Movies - The Eagle Has Landed

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	Movies - The Eagle Has Landed

The Eagle Has Landed is a book by Jack Higgins first published in 1975. It was made into a film in 1976. The plot has some similarities with that of Went the Day Well?

The book is still in print, as it was reissued in New York by Berkley Books in 2000 with ISBN 0425177181

The film was directed by John Sturges and starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall. The majority of the film, set in the fictional village of Studley Constable, was filmed at the village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire and features the village church, Mapledurham Watermill and Mapledurham House. The sequence set in Alderney was filmed in Charlestown, near St Austell in Cornwall. Some of the filming took place at RAF St. Mawgan, near Newquay, in Cornwall.

Shortly after the brilliant (real life) rescue of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny, a similar idea is proposed to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Anthony Quayle), head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) by Hitler and strongly supported by Himmler. Canaris is asked to provide a feasibility study of the seemingly impossible task of capturing Prime Minister Winston Churchill and returning him to the Reich. Canaris considers the idea a joke and realizes that although Hitler will soon forget the matter, Himmler will not. Fearing Himmler may try to discredit him, Canaris orders one of his officers, Oberst (Colonel) Radl (Duvall) to undertake the study, despite feeling that Germany has already lost the war.

Radl and an Unteroffizier on his staff investigate and find that one of their spies, code named Starling, has provided a tantalizing piece of intelligence. "At any other time, in any other place, this information would be useless" Radl says. "And then Synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is reported to be visiting an airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey, a South African woman and German spy, lives. They quickly find an agent to send to contact Mrs. Grey, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland).

Radl needs to recruit a team of commandos to carry out the operation, and decide that a German Fallschirmjäger Officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner (Caine), is perfect for the job. What Radl doesn't know is that while returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervenes as SS soldiers round up Jews at a railway station in Poland, attempting to save the life of a teenaged girl who is shot while escaping. He is subsequently court-martialled along with a platoon of his men. Rather than face death at the hands of the military justice system, the men are given the option of facing death in a punishment unit in the Channel Islands where they make suicidal attacks with manned torpedos against British channel convoys.

Radl travels to Guernsey and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his men as well as a Luftwaffe pilot named Gericke who will fly the team into the UK in a captured C-47 in Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops, as few of them speak English, and plan to infiltrate Studley Constable and complete their mission, rendezvousing with an E-Boat on the nearby coast and making their escape.

The film lacks many details of the novel, including Kurt Steiner's father, General Steiner, who is held by the Gestapo as additional incentive for Oberst Steiner to perform well. Also, a member of an American SS unit features in the novel but is absent in the film. Some concepts, such as Joanna Grey's hatred of the English due to her South African heritage and experiences, are not made clear in the film version.

The plan is ultimately foiled when a German paratrooper rescues a local girl from a water wheel, being killed in the process and his German uniform (worn under the Polish uniforms as assurances against being executed as spies) revealed to the village people. The locals are rounded up, but the daughter of Father Vereker, the local vicar, escapes to a base of American Rangers, where Captain Clark (Treat Williams) is forced to organize a second attack on the German forces after Colonel Pitt (Larry Hagman) is killed in a poorly planned assault.

Oberst Steiner, the only survivor of the mission, evades capture and manages to find Churchill's lodgings, shooting him before being killed by Churchill's security staff. The security staff then note to Captain Clark that Churchill was really a variety artist posing as Churchill, who was in actuality in Tehran at the Tehran Conference.

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