La battaglia d’Inghilterra [Eagles over London] (1969)

(On TV, March 2022) Now here’s something special: what if the exuberance and expressionism of Spaghetti Western had ben applied to a World War II story? You don’t have to wonder about it anymore: just have a look at Eagles over London and you’ll see. A wild and intentionally inaccurate yarn of Germans trying to invade Great Britain at the height of the Battle of Britain, it’s a film that portrays Germans as able to infiltrate British high command even as air raids threatened the country. It’s all suitably bonkers, but executed in a style that doesn’t care as much about plausibility as impact. By far the most distinctive element of the film is seeing classic aerial combat footage re-tinted and presented using split-screen cinematography. Unforgettable. Director Enzo G. Castellari’s work is not necessarily good, but it’s rather fun—coming from late 1960s Europe, Eagles over London is still very much in the “war-is-an-adventure” mode that predates the much more sombre takes of 1970s American cinema. If you want more of this, it turns out that there’s an entire corpus of roughly forty films, called “macaroni combat,” that stem from the same style. Have fun!