Film Recommendation

Real talk: Where Eagles Dare is the OG Mission: Impossible. In fact, revisiting this 1968 belter starring a never-more-rugged Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, you kinda wish that Christopher McQuarrie et al had perhaps studied some of its design and mechanisms a little more closely, as this is a film which opts for slow, exacting detail rather than relentless, explosive bombast. 

It is an adaptation of a novel by the Scottish military-leaning adventure author Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra), whose name is synonymous with what we all know and love as the “dad movie” (movies that dads watch on a sleepy Sunday afternoon with a pot of strong tea and a fully-loaded pipe). It tells of a wartime British intelligence scheme to infiltrate the all-but-impenetrable Schloß Adler, a mountain-top fortress which is only accessible by cablecar.

A British general has been captured and needs to be rescued before he’s forced to spill secrets on a second front, so in comes Burton’s almost psychotically-driven Major John Smith and an elite crew which includes Eastwood’s monosyllabic assassin, Lieutenant Schaffer. The scene is set, the clock is ticking and the Nazi foe absolutely must be exterminated.