Mission Ridiculous

Where Eagles Dare is one of those war movies that looks as if it were cribbed from the funny papers. Steve Canyon is more realistic, and Terry and the Pirates more exotic, but Eagles beats them both in the departments of action-packed implausibility and two-fisted idiocy.

Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood appear as the kind of super soldiers who could have won World War II during a weekend pass. Major Burton is head of a British mission behind enemy lines; Lieut. Eastwood is his Yank second-in-command. Their assignment is to rescue an American general who has got himself imprisoned in a German army fortress high in the Alps. There are two inevitable complications: 1) a dirty turncoat is methodically bumping off the members of the mission, and 2) one of those guys in uniform turns out to be a girl (Mary Ure). She is a sort of Green Berette, a combination of Mata Hari, Annie Oakley and the Dragon Lady.

As time--155 long minutes of it--goes by, our boys storm, fight and bluff their way past the usual cretinous Nazis, snatch the general and head back down the mountain. Along the way, they slaughter a couple of hundred Germans, blast the Schloss, battle the bad guys to the death on top of a cable car, knock out a bridge and cripple an airport. Not bad for a night's work.

It is a little melancholy to see Richard Burton reduced to playing cardboard parts like this one, but he at least manages to look as if he's having a good time. Director Brian G. Hutton apparently realizes that pace, not sense, is the essence of such absurd adventures. Whenever the plot mechanics are about to break down, he blithely blows something up.

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