Authors: Richard Schickel
For Clint, he was another in the long line of loquacious men, as quick with their opinions and wit as he is shy with them, whose company he enjoys. “He was very, very different than I was,” he says of Burton, “but yet not in a lot of ways.” Which is a way of saying they had both known the bite of hard times and shared a reluctance to carelessly expose their deeper feelings. They also discovered, within the first few days of meeting, that they signed on for
Where Eagles Dare
(or “
Where Doubles Dare,” as Clint apparently dubbed it at the time) for similar reasons. Someone asked Burton why he was doing the picture, and he replied, “Because Clint’s doing it.” Whereupon Clint said he had committed to it “because Richard’s doing it.”
If it now made good sense for Clint to associate with prestigious actors in high-budget projects, Burton, too, needed to make some new associations. In the years immediately before and after his marriage to Taylor in 1964 he had enjoyed his largest popular successes
(The V.I.P.s, The Sandpiper)
and his greatest critical success
(Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
working with her. But his Broadway
Hamlet
had, at best, a mixed reception and was tainted by the media circus that staked its tents nearby. His other films of this period
(Becket, The Night of the Iguana, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold)
had not proved that he could carry a picture commercially without resorting to his jointly held celebrity. His more recent pictures with Taylor (
The Taming of the Shrew
, a filmed version of their theatrical production of
Doctor Faustus
and
The Comedians
) had failed, and they could not have had high hopes for their recently completed
Boom!
—a deeply disastrous adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
.
Some sources suggest that Burton initiated
Where Eagles Dare
by telling his friend Elliot Kastner, an American and a former agent who was partnered with Jerry Gershwin in a London-based company specializing in expensive international coproduction, that he wanted to do something that he could take his sons to see. In any event, it made sense for him to work with a rising action star in a picture that had no artistic pretense and appealed to the male audience; by so doing he might establish himself in what amounted to a new field for him. And commercially, this pairing of supposed cowboy and supposed intellectual made sense; it might conceivably bring two normally disparate audiences to the movie.
Kastner spared no expense to achieve this end. The rest of the cast was first-rate (it included Mary Ure in a costarring role and such worthies as Patrick Wymark, Michael Hordern and Donald Houston in supporting parts), and the director, Brian G. Hutton, a former actor and TV director who had just finished another Kastner-Gershwin thriller,
Sol Madrid
, had all the time and budget he needed to master difficult conditions.
Clint liked him, and they had only one awkward moment, early in the picture, after Clint encountered a friend of his, an actor he had previously worked with, in his hotel lobby. When he asked the man what he was doing in Salzburg, he replied that he had driven in with his girlfriend from Hamburg, where they lived, because she was up for a small part in the picture. Clint, however, knew the role had already been cast and asked Hutton what was going on.
“
I’m just going through the motions,” he said, “because the girl who has been cast has an in with one of the producers, and we’re trying to make it look legit.”
This brought back all the anger he had felt at the carelessness and in-sensitivity he had experienced as a struggling actor. “I just got incensed,” he would later recall. “What do you mean, you’re ‘just going through the motions’?” he said. “How can you do this? You’re an ex-actor yourself. You know what it’s like.”
“Well, I’m getting this pressure to do it.”
“Well, just stop it, because I’m not going be part of it.”
Clint was establishing one of the patterns by which he would exercise his newfound power; the feelings of actors were—and are—to be treated with elaborate sensitivity. That power, it should be noted, was greatly enhanced by the film’s eventual commercial success. As Hirshan would later say, it “became an Eastwood picture, not a Burton picture,” despite his client’s second billing. By this he means that within the industry Clint was perceived as the star whose presence made it go with the broad, action-oriented audience.
For Burton, alas, the picture turned out to be an end, not a beginning—the end to his brief run as a major movie star. About all he gained from
Where Eagles Dare
was Kastner’s long-term loyalty; he employed the actor in something like a half-dozen subsequent movies, all of them box-office failures, like virtually every other movie Burton did in the course of the erratic downward spiral that consumed the rest of his life.
