MovieChat Forums > Went the Day Well? (1944) Discussion > ripped off by the Eagle has Landed

ripped off by the Eagle has Landed


Here is what you do, you watch an old black and white film and then change the title.

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Too harsh a judgement I think.

Clearly the similarities are strong, but 'The Eagle Has Landed'(TEHL) makes good use of the concept of honour amongst fighting men. The attempt to prevent the abuse of Jews?

Interestingly there are far more savage scenes in 'Went the Day Well', the slaughter of the German soldier in the cottage, the sacrifice with the hand grenade?

And the Germans are only revealed in TEHL when one sacrifices himself to save a child?

Which begs the (unanswered) question, How did Germany let the Nazis take power?

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Which begs the (unanswered) question, How did Germany let the Nazis take power?

They say that the winners always write the history books... and it was never truer than WW2. WW1 ended with Germany caught in the grip of a short (but vicious) civil war between the Russian-backed Communists and the nationalists. The Weimar Republic spent its short life sandwiched between the exteremes of right and left - and left the German people in perpetual fear that the civil war would errupt again. Things weren't helped much by a scandal involving embezzlement by the Social Democrats of government funds. Nazi violence was directed specifically at Jews and at Communists. They seemed "safe" (if you weren't a Jew or a Red!) and the only people capable of maintaining order. At the start, the Nazi's true face was hissen behind a mask of Nationalist idealism. They provided work, entertainment, even Butlins-style holidays, plus the Hitler Jugend and DMB (Girl Guides) which provided activities and entertainment for Germany's youth. Peoplr commented back at the start of Nazism that "there was always something fun to do".

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...not to mention the humiliating and economically devastating conditions imposed on Germany by the WWI armistice. You'd be amazed what a few years of hardcore depression will do to a people's willingness to trust new and flamboyant leaders.

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Yeah, those poor Germans. All they did was start two world wars which killed more people than any other wars in history.

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"How did Germany let the Nazis take power? "

quentin crisp used to talk about the forse of hitler's charisma (a quality he defined as 'the ability to influence without the use of logic') - he said that hitler certainly had charisma, otherwise there wouldn't now be a germany full of elderly people saying, "i don't know what came over me".

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[deleted]

fg52home -

How? In no particular order -

They got voted in.
The Weimar Republic tanked.
Democratic ideal never took hold in Germany - the Austro-Hungarian empire was barely cold in its grave.
Industrialists afraid of Communism bankrolled him.
The First World War happened.

Agree with you re. TEHL - WTDW isn't a rip-off - there aren't any 'redeeming' German characters in WTDW, for a start.

So glad people are still watching this - I grew up during the 60's and 70's and WW2 still seemed like recent history.

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The nazis WEREN'T voted in, far from it, even in the semi-bent election of March 1933 they only got 43.9% of the vote. The problem with the Weimar republic was that it was too democratic, which is why the boss class was desperate to get rid of it, which they did - in 1930. Keeping it gone was the reason for jobbing Hitler into office. None of that nonsense in the western military dictatorships like Britain, France and the USA.

Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.

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They were the largest party.

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That's too harsh. It was clearly an inspiration for TEHL (and even more for The Devil Ship Pirates), but they didn't just "change the title", they told a different story based on the same concept.

"An inglorious peace is better than a dishonourable war" ~ John Adams as quoted by Mark Twain

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I think that this film also bears an uncanny similarity to the Charlie Sheen/Patrick Swayze classic Red Dawn.
Although the invasion by communists is far more direct, the notion of ordinary people taking up arms against invaders in their own community is identical.

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Pah!

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"the notion of ordinary people taking up arms against invaders in their own community"........& there the resemblance ends!

I LIKE 'Red Dawn', but in no way does it stand as a 'classic' in the same way!

Frankly, I think you would have had to live in Britain during WW2 to fully appreciate it (& I'm not nearly that old myself)!

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The Eagle Has landed did not just plagerise Went The Day Well the films conclusion is lifted from the fictionalised conclusion of I Was Monty's Double

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And just where were the MIGHTY American forces during this invasion by the Cubans and Soviets. Talk about UNREALITY.

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Not in that one little town in rural Colorado. Minus the airman who got shot down.

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TEHL perhaps is too similar, right down to the cemetary scene.

While WTDW? is more violent, TEHL is more realistic. A key realism element in the latter is that the Germans are posing as Polish troops. Quite how did they find 59 German troops with perfect British accents in WTDW? is a strange thing. Okay, their incompetence as soldiers is perhaps the balancing aspect: "do you master soldiering?" -No. "Can you speak with a British accent?" -yes. "You're in!" :)

Both of the films have their strenghts, and I like them both.

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I agree it would be tough to find 59 German troops speaking English. However, I assumed watching the movie that some of them may have lived elsewhere as children. The "major" seemed to suggest he had gone to Cambridge University.

You could imagine that some of them as children lived elsewhere (say in the US or Australia or even England), especially if their parents tried to get away from the economic collapse following WWI. (Aldoph Hitler's nephew grew up in England and then moved to the US -- he served in the US Navy in WWII).

And most of the Germans had difficulty speaking English. A few (such as the officers and the Sargent) fit in very well. Most of the rest came across as very tentative when speaking English.

And the Germans did something very similar during the Ardennes campaign, when they found a bunch of English speaking soldiers, dressed them up as MPs, and sent them behind US lines to create confusion.

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The German learned and spoke perfect English because many were sent to England prewar for their education , The 1975 book, and later film, The Eagle Has Landed uses some of the same ideas.In July 2010, StudioCanal and the British Film Institute National Archive released a restoration of the Went the Day Well? to significant critical acclaim. Tom Huddleston of Time Out (London) termed it "jawdroppingly subversive. Cavalcanti establishes, with loving care and the occasional wry wink, the ultimate bucolic English scene, then takes an almost sadistic delight in tearing it to bloody shreds in an orgy of shockingly blunt, matter-of-fact violence." When the restored film opened at Film Forum in New York City in 2011, A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it "undeservedly forgotten.

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I don't think it was a ripoff, wasn't it based on an actual incident in which the Germans tried to assassinate Churchill.

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