Film Summary DCCIX (The Eagle Has Landed)

The Eagle has Landed is a weird film for me.
Years ago I read The Eagle has Flown without realizing that it was a sequel to an already established novel.
And it has the same Irish guy in it, and almost beat for beat the exact same plot as this movie\novel. The difference is they were going to kidnap Adolf Hitler and much like this movie it ends in a pretty similar fashion.

Robert Duvall plays an incredibly high-ranking Nazi officer who is tasked by the Führer himself to conduct an operation to kidnap Winston Churchill after successfully breaking Mussolini out of a prison.
He decides to hire Michael Caine as his main perpetrator into England to accomplish this goal. Michael Caine is a middle-of-the-road German officer who's shown to have some sort of loving sympathy towards Jewish people and a real distrust of Nazi tyrants.
Essentially it's just an excuse to make a ''good'' guy character out of a Nazi officer.
Which in my view is a bit problematic as you have to be pretty dedicated to some of the more horrible Nazi ideology to get that high up.
It would have worked out better if he was just a basic Soldier, then I might be able to believe it is characters and more heartfelt compassion.


Anyways Michael Caine along with this weird Irish guy and a squadron of German soldiers pretending to be polish recruits for the British military, head in to the English Countryside with the attempt to set up this elaborate plot to kidnap Churchill.
The whole thing goes tits up pretty early on and there's this bad romance with the Irish fellow and this random girl who ends up killing her then possible fiancé with a shotgun blast after falling in love with a guy, she only knew for a few minutes. And killing the other guy after already knowing that the Irish dude was a spy for the German military.

The entire operation ultimately fails and Winston Churchill was actually a decoy.
Robert Duvall's character is executed and everybody pretty much ends up dead, except for the Irish guy who we're supposed to root for.
And he's not really worth rooting for.
He's an ass of the man with no royalty anything and it's implying that he be lobbing car bombs at people if the war wasn't going on.

It's kind of weird cuz he pops up again in the second novel and he's played up as a more sympathetic character there.
Partly because he's going after Hitler and well, that just makes anybody seen better.

Overall these film is decent. It's a little too long and the love plot is kind of unnecessary. Also the last 40 minutes of the movie turns into an action flick and the well-established kidnapping plot is kind of fizzled out after the first 30 minutes. This movie wants to be three different things at the same time and it would have been nice if it just committed to one of them.
Michael Caine is a solid enough performer and the parts with Robert Duvall are fantastic. He has this silly looking eye patch.
Kind of looks like the Israeli politician Moshe Dayan.

Maybe watch it if you've got the time. However my recommendation is to see ''Where Eagles Dare'' instead. A far better movie revolving around similar circumstances.