Stuntman Jim Dowdall recounts his work on the film The Eagle Has Landed
It was the phenomenally hot spring of 1976, but I and many others were dressed as German Fallschirmjagers all carrying FG42s, marching through a winter landscape in Finland to represent the Russian front in 1943. The spring had come unexpectedly early that year and the snow was melting fast, so the special effects men were blowing a mixture of real and artificial snow to fill in the ‘bald’ patches. But why were we here? To begin shooting the World War Two action adventure movie The Eagle Has Landed, an adaptation of the bestselling Jack Higgins novel.
We were in a railway siding near Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, climbing down from an original World War Two carriage being pulled by a genuine World War Two German steam locomotive. On the flat cars there were some military vehicles, including two genuine German Sturmgeschütz self-propelled guns, while outside the station a selection of German vehicles and sidecar outfits were parked.
We had begun filming the scene where Michael Caine’s character, Colonel Kurt Steiner, is being introduced, suitable to lead a group on a covert mission to assassinate Winston Churchill, and I wa…
