Skip to main content

Uh, What? Clint Eastwood's THE GAUNTLET

 THE GAUNTLET

Clint Eastwood, Sandra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bill McKinney. Dir. Clint Eastwood, Warners, 1977

Want to make the universe laugh? Tell it your plans. Between you & me, my plan tonight involved a long, impassioned defense of THE GAUNTLET as one of Clint's least understood, best observed takes on the absurdity of heroism and its increasing obsolescence in the lives of women, featuring pull quotes & maybe footnotes. That...is no longer my plan.

As a kid, I always caught a TV airing of THE GAUNTLET in time to watch the finale, as over the top as Clint's films had yet gone, but never enough of the rest of it to get the full plot. When I corrected that a few years ago, I thought I'd seen as odd &  actionpacked an Eastwood movie as existed. Is it lost on anyone that the climactic shoot-em-up of an armored charter bus occurs twice before, with Sandra Locke's house & poor Bill McKinney & his car? Having your biggest set piece replicate the two you've already shot just like it looks way too deliberate & somehow meta - a word to avoid with Clint - to be laziness or unoriginality.

I cannot possibly be the only one to notice Clint's Det. Ben Shocklee manages to bend McKinney, a big biker gang, & an entire charter bus to his will by waving a six-shot revolver. The bikers don't flank him & leave him crucified with the gun stuck up his ass? The burly bus passengers can't brain him with a suitcase? The action defies even movie logic, as absurd as it is viscerally satisfying.

At first, THE GAUNTLET feels a little like a more cops'n'robbers variant on Arthur Hiller's SILVER STREAK, with spiteful banter filling in for Wilder & Clayburgh's verbal foreplay, but still a sexy, sometimes-funny movie riffing on the difference between policemen & prostitutes & ace comic relief from McKinney until its topheavy & uninteresting plot involving corrupt cops & inconvenient witnesses turns a taut little actioner into a long, complicated actioner. SILVER STREAK hums along great until suddenly Wilder and Pryor are off the train & back on the train & the FBI shows up & I reach for my Chapter Advance key.

THE GAUNTLET comes out much the same. An incendiary conversation between Locke & McKinney comparing prostitution to law enforcement gives way to more wry, frank insights into sexual hypocrisy? More character beats drawing Ben Shocklee as the anti-Harry Callahan, a useless lifer trying to find some reason to be a great cop, if only once?

Not so much. We get a chase action-comedy which has forgotten brevity's relation to wit. We get a final setpiece so over the top its conclusion keeps the brief denouement somewhere in the realm of reason. We get one of my favorite kinds of Clint movies: the ones so straight-ahead yet so insensible they're finally just...weird. THE GAUNTLET surpasses 'good' & 'bad.' It's odd in a way Clint doesn't do. It's Clint at his most peculiar and, if that's not the great revelations I planned for this piece, it's a ways from either bad or, worse, boring.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No Return:Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

 IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar. Dir. Stanley Kramer, MGM, 1963 I do not generally write about films I stop watching halfway. What's the point? I either have nothing positive to say about it or was in the wrong mood. In both cases I'm ignorant of its full length to perhaps do it justice. In the case of Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy smash, however, I feel compelled to make an exception.  My problem with the movie is not my mood, nor disappointment because it's not the movie I once heard. In fact, my biggest problem is that I haven't heard it described in glowing terms, or any, since I was about 9. See, IAMMMMW used to air anually on one or another of the networks, often in December. My parents didn't care for it and never watched it, but my friends watched anytime it aired and talked about it in rapturous terms. Until about 9-10 years old, when it seemed to drop out of conversation, or conv...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Accidental Franchise: The Rambo movies

 FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO:FIRST BLOOD PT. II, RAMBO III, RAMBO, RAMBO:LAST BLOOD Sylvester Stallone, Brian Denehey, Richard Crenna, David Caruso. Dir. Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna. Dir. Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988 Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Ken Howard. Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Weinstein Company, 2008 Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega. Dir. Adrian Grunberg, Lionsgate, 2019 My friend Alice sent me a few movies she got into over the last months. These include Mad Max:Fury Road and The Triplets of Bellevelle, as well as all five of Stallone's Rambo movies. My thoughts on them run below. The problem inherent to the Rambo movies is they each revive a character from a surprise-hit movie, but not his ongoing story, because the first film's genius conceit denied him any backstory. The movies all feature John Rambo, human killing machine, ...
2 comments
Read more

All That Fame:Alan Parker's FAME/Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ

  FAME. Irene Cara, LeRoy Jones, Richard Belzer, Linda Allen. Dir. Alan Parker, MGM/UA, 1980 The first thing that must be said of Alan Parker's sleeper hit of summer '77 is that, if you're new to it and expect the TV version's "hey kids let's put on a show" vibe, or the later remake, think instead of Bob Fosse's '79 ALL THAT JAZZ. Parker's FAME, & Fosse's picture, are films-with-music moreso than traditional H'wood productions. If that's at once unappealing, I urge that reader to withhold judgment until I'm done loving it. By 1980, my parents deemed me old enough to see an occasional R-rated movie with them, but not FAME. My folks, half a generation out of a working poor life, saw in me an advertising man, maybe a newpaper editor. But not an actor. I had mentioned a desire to audition for Cincinnati's School for Creative & Performing Arts (SCPA, pron. SKUHPAH) which had gone over badly. Not taking me to see FAME n...
Post a Comment
Read more