YMMV / The Eagle Has Landed

• Complete Monster: Heinrich Himmler is the head of the SS, the security arm of Nazi Germany, and the right-hand man to Adolf Hitler himself. Actively implementing the genocide of the European Jews, Himmler takes Hitler's expressed wishes to capture British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill as an opportunity to advance his career by masterminding a commando raid into the UK through the Abwehr. Having forged the Fuehrer's signature to okay Operation Eagle, upon receiving news of the mission's apparent failure, Himmler orders the immediate execution of Colonel Radl to maintain deniability. Being fully onboard with the Holocaust and lacking the humanity of Oberst Kurt Steiner and his men, Himmler is an unrepentant Nazi through and through.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The paratrooper Werner (alias Corporal Kuniski) is quite beloved in both versions. For his Plucky Comic Relief Silent Snarker moments towards Pitts in the film, and as The Smart Guy of the team for his Badass Bookworm bona fides in the book being impressive.In the movie, Werner is thirteenth in the credits, and in the book, he's only about the fifth most important of Steiner's men.
  • Clark, the Hyper-Competent Sidekick of the American soldiers.
  • Pamela, the Vicar's sister who proves to be quite the Spanner in the Works.
  • Karl, the dutiful assistant to Radl.
• Evil Is Cool: Not evil, but Steiner and his paratrooper team, who are combatants of Nazi Germany, would qualify for being a Badass Crew. Their colleagues Liam Devlin and Col. Radl would count too.
• Genius Bonus: a couple of other tropes note that Radl tells Karl that Admiral Canaris will protect his family. In real life, Himmler was on to Canaris and less than six months after the events of this film are said to have taken place, Canaris was put under house arrest and his department abolished. After the bomb plot against Hitler, Canaris was arrested, humiliated, and eventually executed in a concentration camp in the final month of the war. He would not have been in a position to help Karl.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: John Standing in the movie adaptation plays a priest who opposes the Nazis, then cut to V for Vendetta, where Standing not only plays a priest again, but a Pedophile Priest and a Sinister Minister who wholeheartedly supports a pro-nazi government.
• Iron Woobie: Steiner and his Badass Crew of fellow paratroopers can be considered this. Despite serving a criminal regime that happens to be Nazi Germany, they are in fact decent people. They are all under suspended sentence of death after trying to help a Jewish girl to escape the Holocaust and are forced to go on a mission to kidnap Winston Churchill as the only way to restore their reputation. Throughout the book and film adaptation, the German paratroopers never once show a negative aspect during their mission and only show positive aspects up to their tragic ends (one paratrooper named Werner disguised as a "Cpl. Kuniski" has a playful sense of humor even towards the Hero Antagonist Col. Pitts, another named Sgt. Altmann shows his Hidden Depths as being a Wicked Cultured pianist when he show off his talent to get the attention and appreciation of the village's vicar and as a last performance in the face of death at the hands of the Allies and last, but most importantly, one of the paratroopers sacrificed his team's cover by performing a Heroic Sacrifice to rescue a little girl from a water wheel, to which the mother bittersweetly thanked Steiner for saving her daughter's life even after the cover has been blown). Despite these positive traits, they are still treated by the villagers, especially the vicar, as "the bad guys," after blowing their cover, which is understandable as their governments are at war. Their deaths are made sadder when it is revealed Churchill was never present at the village and this effort all along was a "Shaggy Dog" Story, even though it was the paratroopers' only chance to redeem their image and escape court martial. Worse, when they all die, they die with their memories demonized in the eyes of the Allies as the usual cliche Nazi villains despite never once have Kick the Dog.
• Magnificent Bastard: Oberst Kurt Steiner is a German paratrooper commando with a prestigious war record before he and his men are condemned for trying to rescue a Jewish woman facing deportation. Steiner agrees to lead a mission organized by the Abwehr to assassinate Winston Churchill in exchange for a full pardon. Steiner and his soldiers expertly infiltrate the small English town Churchill is scheduled to pass through by posing as a Polish unit, only being discovered when one of his men is killed while trying to save a little girl, exposing his German uniform underneath his Polish one. All of Steiner's men are killed to secure his escape, allowing him to infiltrate the U.S. Army base undetected and assassinate Churchill, only for it to be revealed that Steiner really killed a Body Double with the real Churchill safely at the Tehran Conference.
• Older than You Think: This is not the first time Robert Duvall played a sympathetic WWII German Wehrmacht character, as Duvall previously guest-starred in two episodes of Combat! as a Heer medic named Peter Halsman and a Heer demolition expert named Karl.
• Retroactive Recognition: Henrik Vanger is Steiner's Number Two.
• Rooting for the Empire: Steiner and his team are given this treatment due to being the Token Good Teammate group in the adversarial German military in WWII.
• Strangled by the Red String: Molly declaring her undying love for Devlin (even after he's been exposed as a spy) is a bit hard to believe, given that she had only known him for two days.
• Too Cool to Live: Steiner and almost all of his team, except his Number Two Hans (who can be considered to be either The Lancer or The Dragon, depending on one's interpretation given these are German paratroopers from WWII), who became the Sole Survivor.

---