The hero is not and cannot be the hero, this is the circle Donald Sutherland cannot quite square in Eye of the Needle, the film that got director Richard Marquand noticed by George Lucas, who gave him the Return of the Jedi gig after watching it. Being British and non-union undoubtedly helped Marquand a fair bit – Lucas was horns-locked with the Directors Guild of America at the time. But both men also shared an admiration for Alfred Hitchcock – there is a read-across from here to the Star Wars franchise.
Sutherland plays Faber, an undercover Nazi agent collecting information on the south coast of England as D-Day approaches. Code-named the Needle – because he kills anyone in his way with a stiletto – Faber is forced to flee after his landlady catches him receiving instructions from Berlin via his secret-agent radio. She winds up dead and he winds up on a remote Scottish island, where he is to keep his head down until a U-Boat can whisk him and plans of the D-Day offensive back to Berlin.
Whiling away time until the sub arrives, Faber is fatefully thrown together with a married couple. Once dashing former RAF pilot David (Christopher Cazenove) lost his legs on his wedding day to lovely Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and is now a bitter alcoholic drinking his life away. Lucy, for her part, is a woman trapped in a bad marriage in the middle of nowhere. She still has her needs, which her “legless fucking joke” (his words) husband is not supplying. Enter Faber, a strapping handsome man with full use of all bits of his body.
The shape of the plot is The 39 Steps – man on run, couple in Scotland, woman in trouble – and the read-across to Star Wars is the Maguffin of the secret plans (for D Day in one, the Death Star in the other). But mostly we’re in an off-centre homage to Hitchcock. The problem being that on no account – even though David is a weak and charmless man – must we side with Faber, a fugitive (as The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay was), though not an innocent one.
Sutherland is one of those rare creatures who is both a star and an actor – with the former you get starry fabulousness, with the latter chameleon skill, take your pick. But even he is caught out by the emotional gymnastics required by the screenplay. Are we meant to start liking this cold-blooded killer, even as he falls in love? To keep us offside, Sutherland does a lot of imperious Nazi sneering. This undercuts the romance, which on one level appears to hold out the hope of salvation for this hard-bitten Nazi, depending on how hard-bitten a Nazi he really is. Can we side with a man who has the power to scupper plans to retake Europe from Hitler?
Answers on a postcard. To the actors: Sutherland is effectively neutralised by the contrasting demands of playing both the romantic lead and the villain, Cazenove’s David is a cardboard stereotype who is written out of this story at precisely the moment when it might get interesting. At least there is Nelligan, whose performance is a beauty – the early scenes where Lucy first has to admit to herself that she is trapped in a loveless marriage before she can give herself to Faber are the best in the film. Poor old Ian Bannen, playing a cop following on bleakly about four steps behind the fleeing Nazi, has scenes that could largely be removed from the film without any real impact on it.
What George Lucas saw, apart from an admiration for Hitchcock, is Marquand’s ability to set things up efficiently and deal with big set pieces and more intimate moments. There is machinery and people in uniform. This is a war movie with the war largely taking place offstage – same with Return of the Jedi.
The duff stuff – the “hero problem” and the way the ending flaps on for ever (I was muttering “just shoot him!”) Lucas might have put down to Ken Follett, who wrote the original book. First published as Storm Island, it was a best-seller – Follett’s first biggie – but its success unfortunately did not translate to this film. Nor did Marquand’s drastic mid-career upswing (George Lucas as his second unit director on RotJ!) lead to long-term success. He was dead only six years later of a stroke aged only 49.
Eye of the Needle – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
