Happy Landing for a Whopper

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

Directed by JOHN STURGES Screenplay by TOM MANKIEWICZ

The Eagle Has Landed proceeds from a preposterous premise. Some time late in World War II, half-mad Hitler conceives a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill and bring him to Berlin as a hostage against the fate that the dictator sees gathering for him. In preparing a feasibility study of this enterprise in order to placate the leader, German intelligence discovers that it actually is not such a bad idea after all. The movie --which shows how this crazy notion was placed in operation and damn near succeeded--is a good idea too. One almost comes to believe the source of the plot is not a best selling novel but perhaps some costly, discovered secret document.

This massive exercise in suspended disbelief works because the early reels are leisurely devoted to showing how certain interesting coincidences fall into place for the mission's chief planner (Robert Duvall, being excellent again), and how this entirely reasonable fellow begins to fall under the spell of lucky chance. He is in effect the audience's surrogate. Once all his questions have been answered, it seems churlish, indeed downright ungrateful, not to go along with him and the plot he is spinning.

The P.M., you see, is to spend a weekend at a stately home not far from a handy spy (Jean Marsh of Upstairs, Downstairs). She can prepare the ground for the raiding team, not far from a deserted beach where the kidnapers can parachute in unobserved and get out again, via boat, bearing off their prize.

Now there is an inherent problem in this story. Viewers are asked to root for the wrong side, the Germans, as they go about their nefarious business. But that difficulty is neatly finessed by two factors. The most important of them is casting Michael Caine as the assault group's commander. There is not another leading man on-screen today who so consistently exudes a sense of decency and honor without being stuffy about it. If one is willing to follow him into the jaws of hell, then why not, for a couple of hours, into a gale of moral ambivalence? Moreover, we first meet him and his elite unit in Warsaw, putting themselves at risk in a vain attempt to rescue a young Jewish woman from the SS. Thus they are immediately established as gallant lads, holding nothing but contempt for deplorable national policies they have, in any case, been too busy on the Russian front to consider very deeply.

Their taste for the beau geste turns out to be their undoing. They are dressed as Free Polish soldiers on maneuvers as they await Churchill's arrival. Their cover is blown when one of their number reveals the German uniform he is wearing underneath his disguise as he rescues a child from a potentially nasty accident. Much small-arms fire and much suspenseful running about ensue, well staged by the veteran director Sturges (Bad Day at Black Rock, The Great Escape). There is a satisfying surprise ending that serves as a neat moral reckoning as well.

In short, Eagle is an action film of a rather traditional sort--meaning that however improbable it is in detail, it retains some sense of scale and traditional human virtues. It is well played by a cast that includes Donald Sutherland, veering interestingly from dark to light moods as an Irish nationalist making a temporary alliance with the Germans, as well as several old-reliable English character people. Modest, well crafted, less bloody and less bloody-minded than most TV shows, it is a PG film that any P ought to be happy to G the kids through. Richard Schickel

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