Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 791.4372 DYE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 791.4372 DYE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In Zona , Geoff Dyer--'one of our most original writers' ( New York )--devoted a whole book to Andrei Tarkovsky's cult masterpiece, Stalker . Now, in this warm and funny tribute to one of his favorite movies, he revisits the action classic Where Eagles Dare . A thrilling Alpine adventure headlined by a magnificent, bleary-eyed Richard Burton and a dynamically lethargic Clint Eastwood, Where Eagles Dare is the apex of 1960s war movies, by turns enjoyable and preposterous. 'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy' is Dyer's hilarious tribute to a film he has loved since childhood: it's a scene-by-scene analysis--or should that be send-up?--taking us from the movie's snowy, Teutonic opening credits to its vertigo-inducing climax.
Author Notes
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958. He currently lives in London.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This slim volume from critic and novelist Dyer (White Sands) is a witty gem of personally inflected film analysis. Moving scene by scene through the 1969 WWII action epic Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton as commandos who infiltrate a German-held Alpine castle, Dyer lovingly and obsessively dissects a film that's held a special place in his imagination ever since his first boyhood viewing, so that he calls this study "a chapter from an autobiography." He shows off an exquisite eye for visual detail and actorly gesture; praising Eastwood's graceful and unhurried movements, he describes the star's character rigging "explosives as though setting the table for a leisurely dinner that might be served sometime in the next five or six days." He also exhibits an impressive breadth of reference, name-checking Doctor Who's TARDIS and quoting Rilke within two short pages. In footnotes, Dyer is breezily reminiscent, as when he muses about always stumbling upon the film on late-night TV at the exact same scene and nodding off 10 minutes later, as if it was the only sequence that's ever broadcast. The book complements a popcorn classic while functioning in quite a different register-in place of grandiose, visceral big-screen thrills, Dyer's fleet work gives off a playful, often funny intellectual high. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A literary heavyweight escorts us through Where Eagles Dare, the 1968 film that somehow managed to catch him by the necktie and not let gofor decades.In his latest book, Dyer (Writer-in-Residence/Univ. of Southern California; The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, 2018, etc.), who has won the Somerset Maugham Prize and the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, among many others, wastes little time getting down to business. He chronicles the principal players in the film, Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, reminding us of the former's problems with alcohol and Elizabeth Taylor and of the latter's Dirty Harry films and his limitations as an actor: "Squinting is pretty much the limit of Eastwood's facial range." Although the author is a bit puzzled by his fondness for a World War II action flick, he confesses he watches it whenever it appears on TV, and he has clearly memorized the plot and much of the dialogue. Along for the tour is William Shakespeare. Dyer reminds us early on that the film's title is from Richard III; he offers allusions to Hamlet and Othello, and the final line of the book (before a backmatter note) echoes Prospero in The Tempest. Other notables pop up throughout the fluid narrative, from Charles Bronson to Ken Kesey. Dyer also displays his sense of humor, telling us that Lady Macbeth cleans her bloody knife "before she goes all PTSD." Speaking of knives, the author also reveals the quickest way to dispatch someone with a blade. Ever the sharp-eyed observer, he also points out a number of anachronisms that escaped the filmmakers. Finally, he endeavors to place the final portion of the film (when the successful heroes flee the Nazi castle) in the tradition of other getaway films.An erudite and amusing love song to a loved one the writer knows is not all that deserving. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Dyer is that rare breed of creative nonfiction writer who can take almost any topic (jazz, yoga, D. H. Lawrence) and make it his own. Here it's movies, or, rather, one particular movie, Where Eagles Dare, a 1968 WWII film starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It is one of Dyer's favorites, a movie he's seen countless times. This insightful, funny, and wildly enthusiastic book is essentially the literary version of live-tweeting a film: Dyer takes us through the movie almost scene by scene, providing a running commentary not just on the action, but also on how the movie interacts with the viewer, noting oddities along the way, like whether the names of two characters, Harrod and Carnaby, just happen to be the names of one of London's most famous stores and one of its most fashionable streets, or whether they are "code for some kind of psycho-retail geography of the city. If you've never seen Where Eagles Dare, there's still plenty to enjoy here, thanks to Dyer's irrepressible style; but if you're a fan of the film, you can't ask for a more entertaining companion book.--David Pitt Copyright 2019 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
Meanwhile, at dusk--even allowing for the fact that it's winter, the day has been stunningly short--the Eagles sneak across the snowy railroad tracks, in the wake of a freight train whose role will not extend beyond this cameo appearance (a sad decline from the recent glory years of Von Ryan's Express [1965], starring Frank Sinatra, and The Train [1964], with Burt Lancaster). They let themselves into a storage unit where Eastwood and Burton strip off their parkas and pull out greatcoats and caps from their small but apparently bottomless rucksacks. They have not packed lightly, these two; they have enough clothes and equipment to keep the Sherpas on an inter-war Everest expedition employed for much of the climbing season. Working within the confines of a smaller costume budget, the others do what they can, reversing their parkas from snowy-white to wintery camouflage. Thus arrayed, like any bunch of lads on a stag weekend, they head into the village of Werfen for a bit of the old après-ski (minus the skiing), a little apprehensive, naturally, this