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A review by mwx1010
'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy': On Where Eagles Dare by Geoff Dyer
3.0
This is a very strange little book.
I picked it up on the back of Zona, Dyer’s earlier book on Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but this is a very different proposition. This is not really a huge surprise as on the face of it there’s very little to link Stalker, rated as a masterpiece of Russian cinema and one of the greatest films of all time with this book’s subject - Where Eagles Dare, a by the numbers piece of studio film-making not likely to appear on a list of the masterpieces of any kind of cinema.
This is not really so much a work of film criticism as a scene-by-scene retelling of the entire film with asides and observations - Dyer’s book works as something of a written commentary track.
It’s all very slight but Dyer does have an engaging turn of phrase and this is an enjoyable way to waste an hour or two, particularly for British readers of a certain age who were raised on endless TV reruns of the film.
I picked it up on the back of Zona, Dyer’s earlier book on Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but this is a very different proposition. This is not really a huge surprise as on the face of it there’s very little to link Stalker, rated as a masterpiece of Russian cinema and one of the greatest films of all time with this book’s subject - Where Eagles Dare, a by the numbers piece of studio film-making not likely to appear on a list of the masterpieces of any kind of cinema.
This is not really so much a work of film criticism as a scene-by-scene retelling of the entire film with asides and observations - Dyer’s book works as something of a written commentary track.
It’s all very slight but Dyer does have an engaging turn of phrase and this is an enjoyable way to waste an hour or two, particularly for British readers of a certain age who were raised on endless TV reruns of the film.