Based on a novel by Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed (1976) is quite agreeable at first, but doesn’t stay that way. It revolves around a Himmler-approved German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill during the Very Great War, and it stars Michael Caine as an energetic German officer. Certain things in the film are hard to figure out, but easy to discern is when it finally gets asinine.

The cast is interesting and usually appealing, albeit Larry Hagman overplays a hotheaded American colonel and Donald Sutherland, with his fake Irish accent, has no depth as an IRA agent. It is the fault of the script that Sutherland’s character, Devlin, seems too unserious to be a British-hating terrorist who accompanies Nazis. This was the last film by action director John Sturges. He directed a worthy, bloody sequence in which Hagman’s impulsive colonel and a British female traitor (Jean Marsh) receive their just desserts from powerful gunfire. See the movie for the war footage. It isn’t sleep-inducing. Well, none of the movie is.