The Eagle Has Landed (film)
The Eagle Has Landed is a 1976 film version of the novel The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins. It was directed by John Sturges and starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall. It is also Sturges' final film.
The majority of the film, set in the fictional village of Studley Constable, was filmed at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire and features the village church, Mapledurham Watermill and Mapledurham House. The sequence set in Alderney was filmed in Charlestown, near St Austell in Cornwall. Some of the filming took place at RAF St. Mawgan, near Newquay, and at Rock, both in Cornwall.
Cast
Michael Caine - Col. Kurt
Steiner
Donald Sutherland - Liam Devlin
Robert Duvall - Col. Max Radl
Jenny Agutter - Molly Prior
Donald Pleasence - Heinrich Himmler
Anthony Quayle - Adm. Canaris
Jean Marsh - Joanna Grey
Sven-Bertil
Taube - Capt. von Neustadt
John Standing - Father Verecker
Judy Geeson
- Pamela
Treat Williams - Capt. Clark
Larry Hagman - Col. Pitts
Alexei Jawdokimov - Corpral Kuniski
Richard Wren
Michael Byrne
- Karl
Joachim Hansen - SS-Obergruppenführer
Denis Lill
Rick
Parsé (as Rick Parse)
Léonie Thelen (as Leonie Thelen)
Keith Buckley
Terence Plummer (as Terry Plummer)
Tim Barlow - George
Wilde (Publican)
John Barrett - Laker Armsby
Kate Binchy
Maurice
Roëves - Maj. Corcoran (as Maurice Roeves)
David Gilliam
Jeff Conaway
- Frazier
Asa Teeter
Robert G. Reece
Jack McCulloch
rest of
cast listed alphabetically:
Siegfried Rauch - Sgt Brandt
Patrick Allen
- Narrator (voice)
Leigh Dilley - Winston Churchill / George Fowler
Paul Finemore - Dead diver
Anthony Forrest - Sgt. Hayley
Adolf Hitler
- Himself (greets Mussolini after rescue) (archive footage)
Wolf Kahler -
Hauptsturmführer Fleischer
Roy Marsden - Stormbandführer Toberg,
SS
Ferdy Mayne - Radl's doctor
Peter Miles - Adolf Hitler
Benito
Mussolini - Himself (rescued by Skorzeny) (archive footage)
Otto Skorzeny
- Himself (rescues Mussolini, wears binoculars) (archive footage)
Joachim
von Ribbentrop - Himself (greets Mussolini and Hitler, wears white lapels) (archive
footage)
Kent Williams - Mallory
Plot
Inspired
by the real-life rescue of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny, a
similar idea is considered by Hitler, with the support of Himmler (Donald Pleasence).
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Anthony Quayle), head of the Abwehr (German military
intelligence), is ordered to make a feasibility study of the seemingly impossible
task of capturing Prime Minister Winston Churchill and returning him to the Reich.
Canaris considers the idea a joke, but realizes that although Hitler will soon forget the matter, Himmler will not. Fearing Himmler may try to discredit him, Canaris orders one of his officers, Oberst Radl (Duvall) to undertake the study, despite feeling that it is a waste of time.
An Unteroffizier on Radl's staff finds that one of their spies, code named Starling, has provided tantalizing intelligence. "At any other time, in any other place, this information would be useless", Radl said. "And then synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is to visit an airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey (Jean Marsh), a South African and German spy, lives. Radl comes up with a scheme that could work. Himmler meets secretly with Radl and unofficially tells him to proceed, without notifying Canaris. An agent, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland), is dispatched to contact Mrs Grey.
Radl recruits commandos to carry out the operation, commanded by a German Fallschirmjäger officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner (Caine). While returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervened when SS soldiers rounded up Jews at a railway station in Poland, and attempted to save the life of a teenage girl who was shot while trying to escape. For this, he was court-martialled, along with a platoon of his men. Rather than the firing squad, the men were allowed to transfer to a punishment unit in the Channel Islands, where they made suicidal attacks with manned torpedoes against British channel convoys.
Radl travels to Alderney and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his surviving men. The team will fly into the UK in a captured C-47 with Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops, as few of them speak English. The plan is to infiltrate Studley Constable, complete their mission, rendezvous with an E-boat on the nearby coast and escape.
The plan is foiled when a German paratrooper rescues a local girl from a water wheel. He is killed in the process and his German uniform (worn under the Polish uniforms as protection against being executed as spies) revealed to the village people. The locals are rounded up, but Pamela Vereker (Judy Geeson), the sister of Father Vereker (John Standing), a priest, escapes to alert United States Army Rangers. Inexperienced, glory-seeking Colonel Pitt (Larry Hagman) is killed trying to shoot Joanna in her house, while his poorly-planned assault on the church fails. Captain Clark (Treat Williams) then organizes a second, successful attack.
Steiner's men sacrifice themselves to delay the Americans while Devlin, Steiner, and his wounded second-in-command escape, with the aid of local girl Molly Prior (Jenny Agutter), who was romantically involved with Devlin. Instead of boarding the E-boat, Steiner makes one last attempt at Churchill. Steiner succeeds in killing Churchill before being shot himself. However, when Captain Clark appears on the scene, he is informed that "Churchill" was actually an impersonator - the real Prime Minister is at the Tehran Conference.
With the failure of the operation, Radl is executed by firing squad under the pretext that he was "acting without orders from Canaris." In this way Himmler distances himself from the failed mission.
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