7 / 10
Official trailer
Kidnap Churchill
The premise is pure pulp. It’s terrific. In 1943, Hitler, furious after the rescue of Mussolini, demands a similar coup against the British. Nobody takes it seriously except Colonel Max Radl of German military intelligence, who discovers that Churchill will spend a weekend at a country house near Studley Constable, a tiny village on the Norfolk coast, a short hop from occupied Europe.
Radl puts together a plan. A unit of crack paratroopers, disguised as Free Polish soldiers on exercise, will parachute in, blend into the village, grab the Prime Minister and slip away by boat. All they need is a commander, and an agent on the ground to prepare the way.
This is exactly my kind of war film: a men-on-a-mission picture with an absurd plan and a cast full of faces I trust. I had a good time with it, and I’d happily sit through it again for Caine and Sutherland. What keeps it from climbing higher is a saggy middle and a view of the German army that gets harder to swallow the longer I think about it.
Jack Higgins’s novel came out in 1975 and sold in enormous numbers. John Sturges, who’d directed The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, made the film a year later. It was his last.
Colonel Steiner
Michael Caine plays Colonel Kurt Steiner, a decorated paratrooper who’s been sent to a punishment unit for trying to help a Jewish girl escape from the SS at a railway station in Warsaw. He’s brave, principled, loyal to his men and completely opposed to the Nazis, and he takes the Churchill job because it’s the only way to save his unit from certain death.
Caine makes Steiner likeable, even noble, a professional soldier with a conscience who happens to be on the wrong side. He doesn’t bother with a German accent, and it doesn’t matter. He’s cool, dry and commanding, and he’s the man you’d want leading you into a disaster.
The film’s decision to make its German hero so sympathetic is its most interesting choice and its most questionable one. Steiner and his men are decent soldiers.
The Nazis are Himmler and his henchmen, safely back in Berlin. It’s a comfortable division, and it makes the film easier to enjoy than it probably should be.
For Writers
Steiner is a principled soldier on the wrong side, and the film makes him its hero. It’s a risky choice that makes the story more interesting and morally murkier.
A protagonist on the wrong side of history can make for gripping fiction, because the reader has to hold two feelings at once: admiration for the character and horror at their cause. That discomfort can be the most interesting thing in the book. The risk is that it tips into apology. If you write a sympathetic character from a monstrous cause, keep the cause in view. Let the reader see what they’re fighting for, and don’t let the character’s decency excuse the regime behind them.
Devlin
Donald Sutherland plays Liam Devlin, an IRA man and former professor recruited as the agent in the village.
He’s charming, witty and mischievous, and he’s there because he hates the English. He has no love for the Germans. He poses as a caretaker on the local marshes, woos a young village girl and prepares the ground for the landing.
Sutherland’s Irish accent wobbles, but he’s having so much fun that it hardly matters. Devlin is the film’s comic energy and its most unpredictable character, and his romance with Molly, played by Jenny Agutter, gives the film an unexpected tenderness. Sutherland is my favorite thing in the film. He plays Devlin like a man who finds the whole war faintly ridiculous, and every scene gets livelier the second he walks into it.
Devlin also gets the film’s best exit. When everything goes wrong, he slips away from the chaos with a smile, a character too slippery for any side to hold.
Studley Constable
Studley Constable is an idyllic English village, with a pub, a church, a squire’s manor and a handful of suspicious locals, and the film enjoys the comedy of German paratroopers pretending to be Polish while trying not to blow their cover. The village scenes were shot at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, and they look like a picture postcard.
Robert Duvall plays Radl, the planner back in Germany, with a quiet, weary dignity, and Donald Pleasence plays Heinrich Himmler, all thin smiles and cold menace. Anthony Quayle turns up as Admiral Canaris, the intelligence chief who doesn’t want any part of the scheme.
The Millrace
The plan falls apart because of an act of decency. A little girl falls into a millrace, and one of the German paratroopers, Private Kuhl, dives in and saves her. He’s pulled into the mill wheel and killed, and when the villagers see his body, they discover the German uniform he’s wearing under his Polish disguise.
It’s the film’s best moment, a small act of heroism that dooms the whole mission, and Sturges handles it with real feeling. The villagers’ faces, as they realize who has been living among them, say everything.
This is the scene that gets the film to a 7 for me. I think it’s the smartest turn in the story, because the mission is undone by the one man in the unit who couldn’t let a child drown, and that stings far more than any careless mistake would.
For Writers
The mission fails because one soldier saves a drowning child. The plot turns on a character’s decency. That gives the whole story its irony.
Plans that collapse because of a character’s virtue are more moving than plans that collapse because of a mistake. The reader admires the act and mourns its cost at the same time, and that tension gives that moment real weight.
