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'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy'

Watching 'Where Eagles Dare'

Author Geoff Dyer
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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.
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-Porterish 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.
“Dyer’s funniest book yet.” —Michael Ondaatje

“Dyer can’t help writing brilliant sentences.” —The Guardian

“The magpie eclecticism of Geoff Dyer is something to wonder at. His books are like party turns, each one different from the last while all bearing his distinctly puckish signature.” —Financial Times
 
“A short, eccentric, hugely enjoyable work that succeeds admirably in capturing the daft exuberance of Where Eagles Dare.’ —The Literary Review

“Dyer’s wry humour is everywhere evident. . . . ‘There is never a dull moment in Where
Eagles Dare,’ [Dyer] writes, and nor is there in this book.” —The Sunday Times (London)
 
“A witty gem of personally inflected film analysis. . . . Dyer lovingly and obsessively dissects a film that’s held a special place in his imagination ever since his first boyhood viewing. . . . [His] fleet work gives off a playful, often funny intellectual high.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“[Dyer is] funny and he’s a very good writer.” —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Moreishly entertaining. . . . A brilliant, intellectually sparkling critic.” —The Sunday Telegraph
 
“An embarrassment of belly laughs. . . . It’s a sort of mash-up of mini-memoir and maxi-film-review. It is completely unjustifiable and delightfully apt. That’s its charm: it’s the strangest bird of a book you’re liable to take up anytime soon.” —Associated Press
 
“An erudite and amusing love song to a loved one.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“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. . . . This insightful, funny, and wildly enthusiastic book is essentially the literary version of live-tweeting a film.” —Booklist
 
“[A] freewheeling, rule-breaking, wholly original, scene-by-scene sprint through the crazy action film Where Eagles Dare. . . . I defy anyone not to laugh at Dyer’s description of Clint Eastwood’s talent for squinting.” —Craig Brown, Daily Mail
 
“A delightful celebration.” —The Irish Times
 
“Dyer is one of the most stylish writers alive. . . . [He] loved [Where Eagles Dare] as a child, but he doesn’t make the fatal sentimental mistake of worrying over the gap between that affection and what it feels like to see the film today. Instead he just drops right in and begins describing it. Like all of Dyer’s genres, it’s a deceptively difficult stunt to pull off—recreating what it’s like to watch a film in front of you, frame by frame.” —LitHub
 
“[A] funny and profound tribute . . . a book I wish I’d written myself.” —Aidan Scott, The Scotsman
© Matt Stuart

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. www.geoffdyer.com

View titles by Geoff Dyer

About

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.

Excerpt

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-Porterish 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.

Reviews

“Dyer’s funniest book yet.” —Michael Ondaatje

“Dyer can’t help writing brilliant sentences.” —The Guardian

“The magpie eclecticism of Geoff Dyer is something to wonder at. His books are like party turns, each one different from the last while all bearing his distinctly puckish signature.” —Financial Times
 
“A short, eccentric, hugely enjoyable work that succeeds admirably in capturing the daft exuberance of Where Eagles Dare.’ —The Literary Review

“Dyer’s wry humour is everywhere evident. . . . ‘There is never a dull moment in Where
Eagles Dare,’ [Dyer] writes, and nor is there in this book.” —The Sunday Times (London)
 
“A witty gem of personally inflected film analysis. . . . Dyer lovingly and obsessively dissects a film that’s held a special place in his imagination ever since his first boyhood viewing. . . . [His] fleet work gives off a playful, often funny intellectual high.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“[Dyer is] funny and he’s a very good writer.” —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Moreishly entertaining. . . . A brilliant, intellectually sparkling critic.” —The Sunday Telegraph
 
“An embarrassment of belly laughs. . . . It’s a sort of mash-up of mini-memoir and maxi-film-review. It is completely unjustifiable and delightfully apt. That’s its charm: it’s the strangest bird of a book you’re liable to take up anytime soon.” —Associated Press
 
“An erudite and amusing love song to a loved one.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“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. . . . This insightful, funny, and wildly enthusiastic book is essentially the literary version of live-tweeting a film.” —Booklist
 
“[A] freewheeling, rule-breaking, wholly original, scene-by-scene sprint through the crazy action film Where Eagles Dare. . . . I defy anyone not to laugh at Dyer’s description of Clint Eastwood’s talent for squinting.” —Craig Brown, Daily Mail
 
“A delightful celebration.” —The Irish Times
 
“Dyer is one of the most stylish writers alive. . . . [He] loved [Where Eagles Dare] as a child, but he doesn’t make the fatal sentimental mistake of worrying over the gap between that affection and what it feels like to see the film today. Instead he just drops right in and begins describing it. Like all of Dyer’s genres, it’s a deceptively difficult stunt to pull off—recreating what it’s like to watch a film in front of you, frame by frame.” —LitHub
 
“[A] funny and profound tribute . . . a book I wish I’d written myself.” —Aidan Scott, The Scotsman

Author

© Matt Stuart

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. www.geoffdyer.com

View titles by Geoff Dyer