As for the film itself, Quentin Tarantino, one of its comparatively rare fans, accurately described it, in the course of a colloquy with Robert Zemeckis, as a “
bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission” movie. “Isn’t
that the one where Clint Eastwood kills more guys than anybody else in movie history?” Zemeckis asked when Tarantino raised the subject.
Yes, that’s the one, another work in what was then a popular subgenre, owing much of that popularity to the very man who wrote this screenplay—his first—Alistair MacLean. He specialized in what the English like to call “Boy’s Own” adventure stories (after the Edwardian children’s magazine), and it was the hugely successful adaptation of his novel
The Guns of Navarone
in 1961 that had begun this movie trend. Indeed, it is said that the reason MacLean decided to write an original screenplay was that all his other tales had either been made as movies or were under option for that purpose. Kastner persuaded him to this unfamiliar task by assuring him he could always novelize the screenplay later, which he did.
The soldiers’ ostensible mission is rescuing a captured American general, who was supposed to be privy to the plans for D Day, before the Nazis, who are holding him in a remote
Schloss
(reachable only by cable car), can make him talk. But that’s just a pretext—the general is really an actor hired to sow confusion in the enemy’s ranks. Alone of the group parachuted into the Austrian Alps (and obliged to wear German uniforms in order to penetrate the Nazi lair) Burton’s character, John Smith, knows that their operation is really designed to expose a ring of double agents operating within British intelligence. This information is long withheld from the audience. We know only that there is a traitor among the invading group, with suspicion being directed at Smith for some time. It is not until the climax that the chief villain is revealed to be the London spymaster who sent them forth.
It’s less a plot than an excuse for a lot of violent, essentially meaningless action, nicely characterized by Tarantino: “
Eastwood would just stand at the top of the stairs and wait for the Nazis to congregate, and then mow them down.” Yet even though he came to dominate such memories of the film as people retain, Clint’s character, Lieutenant Morris Schaffer, can scarcely be said to dominate the film. He does not speak German, which means he has to stand mute in the enemy’s presence, and even when it is safe for the agents to talk among themselves, Burton, as the unit’s leader, has all the best lines.
One gets the impression that, as the production inched along, Clint was generous to his costar on-screen and protective of him off-screen. This was his kind of picture, not Burton’s, and he was doing what he could to ease his colleague’s way. It was, Clint quickly observed, booze, more than the rigors of production, from which Burton needed protection. His capacity for it was, to Clint, amazing. As was his ability, most
of the time, to carry it without visible ill effects—“just one eye sagging a little, but that’s about it.”
Nevertheless, there were times when alcohol rendered Burton balky. There was, for example, a sequence in which he and Clint, mounted on a motorcycle with a sidecar, are supposed to speed down an icy, twisting road, pausing now and then to affix dynamite sticks to high-tension towers, the plan being to detonate the explosives later on, when they are making their escape. The sequence was scheduled for early afternoon, and Burton appeared weaving slightly and dubiously eyeing the antique motorcycle he was supposed to pilot.
“You
can
drive this thing, can’t you, Richard?” Brian Hutton inquired. Burton replied with an incomprehensible, but not exactly reassuring, mumble. At which point Clint stepped forward. He was a veteran cyclist—at the time he owned two such vehicles—and happily volunteered a role reversal: “I tell you what, Brian, I’ll drive it and Richard rides.”
Relief all around, Hutton now pressed on to outline the rest of the business. Clint would skid to a stop, and Burton would hop out, attach the dynamite sticks (actually balsa wood and, of course, carrying no charges), hop back in, and they would speed off to the next stop (and the next shot).
“I don’t handle explosives, Brian,” said Burton, now obviously quite out of things. “What?”
“I don’t handle explosives.”
“But it’s balsa wood, Richard.”
The star, woozily intent on asserting his prerogatives, shook his head adamantly.
“And Brian’s looking at me like, ‘Damn this guy,’ ” Clint recalls.
