Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Where Eagles Dare
1968 · Brian G. Hutton · Where Eagles Dare on Sightlines
A cable car hangs from a wire over an Alpine valley, and men are fighting on it. Below them is a long drop. Ahead is a castle on a crag. Most of what matters in Where Eagles Dare is in that picture: a place you have to reach, a line that gets you there, and people trying to stop you.
The film takes a long time making sure you understand that line. The cable station is shown to us well before anything happens there. Arthur Ibbetson's anamorphic frames keep the Schloss Adler easy to read: this corridor, that courtyard, the radio room. By the time the shooting starts, you know the building the way a burglar would. That patience is the film's quiet invention, and it's worth slowing down for, because it is exactly what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would have us look at.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze describes the engine of classical film as a loop. A situation presses on a character. The character acts. The action changes the situation. He calls this the action-image, and its grandest version, the large form, runs from situation to action to a new situation. You could hardly ask for a cleaner example. An American general is held in a fortress "nearly impossible to breach." A team goes in to change that.
Why look through Deleuze at all, when the film seems to explain itself? Because the lens makes you notice how much work that self-evidence takes. Deleuze's name for the surrounding world that calls for action is the synsign, the milieu that holds everyone inside it. Here the milieu is literal: snow, rock, altitude. The plot keeps telling us the mission is geographically impossible, and Ibbetson's exteriors make us believe it. Then the film shuts us indoors. His interiors are darker and tighter, almost stagey: the Gestapo interrogation, the radio-room confrontation, the running fight through the halls. Deleuze would call this alternation respiration-space. The film breathes in the size of the mountain, then breathes out into the taut line of the act.
What happens inside that line is the binomial, force against force. Commandos and Germans. The cable-car fight is the purest version of it: two bodies, one moving box, nowhere to go.
It is also where the editing takes over. John Jympson's cutting in the second half moves between the stars, their doubles, the pursuing Germans and the mechanical groan of the moving car. Deleuze traces this kind of montage to Griffith. He calls it organic, American montage: parallel lines that converge on a decisive meeting. The tension here is built from juxtaposition rather than from any single unbroken shot.
At this point film theory has an objection. André Bazin argued that when the drama of a scene depends on two things being in the same space, the cut cheats. Show the man and the danger together, or you have only suggested the danger. A well-worn anecdote has Clint Eastwood joking that the film should be called Where Doubles Dare, which is Bazin's complaint told as a gag. But the joke leaves something out. The second unit was directed by Yakima Canutt, whose method of leaping and falling between moving vehicles runs from Stagecoach through Ben-Hur, and whose craft was built on real danger staged so you could follow it. The rigging was real. The drops behind the stunt doubles were real mountains. So the film is a hybrid. The peril is real; it just isn't always Burton's. The cut then attaches a star's face to it.
Now for Burton's face, because it is where the film gets strange. Alistair MacLean's script is a rescue in which nothing is quite what it seems. Allegiances flip one after another. Deleuze has a term for an action that could belong to two different situations at once: the index of equivocity, part of what he calls the small form, where an act reveals a situation we couldn't fully see. Burton plays Major Smith with a watchful, closed gravity because every gesture he makes has to mean two things. His team doesn't know what he knows. Neither do we.
This is the film's open question. Deleuze argued that classical action cinema went into crisis after the war, when characters could no longer trust what they saw, or act on it. The year is 1968. MacLean's plot is full of liars. Its ancestor North by Northwest had already built a story of nested double agents in which identity never sits still. Where Eagles Dare takes that instability and does not let it spread. Every double-cross is settled with a gun. Ron Goodwin's brass theme keeps marching underneath, promising that whatever is hidden, the next action will clear it up. A film this full of deception, with so little doubt in it: is that a weakness, or the source of its pleasure?
The answer is pleasure, and craft. The lineage is easy to read. From The Guns of Navarone comes MacLean's own template, the impregnable fortress with a traitor concealed inside, which this film multiplies into a cascade. From The Great Escape, tension drawn from a plan unfolding rather than from anyone's inner life. From The Dirty Dozen, the massed assault on a single enemy château. From Hitchcock, the climax staged as physical peril on a monument. From Canutt, the bodies in motion between vehicles. Hutton's film gathers all of these into one high-gloss machine. Its cable-car fight became one of the signature action sequences of its era.
What it did to film as an art was to show the large form at full power, built by hand, at the moment other filmmakers were starting to take it apart. It reminds us that the clarity of action cinema is made, not given. You can follow the chaos only because someone mapped the castle for you an hour earlier.
So watch it again with that in mind. Treat the slow first act as map-making. Notice where Jympson cuts from a star's close-up to a double on the wire. And keep an eye on Burton when he says nothing, which is when he is doing the most.
Concepts in play
- action-image — A rescue premise resolved entirely through action; the sensory-motor loop of situation and response drives the whole film, and the plot 'resolves everything through action.'
- action-image-large-form — An 'impossible to breach' fortress holding a captured general (situation) is infiltrated and assaulted by the commando team (action), transforming the situation in the castle shoot-out and escape.
- the encompasser — Ibbetson's exteriors use snowbound slopes, the castle on its crag and the cable line over the valley to build a milieu of 'geographical impossibility' that the plot keeps insisting on and that calls forth the mission.
- respiration-space — The cinematography's two registers: vast alpine exteriors alternating with dark, tight, theatrical interiors (corridors, Gestapo interrogation, radio room) where the action line tightens.
- binomial — Force-against-force confrontations between the Allied team and the Germans, condensed in the cable-car fight and the running gun battle through the castle.
- montage-organic-american — Jympson's rhythmic cross-cutting between the stars, their doubles, the pursuing Germans and the mechanical peril of the moving car, converging on the climactic confrontation.
- action-image-small-form — Actions progressively disclose a hidden situation behind the apparent rescue.
- index-of-equivocity — Burton's deliberately opaque Major Smith, whose every act could belong both to the apparent rescue and to a concealed purpose.