Agents die lonely

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Agents die lonely
Original title Where Eagles Dare
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1968
length 158 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Brian G. Hutton
script Alistair MacLean
production Denis Holt
Elliott Kastner
music Ron Goodwin
camera Arthur Ibbetson
cut John Jympson
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
The Killer Ship

Successor  →
Force 10 From Navarone

The Hohenwerfen Fortress served in the film as the fictional fortress "Schloss Adler"

Agents die lonely (Original title: Where Eagles Dare ) is a British - American agents - war film from 1968. The film set in World War II was made into a film by the American director Brian G. Hutton based on a script by Alistair MacLean . A special command of the British secret service is supposed to free a US general from a German prisoner of war.

action

Winter 1943/44: American Brigadier General George Carnaby is one of the highest officers involved in D-Day planning during World War II . His plane was shot down on the flight to Crete and Carnaby was taken prisoner . In order to interrogate him about the imminent invasion of the Allies, the Wehrmacht brings him to the headquarters of the German Alpine Corps, the heavily fortified castle complex "Schloss Adler". A British special unit , led by the experienced Major John Smith, is supposed to free Carnaby so that he does not divulge important information. The hand-picked soldiers are instructed by Colonel Wyatt Turner and Admiral Rolland from the MI6 intelligence service . The US-American Lieutenant Morris Schaffer of the United States Army Rangers is assigned to the command as an elite fighter. Agent Mary Ellison, deployed in the operational area of ​​MI6, accompanies the mission in secret; her presence is only known to Smith, with whom she has a relationship.

Under the cover of dawn, Smith and his team parachute over the Alps. A little later they find the command's radio operator dead; Smith realizes that his neck has been broken. Disguised as German soldiers, they go to an inn in the nearby village of Werfen. Smith leaves the building briefly for a secret chat with a British agent who works at the inn under the name "Heidi". Meanwhile, a second member of the unit is killed. Back at the inn, Smith and his men are arrested on some pretext. While driving for her interrogation, Smith and Schaffer, separated from the other three men, are able to kill their guards. With some effort they manage to penetrate the castle, which can only be reached by cable car. They are supported by Agent Ellison, who got a job as a maid at the castle.

There Smith and Schaffer advance to the German commandant and watch as General Rosemeyer and SS-Standartenführer Kramer are interrogating US General Carnaby. They learn that the three other survivors of the liberation squad are German agents who have sneaked into the British military. Smith and Schaffer take the group by surprise and can disarm the Germans. But then Smith surprisingly keeps Schaffer in check with his weapon. He claims to be in truth Major Johann Schmidt, a member of the military defense service. He had thwarted the liberation of the general, who is actually just an American actor named Cartwright Jones, and accused the three German spies of actually working for England. To substantiate his statements, he was identified by telephone from a German major in Italy. As further evidence, he wrote down the name of his commanding officer, the top German spy in England, for Kramer, whom the Standartenführer confirmed as correct. He also instructs the three alleged defectors to write down the names of their agents in England so that they can be compared with his list. However, in another surprising twist, it turns out that he does not own such a list. Smith does not work for the Germans, and the three German agents are not defectors either, but were exposed by the British and assigned to this mission specifically. The aim of the mission was not to rescue the supposed general, but to uncover double agents within the British secret service MI6. This has succeeded, since now the lists of traitors noted by the three German spies are in Smith's possession.

Meanwhile, Gestapo SS Sturmbannführer von Hapen, who has become suspicious of a conversation with agent Ellison, bursts into the middle of the situation, which then escalates and in which all German officers are killed. Smith and Schaffer flee with Jones and Ellison and the three tied up German double agents, while several explosives prepared in advance by the group cause confusion. During the escape, the three German spies are all killed. Pursued by the Germans, the group goes to the Oberhausen military airfield in an omnibus with an attached snow plow. With further explosions and exchanges of fire, they can finally leave the pursuers behind. They are picked up at the airfield with an apparently captured Ju 52 from the secret service; Colonel Turner is personally on board. On the flight back to England, Smith reveals the name of the top German spy to his supervisor: Turner himself. The double agent thus exposed, who would be brought to court-martial as a result, wants to save himself from going to the scaffold and asks Smith for an alternative. With his permission, he committed suicide by jumping out of the plane without a parachute.

Emergence

Hollywood star Richard Burton , whose previous films had flopped, turned to film producer Elliott Kastner to put his career back on the right track. The established author Alistair MacLean , who had worldwide success with The Guns of Navarone in 1961 , was entrusted with writing a suitable script. MacLean wrote the original screenplay for Agents Die Lonely - which he later adapted into a hit novel - in just six weeks. Clint Eastwood , who at that time was already one of the most popular action stars and was used to leading roles himself, was supposed to play the second leading role alongside Burton and could only get an enormous salary of $ 800,000 (today's equivalent depending on the conversion method used between 5 and 16 Million dollars).

The shooting took place between January and May 1968 in Austria in the villages of Werfen , Lofer , Ebensee and Aigen im Ennstal . The Hohenwerfen Fortress , 40 km south of Salzburg, served as Adler Castle in the film . The Fiala Fernbrugg air base served as the Oberhausen airfield.

The cable car is the (old) Feuerkogel cable car in Ebensee ( Salzkammergut , Upper Austria ).

The well-known Salzburg mountaineer Marcus Schmuck was the location scout .

There are some major errors and anachronisms in the equipment, for example, in several scenes Saurer armored personnel carriers from the 1960s, a Gräf & Stift car (the body is a city bus) and a Bell 47 helicopter, both from the Shown in 1950s. You can also see a freight car of the former Deutsche Bundesbahn .

film records

Others

  • The British band Iron Maiden took up the topic in their song of the same name Where Eagles Dare (from the album Piece of Mind , 1983).
  • The very catchy and dynamic film music by Ron Goodwin is popular .
  • The radio message Broadsword calls Danny Boy ( English Broadsword calling Danny Boy ), with which Burton calls the English secret service center several times, has become a popular phrase in England that is often used in a humorous way when making calls.
  • The armored personnel carrier in the village, which can be seen in two scenes, is an armored personnel carrier SPz A1 of the Österreichische Saurerwerke , the prototype of which was only manufactured from 1958.
  • The PC - Game No One Lives Forever takes in his last game sequence with respect to the film.
  • The Ju 52 aircraft used in the film came from the Swiss Air Force (A-702) and wore the white and gray camouflage pattern from the film until the early 1980s. It was handed over to Ju-Air on October 15, 1982 and registered as HB-HOT on July 29, 1985. On August 4, 2018 , the machine crashed in the Alps , killing all 20 occupants.

criticism

Agents die lonely became a great financial success, and critics also reacted extremely positively: " Where Eagles Dare is so good for its genre that one must go back to The Great Escape (1963) for a worthy comparison" (German: " Agenten die lonely is so good in its own way that you have to go back to the 1963 film, Broken Chains , for an appropriate comparison , ”said Variety , for example .
The lexicon of international films judged: "A sensational, implausible and excessively long war film, which draws its tension mainly from the question of who is on which side and is a traitor or a double agent."
The Protestant film observer drew the following conclusion: “An agent film with good actors that delivers a lot of adventure tension but little truth. If you take a closer look, you will find yourself struck by the director's carelessness towards technical and dramaturgical details. "

Publications

DVD

  • Agents die lonely . Warner Home Video 2003. - The German-language DVD version of the film was released in November 2003 and contains a ten-minute documentary that was produced during the shooting. The cover of this edition differs from the original cover in that a swastika in the background has been removed.

Soundtrack

  • Ron Goodwin : Where Eagles Dare. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack , based on: Where Eagles Dare • Operation Crossbow. Original Motion Picture Soundtracks (2 CD), FSM Silver Age Classics, Turner / Rhino / Film Score Monthly (FSM), Burbank, Culver City u. a. 2003, audio carrier no. FSM Vol. 6 No. 21. - Digitally revised original recording of the complete film music under the direction of the composer.

literature

  • Alistair MacLean : Agents die lonely. Roman (original title: Where Eagles Dare ), German by FGU Glass, Pavillon-Verlag, Munich 2005, 266 pages, ISBN 3-453-77016-1 .
  • Geoff Dyer : "Broadsword Calling Danny Boy": On Where Eagles Dare . London: Penguin, 2018.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/relativevalue.php
  2. ↑ Where Eagles Dare.com (Trivia)
  3. ↑ Agents die lonely. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 117/1969