Alistair MacLean sold a lot of books, in the 150 million range. He didn’t rate his own writing skills and said he didn’t like writing much. He was good at it and several of his novels became films, including “The Guns of Navarone” and “Ice Station Zebra”. But his most famous and successful work was “Where Eagles Dare”.
I picked up this old warhorse at a Waterstones in Charing Cross this summer, and finally got around. It’s damned good fun. MacLean opens with an elite but likely doomed team of special forces on a British plane skirting the Swiss-German border. The Nazis have gotten hold of an American general with knowledge of the impending Normandy invasion; the Brits (and one Yank) are to sneak into Schloss Adler – Castle of Eagles – where the Gestapo runs things from its Alpine aerie, and extract the general. But! Traitors, spies, and double and triple crosses await.
Alistair MacLean
MacLean reveled in such intrigue, but his worldview was straightforward: men were men, women were women, the British were good, and the Germans/Nazis were bad. The rest was mechanics. MacLean was Scottish, Glaswegian, and fought the war as a navy seaman. He saw plenty of action across theaters including the Arctic, the Med, and the seas around Southeast Asia.
After the war he went to university, where he wrote short stories for cash. Drawing on his military service, he wrote war stories that proved popular and by the mid-1950s he was earning good money. Guns of Navarone became a film; MacLean became a tax exile, to Switzerland. After more books, he tried his hand at script writing, encouraged by producer-friends in the British film industry.
Where Eagles Dare
The result was “Where Eagles Dare”, which he sold to a studio in 1966; MacLean wrote the novel version as well, which came out in ‘67. Both were massive hits. To this day, the movie “Where Eagles Dare” is something of a Christmas staple in the U.K. MacLean, who favored visual, plot-heavy adventure tales, was a natural for screenwriting, and wrote several. He grew tired of having Hollywood types interfere with the writing and later focused exclusively on novels.
The film version of “Where Eagles Dare” is good, but ironically Clint Eastwood, cast as the American OSS agent, Schaffer, thought the screenplay was lousy and asked to actually have his lines cut. In the novel, Schaffer has the best lines, and MacLean imbues him with a good-natured and funny personality. Lead man John Smith does the clever thinking and the clever talking. Yet the book is too clever.
The Gold Room
The hinge of the plot occurs in the Gold Room, a luxurious chamber in the heart of the castle where the German generals gather over brandy and a nice fire. They have brought the captured American general there for a genteel chat before they will torture him. Smith and Schaffer interrupt the gathering, at which point MacLean embarks on a series of espionage machinations.
As a reader this was where I scratched my head. MacLean wrote action superbly. The opening chapter in the Lancaster, introducing the characters as they fly through a snowstorm to attempt a mad landing on a cliffside, is gripping and fun. It sets a pace the book maintains, until we reach the Gold Room. Then action becomes word salads. MacLean previously enabled his heroes to bluff their way out of tight spots, but here the bluffing becomes verbose.
MacLean delighted in these spy-within-spy plot twists but I found it contrived. Later the story returns to chases (and some romantic banter involving a pair of British women spies embedded in the Schloss). The final scene, on another plane, but now headed to freedom, revives the puzzles of betrayal, and is better played. The ultimate traitor is allowed to bow out with British understatement at its best.
In this respect, I preferred the movie. The Gold Room scene is tighter, and faster, so we don’t have time to wonder at the acrobatics MacLean must perform to make this ridiculous plotline seem feasible. The whole time reading this, I was thinking, Smith and Schaffer have machine guns trained on the highest ranking generals and Gestapo officers in the Third Reich, and Smith is faffing on about double agents? Just shoot the bastards!
Action versus violence
But MacLean had decided to write a relatively pacific story. For all the ka-booms and bang-bang in the novel, few people die, not even the Nazis. Smith knocks out the enemy brass with a sedative before sneaking away.
This is where the movie really does go Hollywood. Clint Eastwood wastes those Nazi motherfuckers. Eastwood asked Richard Burton (playing Smith) to take all of Schaffer’s witty lines in return for taciturn machine-gun work. Of which there is then rather a lot.
Burton’s best turn as the action hero comes atop the cable car, the only link to the castle. The aging British star looks a bit heavy in this film, especially compared to Eastwood, who is lean and flinty. Burton, according to Wikipedia, was still married to Elizabeth Taylor and was on four bottles of vodka a day during shooting; I don’t know if these facts are related. But Burton pulls off a gripping scene where he leaps from one cable car to another, and then gets into a gritty, tense fight with enemy agents.
Old-school action
The cable car scenes in the novel are also good. MacLean portrays the way they swing like pendulums in the storm, and how difficult and scary it is for Smith and Schaffer to hold on. In the film, the cable cars are steady and stable. On the ascent, our heroes merely wait and watch as they near the castle. But MacLean has to explain a lot of mechanics, which slow things down; the visual experience cuts through that. The shots are vertiginous – I fear heights and found the scenes thrilling – and Burton’s leap is all the more exhilarating because it was real. Well, not real for Burton, but his stunt double actually made that jump. No CGI back then, folks. Jayzus.
The final scene on the return flight is also handled well. The understated ending survived the filmmaking process. Bravo.
MacLean indulged in knotty, often ludicrous plots. He eschewed indulging in violence or sex. Sure, characters died in his adventure and war stories, but only when absolutely essential to the story. Women could be capable in his tales, such as Mary in “Where Eagles Dare” (played in the film by Mary Ure). He didn’t portray them as floozies and bimbos. But they were never protagonists, and MacLean left the sex implied or out of the story altogether. They weren’t relevant to his stories.
The morality of war stories
I sense MacLean, a combat veteran, wanted to celebrate the courage of his male British knights rather than wallow in the real-life violence he would have witnessed. This was also good commercial sense, because he was selling to a British and American public that would have quietly clocked the fact of Smith and Schaffer’s humanity toward the evil Nazis and said, “We are the good guys.”
In fact, it would not be until “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998 depicted American troops committing atrocities: after the terror of the beach landings, Steven Spielberg shows American troops shooting Germans in the back, shooting Germans trying to surrender. We’ve been through the harrowing landing with them, and it makes us see these as acts of fear and self-preservation, not of callous depravity. But.
MacLean worked at a time when shading nuance into World War Two was unnecessary. There was no demand for it, it would have puzzled audiences, and MacLean shows no inclination to do so. He was a professional tradesman laboring to sell a lot of books, a vocation at which he excelled.
The year after the novel Where Eagles Dare was published, Kurt Vonnegut would publish Slaughterhouse-Five, a psychedelic sci-fi that portrays the Dresden bombings by the Americans and the British as war crimes. MacLean’s era was coming to a close, although he personally would continue pumping out bestsellers.
Gaijin Cowgirl: an inheritance
Being a GenXer, my thrillers come laden with historical nuances. No vanilla heroes for me. My debut, GAIJIN COWGIRL, features a young American in Tokyo, Val Benson, who is not as innocent as she’d like to believe with a map to World War Two gold stolen by the Japanese…but with American government complicity.
I found myself writing about that war because it led to the prevailing power arrangements in Asia (and everywhere else), and my characters were grappling with that legacy despite being born decades afterwards. But I still have a deep sense of wrong and right, and Val digs deep to achieve a qualified heroism.
Alistair MacLean died in 1987 in Germany, having become rich but divorced and alcoholic, and was buried in Switzerland, near to his fellow tax exile, heavy drinker, and cultural icon, Richard Burton.
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