Search - The Eagle Has Landed on DVD

MPAA Rating: PG Content Advisory: Mild Violence, Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1976 DVD Release: 10/17/2000 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Audio Tracks: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 14 mins Studio: Live/Artisan Total Copies: 1 Genres: Spy Film, War Adventure, War Spy Film See Also: The Eagle Has Landed, The Eagle Has Landed

John Sturges directed this taut adaptation of Jack Higgins' suspense novel about an attempted kidnapping of Winston Churchill by the German high command during World War II. When it is discovered that in November 1943 Winston Churchill is scheduled to spend a weekend in a country home in Norfolk, the Germans plan to kidnap him. Heinrich Himmler (Donald Pleasence), under orders from Hitler, assigns Nazi colonel Max Radl (Robert Duvall) the chore of sneaking the English-hating Irishman Liam Devlin (Donald Sutherland) into the British countryside and arranging for a 16-man task force to be parachuted into the English country town of Sudley Constable, under the auspices of Colonel Kurt Steiner (Michael Caine). The efficient planning works too well, and before long their exactingly perfect timetable begins to come apart. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Michael Caine - Col. Kurt Steiner
Donald Sutherland - Liam Devlin
Robert Duvall - Col. Max Radl
Jenny Agutter - Molly Prior
Donald Pleasence - Heinrich Himmler

Unless viewers were lucky enough to catch this movie in England, chances are that they never saw the full-length, 134-minute edition of The Eagle Has Landed that appears on this DVD. In fact, since the movie never made it to laserdisc, it's unlikely that many viewers even remember how good the widescreen image of this thriller looked. Like most of John Sturges' thrillers, the acting in The Eagle Has Landed is uniformly excellent, even though the characters are drawn a little thinly (and at times unconvincingly). The director also used wide-ranging location shooting, and the first 38 minutes go all over the map of Europe before reaching the tiny village where the German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill proceeds. The plot itself bears comparison with two much smaller (and better) British films made decades earlier, Michael Powell's The Spy in Black and Alberto Cavalcanti's Went the Day Well. While this picture lacks their heart and complexity, it does have size and scope. Coupled with Lalo Schifrin's big, pounding, lush score (which occasionally steals from his work for Mission: Impossible and Mannix, among other predecessors), the result is one of the last, great big-scale World War II thrillers to be released to theaters, a fitting finale to the career of the man who gave the world The Great Escape 13 years earlier. The action here is a lot less believable of course, as The Eagle Has Landed is a fictional tale, but it moves along at a brisk enough pace to keep the viewer from asking too many questions. The video transfer is extraordinarily good. The letterboxing enhances the impact of the images and the picture is as sharp and clear as possible. Even the scenes set in darkness reveal surprising detail and richness. The sound is, if anything, even better than the picture, picking up all of the vocal nuances in the story's multi-tiered game of deception and the impact and subtleties of the score. It's a shame that Sturges didn't live long enough to provide a reminiscence about the movie, and a trailer would have been a handy addition. The 31 chapters break the movie down very well into its relevant sections; one would like to say that the supplement is worthwhile, but it is more strange than anything else -- there are brief biographical sketches of the principal cast members and the director, as well as a biography of Winston Churchill that is well written but hardly relevant to the movie. The menu is straightforward and easy to manipulate, and comes up ahead of the movie. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide