The Eagle Has Landed (1976) - Sturges' enjoyable, last man's adventure

♥♥♥♥

One of the deliciously colored, neat posters for John Sturges' The Eagle Has Landed

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In 1943 in small town Norfolk, England, German colonel Michael Caine (The Swarm (1978)) and joyous adventurer Donald Sutherland (Virus (1999)) land with a group of Polish paratroopers on a secret mission: To kidnap British PM Churchill. But things get complicated ...

The Eagle Has Landed is an adaptation of Jack Higgins' (The Iron Tiger (1966)) same-titled 1975 bestseller by Tom Mankiewicz (Diamonds Are Forever (1971)) and directed by John Sturges (Ice Station Zebra (1968)). It is a very exciting film of a fictitious high-risk kidnapping attempt by the Germans in WWII. Eagle is elementary, male-eschewed suspense of the type that Sturges was often successful with, a real boyish adventure yarn and a well-made one.
Lalo Schifrin (The Mean Season (1985)) has made a fine, militaristic score, and the film has fine performances, apart from the stars already mentioned also from Treat Williams (Chicago Fire (2013-15))  as a very American soldier, Donald Pleasence (Phenomena (1985)) as Nazi Himmler and Robert Duvall (The Apostle (1997)), also as a Nazi, and actually seeming like one.

Related review:

John Sturges: Chino/Valdez, Il Mezzosangue/Valdez the Half BreedThe Valdez Horses (1973) - Bronson is his own man only in Sturges' good spaghetti western

Robert Duvall is credible as a Nazi in John Sturges' The Eagle Has Landed

In lieu of a trailer for the film, not currently on Youtube, listen here to Schifrin's theme for the film

Cost: 6 mil. $
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertainty (but likely a big hit)
[The Eagle Has Landed was released December 25 (Sweden and Finland) and runs 130 minutes. The film was shot on location in England and Finland from May - August 1976. Caine has later related how Sturges confided to him that he only accepted the job, which became his last film, so he could get money to go fishing after. He has also written that Sturges never appeared for any post production duties on Eagle. The film was released in North America in a slightly shorter (124 min.) version, but the film is mostly seen in its longer version on DVD and Blu-ray today. It was well-received by public and press alike and is said to have made a tidy profit, although without numbers, I can't say for sure how much. 13,917 IMDb users have given The Eagle Has Landed a 6.9 average rating.]

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