bit of that here in this film, only it JUST DOESN"T work that way.  Nazis are Nazis, this is well-established, just by being Nazis in World War II, they were complicit, and the modern Nazis are not capable of being "good people" and also Nazis at the same time.  Look, years ago I heard my grandmother once say that Hitler was just misunderstood, and took things just a bit too far.  Gee, YA THINK?

Back to the accent thing - next on the scene is Donald Sutherland, playing an Irish man who's working with the Nazis in some way, because the Irish hate the Brits, get it?  The enemy of my enemy is my friend - except that doesn't mean you should be friends with NAZIS, make a damn exception or something.  Sutherland is NOT an Irishman, though I suppose he may be of Irish descent, but again, it's important in the second half that he can pass as an Irish person, one living and working in the U.K.  So they sort of reverse-engineer his back-story and his motivation in order to make this happen, that's very obvious.  (I just checked, he was born in Canada, and is of Scottish, German and English ancestry.  An acceptable Irish accent, though.)

On the American side, because there turns out to be a cadre of American soldiers boarding not far from where this plan goes down, we've got actors Treat Williams, Larry Hagman, and Jeff Conaway, among others.  No qualms about their accents, I think they're all Americans playing Americans, so we're good.  But it all adds up to a strange cast overall, with a diversity that calls to mind "The Dirty Dozen" or "Kelly's Heroes", only without any African-Americans.  Seeing Jeff Conaway playing a soldier sort of reminded me of that time Steve Guttenberg played a Nazi hunter, in "The Boys from Brazil", opposite both Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck.  But I digress.  My point is, that there's a lot of talent here, but the cast is still comprised of actors that you might not expect to see in the same movie.  Know what I mean? 

And some of these actors are known for comedy, which then raises the question - is THIS a comedy?  I don't think so, but then again, I'm not sure.  We know that this plot to kidnap Winston Churchill never really happened, but this film is just too action-based to be considered a comedy, it takes itself WAY too seriously throughout - but then again, so did "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun", even "Top Secret!", which all prove that taking things way too seriously CAN be funny, in its own way.  But "The Eagle Has Landed" never seems to diverge into parody, so that can't be the case.  Some comic moments do come, not during the shoot-outs or the other action scenes, but it's a little funny, perhaps, that the Nazi commandos (cleverly disguised as Polish paratroopers) keep dying off.  I mean, it's not funny at first, because I think there was a unit of 36 of them at the start, then there are only 18 or 19 by the time they get pardoned and sent on the mission.  Nazi prisons must be tough...  Later they sort of die one by one, and then I have to wonder if they were taking their roles as clumsy Poles too seriously - one dies in a water-wheel accident, and it's a bit comical in addition to being tragic.  

(Great idea for a film, maybe - a squad of commandos who are all very clumsy, and they die off one by one in hilarious ways while trying to accomplish their mission - sort of a spin on "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil"?  OK, maybe not...)

Larry Hagman has a few comic moments, too, as the American commander who fought hard for his position in the war, but just got his orders to rotate back home, and he's not happy about it.  He feels a bit like a lost character from "Catch-22" in that way. So, really, in some ways this film seems like it's neither fish nor fowl, not funny enough to be considered a comedy, but also not serious enough to be taken seriously.  I know it's based on a book, but still it presents me with events in the plot that I'm not quite sure I know what to do with.  Am I supposed to root for the central characters here, the Nazis?  I don't really feel comfortable with that - do I want their plans to come to fruition, or should I be hoping that it fails hilariously?  Or just plain fails?  

The screenplay for this film was written by Mankiewicz - that's TOM Mankiewicz, the son of the famous Joseph Mankiewicz.  And the director was John Sturges, director of "The Great Escape", and "The Magnificent Seven", among others.  This was the last film he ever directed, and Quentin Tarantino just did some kind of article or breakdown about the last films from certain directors, and how some of them suck, I guess.  Michael Caine wrote in his autobiography about how Sturges was, at this point in his life, just directing movies so he could earn enough money to go deep-sea fishing, which was his passion.  As soon as "The Eagle Has Landed" wrapped, that's what the director did, he went off fishing and didn't hang around for the editing or the post-production work.  Seems about right. 

Also starring Michael Caine (last seen in "Tenet"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Jenny Agutter (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Donald Pleasence (last seen in "Dracula" (1979)), Anthony Quayle (last seen in "Anne of the Thousand Days"), Jean Marsh (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Sven-Bertil Taube (last seen in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2009)), John Standing (last seen in "A Good Woman"), Judy Geeson (last seen in "To Sir, with Love"), Larry Hagman (last seen in "Ensign Pulver"), Siegfried Rauch (last seen in "Le Mans"), Michael Byrne (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Maurice Reeves, Keith Buckley (last seen in "The Spy Who Loved Me"), Terence Plummer (last seen in "Sexy Beast"), Jeff Conaway (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Leigh Dilley, Wolf Kahler (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Benito Mussolini (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump").

RATING: 4 out of 10 sleeper agents