The Eagle Has Landed (film)

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The Eagle has Landed
Directed by John Sturges
Produced by David Niven, Jr.
Jack Wiener
Written by Jack Higgins (novel)
Tom Mankiewicz
Starring Michael Caine
Donald Sutherland
Robert Duvall
Jenny Agutter
Donald Pleasence
Anthony Quayle
Larry Hagman
Treat Williams
Distributed by ITC Entertainment
Release date(s) 1976
Running time 135 m (UK)
123 m (U.S.)
145 m (25 fps PAL)(Extended R2 DVD version)
Language English
Budget $6,000,000
IMDb profile

The Eagle Has Landed is a 1976 film version of the novel The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins. It was directed by John Sturges and starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall. It is also Sturges' final film.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Inspired by the real-life rescue of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny, a similar idea is considered by Hitler, with the support of Himmler (Donald Pleasence). Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Anthony Quayle), head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), is ordered to make a feasibility study of the seemingly impossible task of capturing Prime Minister Winston Churchill and returning him to the Reich.

Canaris considers the idea a joke, but realizes that although Hitler will soon forget the matter, Himmler will not. Fearing Himmler may try to discredit him, Canaris orders one of his officers, Oberst Radl (Duvall) to undertake the study, despite feeling that it is a waste of time.

An Unteroffizier on Radl's staff finds that one of their spies, code named Starling, has provided tantalizing intelligence. "At any other time, in any other place, this information would be useless", Radl said. "And then synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is to visit an airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey (Jean Marsh), a South African and German spy, lives. Radl comes up with a scheme that could work. Himmler meets secretly with Radl and unofficially tells him to proceed, without notifying Canaris. An agent, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland), is dispatched to contact Mrs Grey.

Radl recruits commandos to carry out the operation, commanded by a German Fallschirmjäger officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner (Caine). While returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervened when SS soldiers rounded up Jews at a railway station in Poland, and attempted to save the life of a teenage girl who was shot while trying to escape. For this, he was court-martialled, along with a platoon of his men. Rather than the firing squad, the men were allowed to transfer to a punishment unit in the Channel Islands, where they made suicidal attacks with manned torpedoes against British channel convoys.

Radl travels to Alderney and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his surviving men. The team will fly into the UK in a captured C-47 with Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops, as few of them speak English. The plan is to infiltrate Studley Constable, complete their mission, rendezvous with an E-boat on the nearby coast and escape.

The plan is foiled when a German paratrooper rescues a local girl from a water wheel. He is killed in the process and his German uniform (worn under the Polish uniforms as protection against being executed as spies) revealed to the village people. The locals are rounded up, but Pamela Vereker (Judy Geeson), the sister of Father Vereker (John Standing), a priest, escapes to alert United States Army Rangers. Inexperienced, glory-seeking Colonel Pitt (Larry Hagman) is killed trying to shoot Joanna in her house, while his poorly-planned assault on the church fails. Captain Clark (Treat Williams) then organizes a second, successful attack.

Steiner's men sacrifice themselves to delay the Americans while Devlin, Steiner, and his wounded second-in-command escape, with the aid of local girl Molly Prior (Jenny Agutter), who was romantically involved with Devlin. Instead of boarding the E-boat, Steiner makes one last attempt at Churchill. Steiner succeeds in killing Churchill before being shot himself. However, when Captain Clark appears on the scene, he is informed that "Churchill" was actually an impersonator - the real Prime Minister is at the Tehran Conference.

With the failure of the operation, Radl is executed by firing squad under the pretext that he was "Giving orders beyond his control to a point of treason" In this way Himmler distances himself from the failed mission.

[edit] Differences from the novel

The film lacks many details of the novel, including the detention of Kurt Steiner's father, General Steiner, by the Gestapo as an additional incentive for Oberst Steiner. Also, a member of a British SS unit British Free Corps is featured in the novel, but absent from the film. In the novel, Steiner hesitates before shooting Churchill and is shot and supposedly killed. However, Steiner reappears alive in The Eagle Has Flown, a sequel to the novel. Radl is not executed; instead, he has a heart attack in a Dutch hospital after discovering Devlin has escaped from England and is convalescing in the same hospital. The book concludes with author Higgins supposedly meeting the various surviving characters as he gathers information for the story, the final revelation coming from an aged Father Verecker that "Churchill" had been an impersonator and even if the mission had succeeded, it would not have mattered.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Filming locations

The majority of the film, set in the fictional village of Studley Constable, was filmed at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire and features the village church, Mapledurham Watermill and Mapledurham House. The sequence set in Alderney was filmed in Charlestown, near St Austell in Cornwall. Some of the filming took place at RAF St. Mawgan, near Newquay, and at Rock, both in Cornwall.

[edit] External links

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Joe Kidd - Chino - McQ - The Eagle Has Landed