This 1969 Italian movie has accrued a somewhat baffling mystique, not least because of the way it has been lavished with praise by the excitable Quentin Tarantino. This DVD issue includes a hilariously amateurish short of Tarantino hosting a low-rent showing of the film in Los Angeles, followed by an onstage chat with director Enzo G Castellari, clearly amazed to have been invited. He doesn't have to say much, since Tarantino just keeps babbling non-stop about how great he is. His Inglourious Basterds was, they say, hugely inspired by Castellari's Quel maledetto treno blindato, from 1978.
In this 70th anniversary year of the Battle of Britain, Eagles Over London (its original Italian title was La Battaglia d'Inghilterra) strikes a historical chord. It's a lurid, action-packed and frequently ridiculous account of how a group of German agents steal the identities of murdered British solders, then infiltrate the demoralised remnants of the British Expeditionary Force as they're evacuated across the Channel from Dunkirk. Their objective is to sabotage British radar installations, identified by the German high command as impediments to their planned invasion of Britain.
Potentially it's a pretty good plot, but what make the film watchable - mostly for the wrong reasons - are its period-piece special effects and wonderfully Italian attempts to recreate wartime Britain. The War Office in London is decorated like a Venetian doge's palace, Dover looks as though it has been moved to the Bay of Naples, and the early scenes in northern France take place on parched white earth under blazing Mediterranean light. When RAF fighters take off to intercept the Luftwaffe as it heads towards London, they appear to do so from sun-baked Sicilian airstrips.
We've been spoiled by Steven Spielberg's meticulous recreations of World War Two combat, where there's never a unit insignia, firearm or type of armoured vehicle out of place, but Castellari provides the antidote. The RAF seem to be equipped with American P40 fighters while the Germans fly Spitfires with black crosses painted on them. Sometimes Castellari deploys split-screen sequences of wartime newsreels showing real German dive-bombers, but when the British are strafed on the Dunkirk beaches it's by American Harvard trainer aircraft. The big air battles were shot at Cinecitta studios in Rome using wooden models on wires, and it shows.
The acting performances are equally improbable, with a special mention for leading man Frederick Stafford as Captain Paul Stevens. Dressed in a raffish Italian-style cap and sporting a glamorous square wrist watch and central European accent (he was Czech), he's more like a Monte Carlo gigolo than a careworn British officer. Stevens' girlfriend Meg (Ida Galli, under the pseudonym Evelyn Stewart) wears a WAAF's uniform, but underneath she's a sizzling blonde beach-babe. Somehow Van Johnson got himself mixed up in all this as Air Marshall George Taylor, but he creeps nervously through the action as if he's terrified to speak the lines he's been given and hopes he won't be recognised (Johnson and Galli, pictured above).
Yet the film does possess a certain berserk dynamism, as in the action-packed scene where the despicable Krauts burst into the RAF control room where all the air raids are being plotted, or the panoramic vistas of chaos at Dunkirk. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is the film's unironic eagerness to celebrate all the clichés of British stiff-upper-lipdom and old-chapness.
