The Eagle Has Landed

In the autumn of 1943, with Mussolini just lifted off a mountain by German paratroops, somebody in Berlin wonders aloud whether Churchill could be lifted the same way. Col. Max Radl (Robert Duvall), a one-eyed staff officer with a drawer full of dead files, is told by Admiral Canaris (Anthony Quayle) to write a feasibility study nobody will read. Radl reads it, and then Himmler (Donald Pleasence) reads it, and the joke becomes an order. John Sturges’s film of Jack Higgins’s novel, from a screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz, takes this daft premise and plays it dead straight for 135 minutes. It is better than the premise deserves and slower than it should be, and it is worth an evening if war films are your thing.

Sturges introduces his hero on a railway platform in Warsaw, where Col. Kurt Steiner (Michael Caine) steps between an SS detail and a Jewish woman they are herding onto a train, and loses his rank and his freedom for it. It is the scene the whole film leans on. It tells us these particular Germans are the kind we are permitted to like, and Caine plays it without a flicker of speechmaking, which is why it works. Donald Sutherland arrives as Liam Devlin, an IRA man lecturing in Berlin, who is sent ahead to Studley Constable to prepare the ground with Joanna Grey (Jean Marsh), a widow who has been sending Berlin the weather for years.

Then the film sits down. Devlin courts Molly Prior (Jenny Agutter), a farm girl who rides across the marsh to see him, and the courtship takes most of the second act. Agutter is warm and Sutherland is funny, and we still found ourselves checking how much was left. Pleasence plays Himmler as a mild, pedantic clerk who never raises his voice, and Duvall watches him with the face of a man reading his own death warrant. Every time the film cut back to Norfolk we felt the air go out of it.

Steiner and his men come down on the marsh dressed as Polish paratroopers, with their own uniforms underneath, on the grounds that a soldier shot in his own colours has died a soldier’s death. From there the last hour is the director of The Great Escape doing what he did best: a small place, a clock, and a plan going wrong in stages. Anthony B. Richmond shoots it flat and grey under a wide sky, and the church by candle and lamp. Lalo Schifrin gives the Germans a brisk snare-drum march and gives Devlin something lighter, close to a folk tune, which tells you where the film’s sympathies lie.

The Americans, when they turn up, are the weak point. Larry Hagman’s Colonel Pitts is a blowhard who wants a war to fight, and the film treats him as comic relief in a stretch that has no room for it; Treat Williams’s Captain Clark is the sensible one and gets little to do but be sensible. John Standing’s Father Verecker and Judy Geeson as his sister Pamela are the village’s conscience, and the script gives them exactly enough.

What we felt, honestly, was surprise. We went in expecting a Sunday afternoon time-passer and for two stretches, the Warsaw platform and the last forty minutes, we were properly caught, leaning forward, minding what happened to men we had every historical reason not to mind about. That is Caine’s doing. He plays Steiner as a tired professional who no longer believes in Germany and still believes in the men he brought with him, and he never asks for our sympathy, which is the only way to earn it from a British audience in 1976. Most critics have called the film far-fetched, and it is; the trick is that everyone on screen behaves as if it were not.

It was Sturges’s last film, and it is not The Great Escape, which knew how to make waiting exciting. This one makes you wait and then rewards you. See it for Caine, for Pleasence, and for the last hour; make a pot of tea for the middle. It runs 135 minutes and carries a 15.