being their first night out on the streets of the resort. The pitched roofs are laden with snow, the streets are bustling with troops and vehicles, and there's so much parping of horns it sounds like an Alpine equivalent of Cairo. They choose a tavern at random--we'll try this one behind us, says Burton, though as with most things he says he's not saying but ordering. He tells them to keep their ears open for anything about General Carnaby, but it seems a lame excuse for that which needs no excuse, namely getting into the bar and getting a few down them. It's a cosy place with foaming steins, a really festive Bavarian atmosphere and no obviously anti-Semitic conversation. You can't help thinking what fun it would be to attend a fancy-dress party like this in real life, even though you'd catch hell from the tabloids, especially since the guests include none other than the blond beast Von Hapen, in his medal-bedecked Gestapo costume. For once Burton is not the one doing the ordering; it's Eastwood who orders drinks at the bar, thereby raising the possibility that, for all his swagger, command and much-publicized love of drink and his willingness to splash out vast sums of money on diamonds, Burton might be that lowest, most treacherous form of British life: a round-dodger, a conscientious-drink-buying-objector and all-round round-shirker. Even this suspicion only slightly clouds the rest of the group's belief that this is surely the best of all Second World War mission-capers, way better than scaling the cliffs of Navarone, sweating your malarial bollocks off on that ghastly bridge over the River Kwai or waiting for Telly Savalas to flip his sicko lid in The Dirty Dozen . A top night seems guaranteed as long as they can keep up their German and not be tricked into letting their conversational guard down, as fatally happened, six years earlier, to Gordon Jackson as he boarded a bus in The Great Escape (before enjoying extended small-screen resurrections in Upstairs Downstairs and The Professionals ). This seems unlikely, since they are all, as we learned in the briefing, so fluent in German that it sounds indistinguishable from English. That fluency is casually conveyed by the way Eastwood casually asks for 'two beers' as though he's in a bar in Dodge City or Telluride during the film festival. He feels quite at home, in other words, which is not surprising given that it's essentially a western saloon with chaps in German uniforms instead of chaps. They've only had a couple of sips when Burton leaves Eastwood at the bar, sits down with some German officers, grabs the dirndl-clad waitress and plonks her down on his lap. He whistles a song at her--code!--and whispers (though it's still an order, a whispered order) to meet him in the woodshed. He's the kind of man who's always meeting women in some kind of shed. Then he tells her--another order--to slap him across the face, which she does, with some gusto, before flouncing off convincingly. The other German officers at the table are not impressed by this display of grab-ass boorishness, so Burton puts them in their place by telling them that he's Himmler's brother--which roughly translates as saying he's a bigger star than any of them, earns the kind of money a bunch of extras could only dream of and, most important, could drink the lot of them under this very table any night of the week. (That's probably a generous translation in light of the opinion of Germans confided by Burton to his diary the year after the film's release: 'Even when they are at their fat chuckling meerschaum-smoking jolly best I see the jew-baiting death's head under the jiggling flesh and the goose-step and the gas-chambers.') Back at the bar, he and Eastwood inhale a couple of cognacs before Burton slips off to the woodshed, leaving Eastwood to keep an eye on things, i.e. to squint. But he's not just squinting, he's squinting in German. In the woodshed it's not the barmaid waiting for boorish Burton--it's Mary Ure, whom he promptly tells to take off her clothes. She's surprised but not unwilling, ready to obey, maybe even turned on somewhat by his German uniform in a 'Fascinating Fascism,' Night-Porter ish way, but he doesn't want to get into her pants, he wants to get her into the castle. Helping Mary off with her boots--though even help comes in the form of an order: give me that boot--he explains that the plane with General Carnaby-Street aboard wasn't shot down, it crash-landed, riddled with bullet holes--British bullets, but a hole is a hole is a hole, he says, in a theatrical triple entendre. And General Carnaby is not really General Carnaby; the person they think is General Carnaby knows no more about the Second Front than Burton knows about the back end--what a shame he didn't say 'side' instead of 'end'--of the moon. By association, then, it's obvious he's got more on his mind than the mission as he helps her take off the other boot and explains that the person being held prisoner is an ex-actor, Cartwright-Jones, probably second-rate, playing the role of General Carnaby. Suddenly things have all got rather meta, especially since it's actually Robert Beatty who's playing the role of the actor (Cartwright-Jones) playing the part of Carnaby-Street. He didn't need to be talked into it, Burton explains, he volunteered--what actor wouldn't? Well, one who didn't have Burton's enormous need for money might have thought twice but, yes, in many ways it's a method actor's dream, an opportunity for immersion in character so total that it's highly likely he'll not make it out of the Schloss alive. As Burton says, it might be a short engagement. A one-night stand, says the ever-hopeful Mary.* * Turning on the TV and surfing through the channels, I am always happy to stumble across Where Eagles Dare . The strange thing is that I always bump into the same bit-- this bit. If it's late and I'm drunk I only watch for ten minutes or so, which means that I've seen the sequence beginning roughly with Burton leaving the bar or Heidi entering the woodshed more times than any other part of the film. Is some hidden order of the world revealed by this statistically improbable outcome? Or is it not so improbable after all? Perhaps transmission of the film has tended to start at a time that increases the chances that I will encounter it at this point. A third alternative is that only this fragment of the film is ever broadcast. Excerpted from 'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy': Watching 'Where Eagles Dare' by Geoff Dyer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.