Broadsword calling Danny Boy

[Bed-time; the short period before turning the lights out.]

C:    Stop laughing. I'm trying to concentrate on this.

M:   OK. But can I read you this really funny bit?

C: No!

 [3 minutes later, during a stint of strenuous laughter suppression...]

C: If you don't stop shaking the bed you can go and read somewhere else! 

This is a little plug for Geoff Dyer's 2018 short but very funny account of the film "Where Eagles Dare", which has the above title. (But then, if you know the film you know the callsign!) But bear with, for a couple of paragraphs...

As a kid I was always reading. I would even read by torchlight under the covers after my bedroom light had to be off. After the Secret Seven, Dr Doolittle, and Just William books came Biggles and Jennings. In my teens, before the Age of Science Fiction  it was The Saint, Alastair MacLean, then Hammond Innes and Ian Fleming. I devoured all the MacLean stories. I remember writing a review of "Ice Station Zebra" for an English essay and saying that the author made me truly hate the villains - I'm pretty sure this was the only time any teacher praised anything I'd written.

Where Eagles Dare was the first screenplay written by MacLean. I don't even know if I was aware it was his story when I first saw the film at the pictures, but I do remember how exciting it was: Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood as Allied soldiers infiltrating a snowy mountain-top German army base in 1944. AND we had the double treat of both Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt, soon to become my 18-year-old self's favourite (and alarmingly sexy) vampire, e.g. in the 1970 Hammer horror "Vampire Lovers". (Sadly she turned down the sequel "Lust for a Vampire" - because many of the nubile in that visual feast bared their breasts and more besides.)

I knew about Dyer's book - it's been on my 'to read' list for a few years - but it wasn't till I noticed that the film was being shown on terrestrial TV that I had the motivation first to record the film and second to get online and request the book from the local library (for the modest sum of £0.30). It came within a week and boy what a treat.

I already knew that Geoff Dyer could make me laugh. His story about inadvertently picking up an escaped convict in the Utah desert (in "White Sands") was a classic - and Broadsword didn't disappoint at all. His obvious love for the film doesn't stop him poking fun at (for example) Eastwood's impressive thespian range (squinting), Burton's character's imperiousness, the plot holes and general implausibility of the whole story.

And without exaggeration I then enjoyed my (third?) viewing of the film just as much as my first. 

Highly recommended.