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

Popular posts from this blog

Cuck Fiction: Charles Vidor's GILDA

 Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George MacReady, Steven Geray. Dir. Charles Vidor, Columbia, 1946 My favorite erotic fiction deals with cuckolding. The stories fascinate me. As people, cuckolds don't seem to think they're worth nice things. Or happiness. On the other hand, the cuckolding partners and their multiple lovers don't come over as the clear victors, either. Part of the fascination - maybe most of it - lies in trying to decide which party comes out the MOST degraded.  Is it the submissive, sensitive husband and his unsatisfactory size/staying power? Is it the "slutwife" who finds satiety in being transformed into a fuckdoll to humilate her husband? Or is it the lover - often black - who gets to degrade the sexy white lady but who doesn't otherwise matter? As in bdsm scenes, if the cuck is most degraded, that means he also "wins," as his desires to see his wife turned into a promiscuous slut while he gets to be bi without shame are most fulfi...

Obligatory TL;DR Statement of Purpose

 A not-so-brief explanatory note as to how this blog works: I can't recall a time when movies weren't my passion, my compulsion, my addiction. Ever since my parents took me to see Disney's Bedknobs&Broomsticks, I've been hopeless. Born in 1967, I grew up with free range parents. They took my brother and me to all kinds of movies, often using Hollywood as a babysitter. We saw movies about which many parents today would cluck their tongues (though nothing R-rated until I was 12. My first R-rated movie was MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN.) Though my parents were professionals and we grew up affluent, our home saw its share of dysfunction. Dad was in the house, but not often present. Mom, stressed and disappointed at discovering her marriage wasn't an equal partnership, took out her frustrations on me.  Without getting too far into the weeds, let me just say my adult life has been far from typical middle class stability. I've never had a career. Never finished ...

Personal Movies: Robert Redford's ORDINARY PEOPLE

 Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore Timothy Hutton, Judd Hitsch. Dir. Robert Redford, Paramount, 1980 I have been fortunate - I suppose that's the word - to see my story on the big screen. Twice. We talk of identifying with movies, with characters, of moviegoing being our identity, but I never went to the movies expecting to see my life reflected back to me. The second time it occurred, with Jonathan Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, it at least had the benefit of being about a woman, so I can't get all theatrical about how I totes get Rachel. I don't, but I went home from treatment for family events and man, it looked a lot like that movie. The first time it happened, with Robert Redford's directorial debut, ORDINARY PEOPLE, it was a guy, and that guy, if older than my 13 years, lived a life that looked a whole lot like mine, minus the dead brother. In my case, my brother, my parents' biological son, is extravagantly the favorite, and my Mom & I know the...