The Eiger Sanction (1975)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

Clint Eastwood

Writers:

Rod Whitaker (novel)
Hal Dresner (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

21 May 1975 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Romance | Thriller

Tagline:

HIS LIFELINE - held by the assassin he hunted.

Plot:

An classical art professor and collector, who doubles as a professional assassin, is coerced out of retirement to avenge the murder of an old friend.

Plot Keywords:

Art | Mountain | Mountain Climbing | Professional Assassin | Climbing

US TV Schedule:

Thur. July 16

12:15 PM

MAX

Cast

Clint Eastwood	...	Dr. Jonathan Hemlock
George Kennedy	...	Ben Bowman
Vonetta McGee	...	Jemima Brown
Jack Cassidy	...	Miles Mellough
Heidi Brühl	...	Mrs. Anna Montaigne
Thayer David	...	Dragon
Reiner Schöne	...	Karl Freytag (as Reiner Schoene)
Michael Grimm	...	Anderl Meyer
Jean-Pierre Bernard	...	Jean-Paul Montaigne
Brenda Venus	...	George
Gregory Walcott	...	Pope
Candice Rialson	...	Art Student
Elaine Shore	...	Miss Cerberus
Dan Howard	...	Dewayne
Jack Kosslyn	...	Reporter

Runtime:

123 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Colour (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Iceland:16 | UK:AA (original rating) | Australia:M | Canada:14+ (Ontario) | Brazil:14 | Norway:15 (TV rating) | Argentina:13 | Finland:K-16 | Norway:15 | Norway:16 (1975) | South Korea:18 | Spain:18 | Sweden:15 | UK:15 | USA:R | West Germany:12 | Singapore:PG

Filming Locations:

Carmel, California, USA

Company:

Jennings Lang

Trivia:

Many of the names of characters were originally inside jokes; for example, in the novel the full name of the character 'Dragon' is 'Urassis Dragon' ("Your Ass is dragging"). Also, Hemlock (the name of the assassin) is a poison.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: (At 1:44) When Montaigne gets hit in the head and goes dead weight, his taught rope suddenly gets slack in Hemlock's grip.

Quotes:

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock: [to his class] Some of you will continue in your education. Some of you will continue with your interest in art. Some of you will have interests other than that. If we've learned nothing else this year, I hope you've learned the stupidity of the statement that art belongs to the world. 'Cause art belongs to the cultivated who can appreciate it. The majority of the great unwashed does not fit into this category... and neither, I'm sorry to say, do most of you.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Crawling Eye (#2.1)" (1989)

terribly enjoyable/ enjoyably terrible?

This is the silliest film with Eastwood's name on the credits, and that includes stuff like 'Francis in the Navy' and 'Tarantula'. But at its best, its a kind of bravura silliness. There are chunks of quotable dialogue, vertigo inducing cinematography and the requisite smorgasbord of villains and could-be/would-be villains. Just don't ask me if its a spoof, because I have no idea. I'm pretty sure nobody involved with the picture did, either.

The intermittent tone seems largely attributable to the fact that, at this point in Clint's career, the ego had landed. Thus we witness scads of nubile young lovelies attempt to lure the granite hewn stud into bed, whilst he disrobes to reveal a finely honed physique at every opportunity. The women are all sex crazed psychopaths (ain't it the truth) driven to distraction by his squinting cool and formidable musculature. Notice also the number of times both female AND male characters are required to comment admiringly on Eastwood's appearance and caress his form with their eyes. There's no distance to any of this, however. Even the pop-Nietzcheian antics of the mountain climbers are served cold. The director star never offers us the merest suggestion that he's mocking the preening machismo at any level.

All of this worship, plus the fact that the star's performance is WAY, WAY over the top - his usual 'snarling and eye-rolling alternated with boyish grin' is accentuated to parodic proportions - lends the piece a bizarrely dreamy, awkwardly sadistic homo-eroticism. If, in any other film, the hero yelled, "you're quiet now, ain't ya, ya little prick?" at a dog called 'faggot' after he'd killed it's master, I'd be on safe ground in assuming that the makers were nudging my ribs. Here, though, the surrounding unfettered narcissism and borderline unpleasantness it engenders makes it impossible to tell when the joke is for us or on us.

But its fun because of this nonsense. Even the final inconsequentiality of the whole exercise can't diminish that. It's just that this film, more than any other in his catalogue, lends extreme credence to biographer Patrick McGilligan's central assertion that, cinematically speaking at least, Clint is a lot less smart than critics allow.