Life on the Where Eagles Dare set was as dramatic as the film itself.
Filming began on New Year’s Day 1968, with temperatures below freezing and only six hours of daylight. Mountains near Salzburg were accessible only by convoys of snowploughs, and director Brian G. Hutton later joked that he had “three hundred people on top of a goat farm.”
The production’s biggest stars lived in contrasting comfort. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, inseparable throughout the shoot, rented a suite at Salzburg’s Hotel Österreichischer Hof, complete with personal staff and a $50 000 living allowance. Taylor even flew roast pork from London’s Salisbury Pub for a dinner party, telling guests, “Cold pork is never quite the same without British air.”
Their opulence contrasted sharply with the exhaustion of the crew camped on windswept ridges. For actors like Peter Barkworth, who had only a handful of lines, the experience was grueling.
“It seemed endless,” he recalled. “I was still dubbing lines in June, six months after my first day.”
Burton’s heavy drinking became the subject of quiet concern, while his co-star Mary Ure—both his former lover and, ironically, his on-screen ally—often scolded him for arriving late or hung-over.
“She’d call him a bum right there on set,” Hutton said. “And he’d mutter, ‘Who cast her?’ ”
The weather proved a greater adversary than any actor. A blizzard could transform the landscape overnight, erasing continuity. When an entire valley thawed between scenes, the crew scattered eleven tons of Epsom salt to recreate snow, only to have rain wash it into the river. Local farmers soon complained their cows had diarrhoea from the tainted water, forcing MGM to pay $60 000 in damages.
Even catering caused problems. To save time, a running buffet was arranged so crew could grab soup and sandwiches without breaking for lunch. The resulting litter—hundreds of white Styrofoam cups—remained buried in the snow until spring, when angry landowners demanded another payment to clean the mountainside.
Yet despite hardship, morale stayed high. Burton entertained colleagues with epic late-night storytelling sessions, while Clint Eastwood, ever the professional, trained daily with stuntman Alf Joint, running laps around the frozen set.
Hutton later said, “We had glamour, chaos, and goats—everything a movie needs.”
Sources
- – The Making of Where Eagles Dare, feature article, 1996.
- – Brian G. Hutton interview, American Film, June 1980.
- – Peter Barkworth memoir First Houses (1983).
- – BFI Production Reports, “Austria Unit Daily Logs,” 1968.
- – Variety, 15 Apr 1968, “Burton’s Blizzard Epic Tests MGM Crew.”