Eagles over London (1969)

The year is 1940 and the Germans have all but crushed the armies of Europe.  The retreating British and what is left of the French army are headed Dunkirk to hopefully be rescued by whatever ships can be sent across the English channel to haul them back to England.  The Germans take this opportunity to sneak some spies in among the retreating forces in an effort to use the chaos and confusion to infiltrate.  The story picks up here as we meet an English officer named Stevens who unknowingly befriends one of the Germans named Martin.  The funny thing is that it is Stevens who realizes the German’s have infiltrated before anyone else does, and is put in charge of finding them and protecting England’s radar system from sabotage.  Martin realizes that his new friend is in a perfect position to get him close to the investigation and the radar system and uses him to do so.  Waiting until the time is right Martin and his German compatriots attack the radar system while the German Air Force attacks London.  It is up to Stevens to save the system and help the RAF (England’s Air Force) defend the capital.  

I’m a big fan of Enzo G. Castellari and his movie Inglorious Bastards.  So when I saw the press release that the fine folks over at Severin films were releasing Castellari’s other war movie, Eagles over London, I was pretty excited.  But I have to admit that I’m not as big of a fan of this movie as I was Bastards.  Unlike Bastards, which was more of a Dirty Dozen rip off, this movie is played as a straight war flick.  So you don’t have all the oddball characters that made Bastards such a cool movie.  That said I did enjoy some of the characters, especially Stevens’ right hand man Sgt. Mulligan.  But I found the rest to be a bit bland and boring.  I was impressed with the story, which is very ambitious and takes the audience from the rescue at Dunkirk to the Battle for Britain in the skies over London.  Though as someone who is very interested in history I have to warn potential viewers that this isn’t a historically accurate movie and takes some liberties.  This did kind of bug me, mostly because unlike Bastards this movie is played more seriously, so the inaccuracies were more annoying.  The movie also seems to be a bit long.  There is a love interest for Stevens and a very bad attempt to create some sort of love triangle between them and an RAF officer named Taylor (played by Van Johnson) that I could have done without. 

This was a very ambitious movie, and unfortunately it’s lack of budget shows.  Now again I’m a nerd for WWII and I’m not sure that this will be at all an issue for anyone else.  But I did notice that the “German” aircraft were with one exception all either old trainers or repainted Spitfires (a very distinctive British fighter plane).  Again not everyone will notice this, but I think that everyone will see the same scene shot from different angles used again and again (especially the Dunkirk stuff).  That and the air combat sequences aren’t at all exciting and are actually kind of boring.  I’ve seen air combat portrayed much better in other earlier movies, so again I’m thinking that this is more of a lack of budget than anything else.

For this review I checked out both the Blu-Ray and DVD.  Honestly after watching both if you have a Blu-Ray player then get the Blu-Ray, if not grab the DVD.  Severin has done a great job on the discs, but I just didn’t see much difference in quality between them.  The same extras are included on both.  There is a fun conversation between Castellari and Quentin Tarantino.  Also there is a fun Q and A that was recorded with Castellari and has Tarantino moderating it.  While the movie is okay and didn’t thrill me, I did have a blast with these extras. 

So I’ve kind of picked at the movie here in my review.  While not on par with Inglorious Bastards I still think that this is an interesting movie and worth checking out.  I can’t really see myself watching this one again so I’m not sure if it justifies a purchase and seems like more of a rental. 

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer