Saturday, August 20, 2016

Movie review - "The Eiger Sanction" (1975) *** (warning: spoilers)

Clint Eastwood's languid directing style suits mountaineering - the slow but steady pace, the accumulation of suspense rather than wham-bam action... There's some terrific mountains to take in here - in the US and Europe; Clint is a believable mountaineer and I bought all the technical jargon about the mountain trade spouted by Clint and George Kennedy.

The story should be simple but is needlessly complicated. Clint is a former assassin hired by a shadowy government office to kill an assassin in order to (a) help his country (b) avenge an old friend of Clint's (c) get the IRS off Clint's back (a nice touch!).  For some reason, the man Clint is after will be on a mountaineering expedition, one of several people, they're not sure which,  except he has a limp. Clint doesn't notice that Kennedy has a limp until the end for some reason. Clint kills one person, goes back to the "M" figure, is told to kill again - one visit was surely enough? People keep trying to kill Clint at Kennedy's training center but he never seems that worried. Clint is passive for a lot of the story for all the mountaineering he does - all these people die on the mountain due to it being, well, hard - no real attempt from Clint to save them.

The novel on which this is based was a spoof and enough of the spoof survives this film - the albino head of the government organisation, the flamboyantly gay assassin (Jack Cassidy), the way out humour, the fact Clint's character is an art professor as well as assassin (hit on by students including a nubile Candice Rialson), a plot involving treacherous government. Other elements of it are more recognisably Clint: women throwing themselves at him (blonde, Indian, black), mocking feminists (when a woman asks George Kennedy about climbing a mountain and masculinity, Kennedy goes "lady why don't you go get yourself a screw")

It's beautifully shot. Some of the mountaineering stuff is really good. The acting is strong - Clint is ideally cast, Kennedy and Cassidy are fun.

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