One of my favorite movies will air on TCM a little later today, as part of their Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies. The movie will air while I’m at work, although it doesn’t matter because I have the DVD.

“Where Eagles Dare” is a crackerjack (but not very realistic) spy thriller starring the unlikely duo of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Many of you have seen it before — there was a period when TBS and TNT ran it quite regularly — but if you haven’t, you need to. As I said, you may need to suspend disbelief from time to time, but the action (after a slow first half-hour) is thrilling, the plot (by Alistair MacLean, who wrote an original screenplay because he had no more novels for the producers to adapt) has various surprises up its sleeve, and Burton and Eastwood make a shockingly effective team. Great fun.

(The post title comes from Eastwood’s last line; he tells someone, in effect, not to call him the next time such a dangerous mission comes up.)

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