Higgins understood that the most memorable twist in a war story is often a human one. The enemy is revealed, and the mission doomed, by the one man in the unit who couldn’t let a child drown. It tells the reader everything about who these soldiers are.
The Church
With their cover blown, the Germans round up the villagers in the church. What follows is a long siege, as an American Ranger unit stationed nearby, led by an incompetent colonel played by Larry Hagman, bungles a rescue attempt, and a more capable officer, played by Treat Williams, takes over.
Hagman is hilarious as the glory-hunting fool who marches his men straight into an ambush, and the battle is tense and well staged. The Americans come off badly throughout: loud, careless and more interested in medals than in lives, a portrait that probably pleased British audiences in 1976 more than American ones. Sturges was a master of action, and even in his last film he knows how to move soldiers around a landscape.
Hagman made me laugh harder than anything else in the picture. The film isn’t fair to the Americans, and I’m fine with that, because a glory-hunting colonel marching his men into an ambush is too good a gift to turn down.
Churchill
The ending contains a good twist. Steiner, the last survivor, fights his way through to the country house and finally faces Churchill on the terrace.
He fires, and he’s shot dead. Only then do we learn that the man he killed was an actor serving as Churchill’s double, while the real Prime Minister was elsewhere.
It’s a bittersweet ending for a doomed mission, and the film plays it with a touch of melancholy. All that courage, and all that loss, for nothing.
For Writers
The final twist reveals that Steiner has killed a double. The mission’s whole purpose evaporates at the moment of its success.
An ending that achieves the goal and reveals it was meaningless can be devastating. The reader has invested in the mission, and the empty victory forces them to question what the characters were fighting for.
Sturges plays the twist without fanfare, and that restraint matters. A big dramatic reveal would turn it into a trick. A quiet one makes it a tragedy, and it leaves the audience thinking about every man who died for a plan that could never have worked. Futility, shown plainly, can hit harder than any defeat. For more, see my article on plot devices that work and those that wreck a story.
Higgins’s Novel
Jack Higgins’s novel was a publishing sensation, and it’s a better-constructed story than the film. It’s framed as a real historical mystery, with the narrator, Higgins himself, stumbling across a hidden gravestone for German paratroopers in an English churchyard and piecing together what happened. That framing gives the book a haunting, melancholy quality the film mostly drops.
Higgins also gave Devlin more room, and the character proved so popular that he returned in later novels. Years later, Higgins wrote a sequel, The Eagle Has Flown. That revealed that Steiner had survived. Fans of the film who want more should start with the original book. That goes deeper into the men on both sides.
Old-Fashioned
The Eagle Has Landed is a solid, well-made war adventure in the style of The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. It’s got a great cast, a clever premise and some good action, and it’s very watchable. It’s also a bit slow in the middle, and the romance between Devlin and Molly takes up time the story doesn’t have.
Sturges was ill during production, and some critics felt the film lacked the snap of his earlier work. It’s efficient. Inspired it isn’t. The editing is loose, and a few characters, especially the villagers, are too thin.
Sympathy for the Enemy
The film’s portrayal of its German soldiers as honorable men was controversial even in 1976, and it feels odder now. Making the Nazi regime the villain while letting its soldiers be heroes is a very comfortable choice, and it lets the audience root for a plot to kidnap Churchill without feeling guilty.
The middle is where the film loses me. As much as I enjoy Sutherland, I’d have trimmed the Devlin and Molly romance hard and spent the time sharpening the villagers, who never become more than faces in a pub.
Higgins’s novel handles this with more nuance, and Steiner’s rescue of the Jewish girl gives him real moral credentials. But the film leans hard on the claim that the men who fought for Hitler were mostly decent chaps who’d been let down by their leaders. That’s a myth with a long and not very admirable history.
Where It Lands
It’s a 7 because the cast, the premise and the millrace scene are all excellent, and because the film is great fun as a piece of old-fashioned adventure. It loses points for its slack pacing and its rosy view of the Wehrmacht.
It’s worth seeing for Caine, Sutherland and Hagman, and for the last hurrah of a great action director.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Small human choices undo the audacious mission The Eagle Has Landed sets up: a soldier who saves a child, a colonel who can’t resist glory, a double in a garden. The plan is grand, and the failures are personal.
Grand plots feel most human when they turn on small, personal moments. A single act of kindness or vanity can bring down the biggest scheme.
When your plot involves a big plan, find the small, human moment that breaks it, and make that moment the heart of the story.
The Last Sturges Adventure
I give The Eagle Has Landed a 7 because I enjoy it a great deal and can’t fully get past what it asks me to forgive. Caine, Sutherland and Hagman are a pleasure, the millrace scene is the best thing Sturges does in the picture, and the double on the terrace is a gut punch.
The slow middle costs it, and so does the rosy picture of Hitler’s soldiers as decent chaps. I’d still recommend it to anybody who likes a war adventure with a good cast.
