'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy' Watching 'Where Eagles Dare'

In Zona, Geoff Dyer—‘one of our most original writers’ (New York)—devoted a whole book to Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult masterpiece, Stalker. Now, in this warm and funny tribute to one of his favorite movies, he revisits the action classic Where Eagles Dare. A thrilling Alpine adventure headlined by a magnificent, bleary-eyed Richard Burton and a dynamically lethargic Clint Eastwood, Where Eagles Dare is the apex of 1960s war movies, by turns enjoyable and preposterous. ‘Broadsword Calling Danny Boy’ is Dyer’s hilarious tribute to a film he has loved since childhood: it’s a scene-by-scene analysis—or should that be send-up?—taking us from the movie’s snowy, Teutonic opening credits to its vertigo-inducing climax.

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. www.geoffdyer.com