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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.

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