"Broadsword calling Danny Boy"

For the holidays I'll be posting fluffy little nothings (if explosions and Richard Burton can be considered fluffy) about guilty pleasures.

Chief among these may be the 1968 classic war movie, Where Eagles Dare.

(No, not because of how similar the theme music is to the mock-heroic chunks of Monty Python and the Holy Grail; maybe Ron Goodwin was moonlighting at DeWolfe Music.)

Richard Burton is only two years removed from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but well on his way to his "magnificent ruin" stage. Clint Eastwood is just off his Leone spaghetti westerns and has gotten no less wooden. As the good guys, they have preternaturally perfect aim of their machine guns, while the German troops, despite their large numbers and ferocious reputations (see, "Poland, invasion of"; and "Russia, invasion of") seem not to be able to work their guns very well at all.

And yet, somehow, this schlock is every Western boy's fantasy – well, mine anyway. I guess that's because the whole movie is like playing army with your friends when you're ten. You can blow up anything, because you're carrying around enough dynamite packs with cool trip-wires to destroy Central Europe. You shoot at guys and say they're dead, and they are, while you yourself get to say "missed me!" whenever you want.

The radio scene is perhaps the high point – Burton trying to signal for the plane to pick up the embattled survivors with full-throated stage ham voice, while Clint schmeissers a battalion of the Wehrmacht's finest without hardly looking. It's stuck with me since the first night I was allowed to stay up late and watch this idiotic wonder several decades ago.

"Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy!"

Update on Monday, January 3, 2011 at 9:07PM by Scott

Okay, make that singular – fluffly little nothing.

Back to pomposity tomorrow.