The “pile of crap” movie that baffled Clint Eastwood: “I can hardly tell you what it was about”
There are a thousand different reasons why an actor agrees to star in a movie, and not all of them are creative or artistic. Clint Eastwood found himself with an opportunity he didn’t feel he could turn down, but even years after the film was released, he didn’t have the foggiest what it was about.
While performers will regularly board a production based on the strength of the script and their desperation to be part of a story they’re immediately invested in, other factors are often at play. It could be the director, the cast, the paycheque, the glamorous locations, or the need to try something new.
For Eastwood, it was a mix and match of the above. By the late 1960s, he was in danger of falling victim to typecasting. He had his sights set on directing, but it would be another couple of years before Play Misty for Me gave him the chance to dip his toes into filmmaking, which quickly became his second home.
Prior to Where Eagles Dare, six of his previous eight features had been westerns, which increases to seven when considering that Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff was essentially a modern-day retelling of the same tropes, trappings, and archetypes that had defined Eastwood’s filmography for the better part of a decade.
A rousing World War II adventure placed him in a different time period, sent him off to the other side of the world to shoot in Austria, and united him with one of the best actors in the business, Richard Burton. As it turned out, their desire to work with each other was a two-way street.
“We got over there and Burton said he was doing the picture because I was in it,” Eastwood told Paul Nelson. “And I was doing the picture because he was in it. It was one of those things.” Serendipitous, maybe, but there was one glaring issue the two stars and director Brian G Hutton agreed on that Where Eagles Dare failed to overcome.
“To Brian’s credit, he felt the script was a pile of crap,” the four-time Academy Award winner explained. “Burton felt the script was crap. ‘Brian’, I said, ‘There’s too much exposition in this thing’. He had a couple of scenes with Richard shooting that he didn’t think looked too good. I was in really good shape then.”
As a compromise, Eastwood had his dialogue scaled back and many of his lines given to Burton’s character instead: “I said, ‘Let him handle the talk, and I’ll handle the killing, and we’ll just do a wild film’. So we did it, and everybody had fun doing it, and it did real well.”
In the broadest sense, Where Eagles Dare followed a special forces team tasked to rescue an American general from an enemy fortress, but there’s a traitor in the midst and a ludicrous number of disposable soldiers to kill in a film that forsakes logic and common sense to get to its explosive third act.
The plot is a great deal more convoluted than that, and audiences weren’t the only ones who questioned whether much of it made sense. After all, Eastwood confessed that he was too busy mowing down the opposition even to try figuring out what was going on, narratively speaking: “I was in it, and I can hardly tell you what it was about.”
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