Eagles Over London

It's the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. British soldiers fight bravely in a rear guard action. They encounter German soldiers dressed in British uniforms. They're killed and their identities stolen. The Germans secretly board the ships to England and work to sabotage the war effort. They zero in on the new radar installations.

No expense was spared in recreating Dunkirk. There are lots of extras and lots of explosions. Captain Paul Stevens is shown to have discovered the dead soldiers and he suspects infiltration. The problem is that he fails to catch the first guy. It seems like a great opportunity to confirm the situation to him so that when the higher ups refuse to accept it, it becomes even more intense. The fact that he gets full cooperation saps the movie of its potential tension. The other fact that an enemy gets so close to him detracts from the audience's opinion of the Captain. The problem is that the film loses intensity once they get home from Dunkirk.

There is a laughable miniature scene. There is bad history. The radar stations don't look like that. Most of them are located in remote places along the coast. The film becomes a lot flatter after a rip roaring start. The reinvention of the Battle of Britain gets to a wrong place. I guess that there is some good action. Even there, there is too much big dying in the shootouts. I'm willing to give this a pass for some fun action.

This is an odd case of casting, as the very American actor, Van Johnson, plays a British officer! However, despite this, the film looks very good for an Italian-made WWII film--sort of like a 'spaghetti' war film. For example, the Dunkirk scene was quite nice and had a pretty expansive look--with a relatively large cast and lots of ships. And SOME of the airplanes were done well (such as the fake He-111 cockpits--VERY nice). Unfortunately, the rest of the planes in the film are an odd lot--probably because the original models weren't available to the Italian film company. The German fighters were often American T-6s or even British Spitfires and the Spitfires were sometimes some odd plane (I assume Italian) that looks a bit like it but whose cockpit and undercarriage look more like that of the German Bf-109. To make it even more confusing, the exact same plane was often used interchangeably by BOTH sides in the film. And, at one point a British fighter plane becomes a Lysander observation plane. Clearly the film's attention to these sort of details was pretty poor...at best. And, late in the film the planes are CLEARLY cheap models. It's best to just close your eyes or so get a snack during these scenes because even if you don't care about these details, it still will confuse you.

The plot itself is rather clever. At Dunkirk, a group of Germans who speak English well are chosen to assume the identities of dead British soldiers. Then, when the British army is rescued, these agents can then infiltrate the country and eventually attack the Brit's most important secret weapon--their radar.

The bulk of the film is executed reasonably well (not always great--but not bad) and it's obvious they spend some money on the film. However, there were a few problems. The punching sounds in the fight scenes sounded EXACTLY like the punching sounds from a kung fu film! There also was a scene involving the killing of a German female agent and it was silly and WAY overdone--and completely unnecessary. All together, the film was very uneven but the good still far outweighed the bad. I would really love to see this film re-done--with a tighter script and more consistent special effects.

Using the chaos of the Dunkirk evacuation as a cover, several German agents take on the identities of English soldiers in order to gain access to England and take out the radar installations. One Captain aware of the ruse has to track the men down and stop them before the Germans can bomb England into surrendering.

Good, if a bit long, spy story set in London. there are several action set pieces that are quite good, though they suffer a great deal in pan and scan because of the use of multiple images. (Oh how this film cries out for a good letterbox edition.) This is the sort of film that grabs you from the first couple of moments and then drags you along at its conclusion. I really liked this and probably should have rated it higher than 6 but I think the viewing experience was really hindered by a lack of widescreen.

Worth searching out, especially if you can find a wide screen copy.

This is a surprisingly elaborate war film which tackles the same events as the big-budgeted BATTLE OF Britain (1969), but from an entirely different perspective - the infiltration of German spies into London prior to the Luftwaffe's aerial attack in order to destroy the RAF's infallible radar system, and British Captain Frederick Stafford's efforts to root them out in time.

While the generally slick presentation belies the modest funds that were obviously available, the overall achievement is still hurt by too much concession to elements particular to lowbrow film-making and especially some grating comic relief (culminating in a brawl between British and French soldiers) provided by Renzo Palmer - but there's also a baffling over-emphasis on the heroics of a French air ace (who's not even a major character!), as well as obviously choreographed stuntwork...not to mention the fact that every revelation in unmasking the Nazi plot is left to the ingenuity of one man, which makes one wonder just what would have become of Great Britain if Stafford hadn't been there!! Besides, even if I was watching the film in Italian, the fact that none of the cast is British or German is inescapable - which certainly doesn't award it any marks for authenticity!

Castellari's often flashy direction doesn't work either: shooting from odd angles (through a bullet hole in a helmet, through a pair of clasped hands or through a loudspeaker!) and utilizing distracting editorial techniques, such as his playful use of the split-screen - which is partially lost anyway, given that the aspect ratio on the print I watched has been changed from the original 2.35:1 to 1.85:1! The action-packed film (with a couple of romances thrown in for good measure) is enjoyable in itself but, even if flawed, BATTLE OF Britain is clearly superior (the familiar Euro-Cult faces here are no match for the roster of Britsh stars which populate that film!) - though they did engage the services of Bunuel regular Francisco Rabal (as a conscientious German) and American Van Johnson(!) as the British RAF officer in charge of the country's defense (who, in the final decisive action, takes to the skies himself to repel the invading Nazi forces).

If you know anything about WWII history this will have you either laughing at the ridiculousness of it all or raging at the inaccuracies (Warning - this film contains a PIAT-zooka). But beneath it all is a reasonable plot, with some classic characters, the hard as nails sarge, the clueless youngster., etc which make it still kinda fun.