I first saw Where Eagles Dare just after I had turned 10. I remembered that I loved the film. But then, 20 years later, I remembered little else.
I am sure that it has played very often on television since then. But, I managed to miss it every time. Then, Manoj bought the CD sometime ago, and we finally got down to seeing it last week.
The best parts of the film struck me all over again. I also saw things that I hadn’t seen when I watched the film before.
The story is perhaps an often told one, but it still has you guessing. It’s a spy story set in World War II – a group of British and American spies are trying to free one of their men in a German camp. But, they have an infiltrator in their midst. Who could it be??? In this way, the story unfolds.
Some of the best parts were…
- The suspense, the suspense, the suspense. It got me the first time. It got me again.
- Simply Richard Burton!
- The young Clinton Eastwood.
- The coming together of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. Just for that, this movie could be a classic.
- Sharp editing
- Quick action
- Humour delivered that inimitable Richard Burton style. (What a body of work that man has left behind!)
- This is how a film based on a book should be made.
- It’s also how a spy film should be made.
Incidentally, this film made in 1968 is the original spy film. You need to look at this once to understand all the lesser spy films that followed. In fact, I think that Ron Howard should have watched this film at least a 100 times before he made the Da Vinci Code. Then, perhaps we would have awarded the disaster that the Da Vinci Code became.
On the downside, technology has advanced a great deal in the 36 years, so twenty-first century spy films are perhaps a lot more slicker. Also, some of the techniques that came into being have been re-used often over the last three decades making the original seem a little cliched.
But, the sheer power of the original smoothers that all.
You realize then that there are some things that Hollywood has just forgotten to make…epics, musicals and spy films. And this particular film belonged to a golden age.