So the director manqué offered another suggestion: “I say, ‘Richard, look, why don’t we do this? Just you put this one set of balsa-wood things down here and then there’s a hostel down the road. We’ll go down there and have a shot, you and I.’ ”
“Good idea,” Burton enthused. “Good idea.”
“So I go back to Brian and I say, ‘OK. You’ve got one shot on this, so you better get it.’ ” This, happily, he did.
Eventually they wrapped in Austria and moved on to studio work in London—much of it fussy rear- and front-screen-projection special effects. There, if anything, Burton spent more time drinking; he had a number of favorite pubs to which he introduced Clint, who could be counted on to get him back to the soundstage more or less on time, in more or less functioning condition, for their next call. The indulgences
with which Burton was favored are sometimes visible on-screen. There was, for example, a sequence, shot in the studio, in which he and Clint are supposed to be pulling themselves up the castle walls on ropes, hand over hand. Clint is visibly straining as he toils upward, while the older and manifestly less-fit Burton seems to be making the climb effortlessly. But he was positioned on a crane and only had to mime his ascent, while Clint had to pull himself up under his own power.
Clint shrugs ironically at this memory. By this time he was increasingly preoccupied by Maggie’s rapidly impending delivery, increasingly impatient with delays in production, which by early May was a month over schedule. Film and nature were now in a race to the finish line, with Clint equally impotent to speed up the former or slow down the latter. While he seethed, his parents came down to Los Angeles to be with Maggie, and his father called Clint to tell him that the birth was no more than a few days off. Two more days, Clint said. Two more days and I’ll be out of here. “Just hold tight,” he said to his wife.
But that was impossible. Kyle Eastwood was born in St. John’s Hospital, in Santa Monica, on Sunday, May 19, 1968. In London, Burton’s response was predictable: “Let’s go out and celebrate.” So was Clint’s. “Wait a second,” he said. “I don’t want to go out drinking in pubs. I want to get the hell out of here.” A day or two later, he did.
Despite the fact that Clint’s character in
Where Eagles Dare
was the most abstract figure he ever played—a pure killing machine, vouchsafed not a single humanizing moment, romantic or comic—it did not stir the kind of agitated comment his work for Leone had or his work as Dirty Harry soon would. This is the more remarkable when one recalls that it went into release in 1969, when antiwar sentiments were at their height in the United States and such headlong displays of ‘“traditional” masculinity were at a deep discount in the better cultural circles.
But this was the kind of film that does not bring out the best in critics and no one had anything very interesting to say about it.
Time
dubbed it “Mission Ridiculous,” and found it “melancholy” to see Burton in it.
Life
called it “inelegant” while Vincent Canby in
The New York Times
thought it had so many predictable situations that it threatened to become “as numbing as an overdose of novocaine,” but somehow didn’t. In general, the range of response to the movie was very narrow, from amiable dismissal to amiable indulgence—formulaic responses to formulaic filmmaking. The ironic appeal of
Where Eagles Dare
for a subversive, postmodernist like Quentin Tarantino is much more interesting to consider. In his films, typically, people get killed because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time—that is to say, they die quite whimsically, proving, at best, that we live in a chance universe. Equally typically,
his films—like Leone’s, like any that actually make us feel the astonishment of sudden, violent death—are criticized because they offer no obvious moral justification for the deaths they deal out; lack of same, in fact, being their basic moral point. Thus in Tarantino’s remarks about this movie one may read a sort of seriocomic envy for the ease and simplicity with which moral questions about mass mayhem, at least as absurd as any presented in
Reservoir Dogs
or
Pulp Fiction
(or
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
), are elided.
The nameless creatures who die so unceremoniously, without evoking more than a bemused response from the audience, are brothers under the skin to Tarantino’s wrong place—wrong time victims. The thought that, in reality, these German soldiers were probably draftees, that some of them must surely have doubted the cause that obliged their service, that most of them must just have been dumb kids like so many of our own soldiers, does not occur to us, especially since they are slaughtered en masse, impersonally, usually at some distance from the camera. Hey, they’re Nazis—and dumb Nazis at that. Let’s rub out a bunch more.