The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

Michael Caine, as the Cockney German.

Directed by John Sturges
Written by Thomas F. Mankiewicz, Jack Higgins (novel)
Starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasence, Larry Hagman



Somewhere in Hollywood, perhaps in a bunker midway between all the major studios, there’s a conveyor belt.  It’s just like the conveyor belts you get in airports, the big loop, people waiting for what they need to come around, and with a long, mysterious section hidden from the view.  It takes a fair while to make a complete circuit, perhaps twenty years or so, but it never stops entirely.  And on this conveyor, they place boxes full of used-up genres and plotlines, send them off into that strange world behind the curtain, and wait excitedly for another box to come out the other end, full of old ideas to put back into service.

Yet, hidden behind that curtain, there seems to be a box that’s fallen off.  How better to explain why there’s been no resurrection for a hugely popular strain of movies that came out between the late 60s and the mid-70s?  Big, grandiose pictures, with an all-star cast, striking, Technicolor vistas and usually a plot slightly thinner than the tub the popcorn came in.  For the most part, they were either about disasters (think The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure or the Airport films), or about the Second World War (The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone), were full of big set pieces and explosions, and nowadays they mostly turn up on television to fill a bank holiday afternoon.  And good fun they are too, good, stupid fun – but they’re preserved in aspic, a leftover of a last burst from the old star-centric studio system, never again to be repeated.

It’s certainly hard to imagine The Eagle Has Landed being made today.  The explosions would still be there – probably a lot more of them, probably directed by Michael Bay or Gore Verbinski, certainly full of CGI – but the all-star cast would be gone, as would the Boy’s Own adventure story.  It just wouldn’t be as charmingly daft.  It certainly wouldn’t be anything you’d see on a bank holiday afternoon.  Why (apart from the box falling off the conveyor)?  Well, for one thing, the studios know now that, thanks to dvd, tv and online aftersales, whatever film they put out isn’t going to lose any money, so there’s no point roping in quite so many names; for another, Hollywood productions have become far too focus-group and market driven to allow for such cheery silliness.  That’s not to say there’s no longer any stupidity in Hollywood pictures – there’s more than ever, if anything – but that it’s cynical, ugly, stupidity, a dumbed-down ugliness that stems from the new economics of the cinema.

I’d far rather watch a film which wears its over-the-top absurdity on its sleeve.  Here we not only have that bigger-is-better cast, but they’re all turning up in a wonderful variety of different accents – Robert Duvall doing standard movie German, Michael Caine doing, um, Cockney German, Donald Pleasance doing Donald Pleasence, Donald Sutherland doing comedy Oirish – and enthusiastically hamming their scenery-chewing way through a dashing tale of derring-do (which is, as it happens, lifted almost wholesale from Cavalcanti’s superb wartime propaganda film, Went the Day Well).  And what we don’t have is, by any sensible standard, a classic, a great movie, a significant contribution to the art.  It is, after all, idiotic tosh.  But, hey, so what?  It’s fun.  Particularly on a bank holiday afternoon.