August 2010 - Old Movies

A slightly-dated Clint Eastwood vehicle that combines mountain-climbing with the spy/hitman game. Eastwood plays Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an improbably tough-talking art professor who climbs mountains and also happens to be a retired assassin. He gets pulled back into his former profession by a distasteful albino spylord named Mr. Dragon who blackmails him via Hemlock's illegal art collection. The rest of the film takes in some typically 70s spy-thriller territory, with a variety of European and American settings that utilise impressive mountain and rock formations. Hemlock must infiltrate a climbing team and kill another climber/spy whilst they embark on a dangerous climb. I'm not joking.

Hemlock takes a nihilistic view of the spy profession, seeing both sides as equally bad as each other. He originally opted out of the game because the probability of being killed goes up everytime he kills someone... in this respect Hemlock echoes Eastwood's self-preserving western characters in films like A Fistful of Dollars, but the similarity ends there. Eastwood spends much of the film breezing around making wisecracks, and is more animated/intellectual than usual. There's lots of smart-alecky rapport between Hemlock and the other characters, with Eastwood even playing gay at one point whilst impersonating an effete German bellboy. Mostly, Eastwood's humour falls flat... especially in regards to the (misjudged) rape joke he makes just before a sex scene. He's better when he isn't trying so hard, and I guess he realised this as most of his subsequent films feature more of his trademark stoicism. Actually, while we're on this subject, a lot of the 'humour' in The Eiger Sanction comes across as mildly offensive... there's a sense that it's trying to be casually cutting-edge, with things like a flamboyantly gay character who has a pet dog named 'faggot', but it just doesn't work. Eastwood's films work better when his right wing leanings are implied rather than explicit, and here it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

That aside though, there's still a lot to recommend this film. George Kennedy is great as Hemlock's man on the ground, and there's a suitable number of exotic women to fulfil the spy genre requirements. Most impressive are the long shots of small figures silhouetted against vast rocky outcrops... the pre-70s absence of bluescreen and CGI means that the climbing stunts are all the more real and breathtaking. The shot of Kennedy and Eastwood swilling beer cans on top of the Totem Pole (a solitary and staggeringly high rock column in the American desert) is 100% real, and The Eiger Sanction is worth watching if only just for capturing such things on film. These are shots that will never happen in the movies again without the assistance of special effects. Anyway, I won't give away the film's ending but I will say that it was unexpected and surprised me, and it redeemed it from some of the aforementioned weaker aspects. The Eiger Sanction can be a bit silly at times, but overall it's an entertaining enough film and definitely a must for Eastwood fans.

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