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

Geoff Dyer's earlier book on film, Zona, was about Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so it was perhaps inevitable that he should next devote his unique critical and stylistic energies to Brian G. Hutton's Where Eagles Dare. A thrilling Alpine adventure starring 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 Geoff 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 it's snowy, Teutonic opening credits to its vertigo-inducing climax.

• Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
• The Ongoing Moment
• White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World
• Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
• Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It
• Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
• The Missing of the Somme
• The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film
• Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire
• Picture (New York Review Books Classics)