The Eagle Has Landed is a 1976 British war film directed by John Sturges, and starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.

Based on the 1975 novel The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins, the film is about a fictional German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill in the middle of the Second World War.

[2] In 1943, following the successful rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, is ordered to make a feasibility study into capturing the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

Firstly, Radl recruits an agent, an IRA man named Liam Devlin, who lectures at a Berlin university.

However, while the Luftwaffe parachute troops are returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner unsuccessfully attempts to save the life of a Jewish girl who is trying to escape from the SS in occupied Poland.

Steiner and his loyal men are court-martialled, and sent to a penal unit on German-occupied Alderney, where their mission is to conduct near-suicidal human torpedo attacks against Allied shipping in the English Channel.

Colonel Pitts, the Rangers’ inexperienced and rash commander, launches a poorly planned assault on the church that results in heavy American casualties.

It is left to Pitts' deputy, Captain Harry Clark, to launch another attack that overruns the positions of the Germans and traps them inside the church.

In consequence, Radl is arrested and summarily executed by an SS firing squad under the pretext that he "exceeded his orders to the point of treason".

[9] Tom Mankiewicz thought the script was the best he had ever written but felt "John Sturges, for some reason, had given up" and did a poor job, and that editor Anne V. Coates was the one who saved the movie and made it watchable.

[Producer] Jack Wiener later told me [Sturges] never came back for the editing nor for any of the other good post-production sessions that are where a director does some of his most important work.

[15] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film "a good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.

Mr. Sturges ... obtains first-rate performances building the tension until the film's climactic sequence, which, as you might suspect, concludes with a plot twist.

[2]When another ITC production, March or Die, faltered in US theatres during initial engagements in the fall of 1977, Columbia Pictures repackaged it into a double-feature combo with Eagle for its remaining playdates.