Tweet
Based on the 1975 novel The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins, the film is about a fictional German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill in the middle of the Second World War. The Eagle Has Landed was Sturges's final film, and was successful upon its release.
Plot
In 1943, following the successful rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, is ordered to make a feasibility study into capturing the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Canaris considers it a meaningless exercise that will soon be forgotten by the Führer, but he knows this will not be the case with Heinrich Himmler. Canaris therefore orders staff officer Oberst Radl to begin the study, to avoid being discredited.
Radl receives intelligence from an Abwehr sleeper agent in England, saying Churchill will stay in a Norfolk village near the coast. He begins to see potential in the operation, which he code-names "Eagle". Firstly, Radl recruits an agent, an IRA man named Liam Devlin, who lectures at a Berlin university. Secondly, he selects Kurt Steiner, a highly decorated and experienced Fallschirmjäger officer, to lead the mission. However, while the Luftwaffe parachute troops are returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner unsuccessfully attempts to save the life of a Jewish girl who is trying to escape from the SS in occupied Poland. Steiner and his loyal men are court-martialled, and sent to a penal unit on German-occupied Alderney, where their mission is to conduct near-suicidal human torpedo attacks against Allied shipping in the English Channel.
Radl is summoned to a private meeting with Himmler, without Canaris' knowledge. Himmler reveals that he knows all about the operation, and gives Radl a letter of authority, apparently signed by Hitler, authorising the operation and giving him carte blanche to use all means necessary to carry it out. He then flies to Alderney, where he recruits Steiner and his surviving men.
Operation Eagle involves the German commandos dressing as Polish paratroopers to infiltrate the village; underneath, however, they retain their German uniforms so as to avoid being shot as spies if taken prisoner. Their aim is to capture Churchill, with the help of Devlin, before making their escape by a captured motor torpedo boat. Once the operation is under way, Himmler retrieves the letter that he had given to Radl and destroys it.
On arrival in the English village, the German paratroopers take up positions under the guise of conducting friendly military exercises. However, the ruse is discovered when one of Steiner's men rescues a young girl from certain death beneath the village waterwheel. The soldier dies and the wheel brings up his mangled corpse. The villagers then see that he is wearing a German uniform underneath his Polish one. Steiner's men round up the villagers and hold them captive in the village church, but the vicar's sister, Pamela Verecker, escapes and alerts a unit of nearby United States Army Rangers.
Colonel Pitts, the Rangers’ inexperienced and rash commander, launches a poorly planned assault on the church that results in heavy American casualties. Pitts is later killed by the village's sleeper Abwehr agent, Joanna Grey. It is left to Pitts' deputy, Captain Harry Clark, to launch another attack that overruns the positions of the Germans and traps them inside the church. To delay the Americans, Steiner's men sacrifice themselves to give Devlin, Steiner, and his wounded second-in-command time to escape the church through a hidden passage. A local girl, Molly Prior, who has fallen for the charming Devlin, helps them escape. At the waiting S-boat, Steiner orders his wounded second-in-command on board, but says he is staying behind to kill Churchill.
On Alderney, Radl receives news that the operation has failed. He realises that Himmler had never really had Hitler's permission for the mission. In consequence, Radl is arrested and summarily executed by an SS firing squad under the pretext that he "exceeded his orders to the point of treason".
Back in England, Steiner succeeds in killing Churchill moments before being shot dead himself. It is then revealed that the victim was actually a body double, and that the real Churchill was on his way to the Tehran Conference. The torpedo boat is aground, at dead low tide, awaiting Steiner's return. Meanwhile Devlin, evading capture, leaves a love letter for the local girl, before slipping away.
Production
In October 1974, Paramount announced they had purchased the film rights to Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed in partnership with Jack Wiener, formerly an executive at Paramount. The book came out in 1975 and was a bestseller...
Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_Has_Landed_(film)
Director: Richard Marquand -
Writers: Ken Follett, Stanley Mann -
Stars: Donald Sutherland, Stephen MacKenna, Philip Martin Brown -
A ruthless German spy, trying to get out of Britain with vital information about D-Day, must spend time with a young woman and her crippled husband.
[553]1422[661]0724
There are commercials at the beginning and early on.