'BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY BOY'

There's an old joke about Ernie Bushmiller's long running comic strip, NANCY. The strip, you may recall, was four panels every day, with the first three panels setting up the payoff gag that the fourth panel contained. It was utterly banal, but it took a mere fraction of a second to read, so minimal were the art, characters and humor. The joke is that it took longer to decide not to read NANCY than it did to actually read it. 

It doesn't take much time to read Geoff Dyer's very slim new book, 'BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY BOY': WATCHING WHERE EAGLES DARE. The book is only 121 pages long and you could easily get through it multiple times in the time it would take to watch the film (which runs two hours and thirty-eight minutes). And at a cover price of $22.00, you've got to be one helluva fan of WHERE EAGLES DARE to spend that much on so little. Note: I bought it on sale at 40% off.  

But while the price is steep and the page count small, this little book is a delight to read from start to finish. WHERE EAGLES DARE, while far from a great film (although Dyer does claim that it's a better film than Wim Wenders UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD) , the WWII action epic  holds a special place in Dyer's heart.  It's one of the seminal films of his childhood, one he first encountered at exactly the right time and age to make it an indelible part of his life.

 In 121 pages, Dyer takes us through the entire film, commenting at length about various aspects of the film. It's not the kind of commentary you'd find on a Blu-Ray. Those usually deal with more technical matters, more behind-the-scenes, "making of" information. Here, Dyer delivers an almost stream of consciousness narrative that runs from insightful to hilarious. It's clear that he absolutely loves this film (and '60s and '70s war films in general), and while he can find plenty of faults and inconsistencies in the 1968 adventure classic, none of the blemishes are enough to make him fall out of love. 

In fact, the only really critical analysis he delivers is in regards to the novels of British adventure king Alistair MacLean. Dyer states that he read all of the MacLean bibliography when he was a youngster but now finds most of MacLean's stuff unreadable. In fact, he uses this word to describe the novel version of WHERE EAGLES DARE which is, in fact, a novelization of MacLean's original screenplay. 

I too read almost all of Alistair MacLean's thrillers when I was in junior high and high school. Loved 'em all at the time. I started re-reading MacLean a few years back and found that while his earlier material (GUNS OF NAVARONE, et. al), still hold up, some of his later works are just plain bad. Trouble is, he was wildly inconsistent in the '70s and beyond. I read BEAR ISLAND not long ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. But ATHABASCA was a painful read. Had the master really lost his touch or is it, as Dyer theorizes in his book, that you need to be a youngster to read and really enjoy the kind of boys' own adventure novels that MacLean is known for. 

Whatever the case, I loved 'BROADSWORD' and can enthusiastically recommend it to any and all movie buffs. 

 It got me to thinking about which seminal films from my childhood I might possibly write about in an extended format has Dyer has done. The films that immediately spring to mind are JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, THE GREAT ESCAPE and, of course, GOLDFINGER.

 Stay tuned dear readers. You never know what might be coming.