For many moviegoers, it's often difficult to separate Clint Eastwood's undoubted skill as a filmmaker and charisma as a star with the sometimes ugly message of his movies. The Eiger Sanction (1975) seems designed to test the limits of one's patience with Clint. Mating a preposterous thriller plot with a "politically incorrect" script that practically dares viewers to be offended, its main selling point are the elaborate mountain-climbing sequences in the second half - and those might not be enough for viewers to forgive its shortcomings.
John Hemlock (Clint Eastwood) is an art professor and mountain climber who's also a retired assassin for the shadowy government organization C2. After an old colleague is murdered in Switzerland, Hemlock's approached by his boss Dragon (Walter Thayer) for one last "sanction" to avenge the colleague's death, and hopefully recover a formula for biochemical weapons. This mission requires him to pose as a climber to join an international team ascending the Eiger, a 13,000 foot mountain in the Alps. After getting in shape with old trainer Ben Bowman (George Kennedy), dodging a gay assassin (Jack Cassidy) and bedding a femme fatale (Vonetta McGee), Hemlock is finally ready to join three European colleagues (Reiner Schone, Michael Grimm and Jean-Pierre Bernard) in a death-defying climb. Unsurprisingly, not all is what it seems.
The Eiger Sanction never overcomes one basic problem: the original novel by Trevanian (a pseudonym for novelist-film scholar Rodney Whitaker, who contributed to the script) is a comic spoof of James Bond-type Manly Man thrillers, highlighting their ridiculous and hateful attitudes. Hence the goofy character names (Hemlock, Agent Wormwood), oddball characters (Dragon is an albino who dwells in an unlit office, subject to regular blood replacements) and coarse bigotry (McGee's Black operative is named Jemima; Cassidy's flamboyant killer has a yappy dog named Faggot). It would seem impossible to take all of this seriously, but Eastwood evidently lacks a sense of humor. He treats this absurdity like he's adapting John Le Carre, making the film difficult to appreciate even on an escapist level.
Without a comic touch, Eiger Sanction turns into a Robert Ludlum-esque muddle of double cross, secret identities and improbable betrayals. The film opens with an operative getting their throat sliced open to retrieve microfilm that he's swallowed, and never transcends that level of gaudiness. The espionage plot fizzles out for a long training sequence, highlighted by the aforementioned gay-baiting and Hemlock taunting his Indian trainer (Barbara Venus) with racial slurs. The movie is so offhanded in revealing its big twists that it practically forgets the spy plot when it plunges into mountaineering. When Eastwood needs an original touch, he reworks bits from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (stranding an adversary in the desert) and Where Eagles Dare (confronting a traitor after being rescued).
The Eiger Sanction nonetheless has a cult following due to its grimly realistic climbing scenes, which take up the last third of the movie. The various personalities of Hemlock's team - the boorish German (Schone), friendly Austrian (Grimm) and frustrated Frenchman (Bernard) who's cuckolded by his wife (Heidi Bruhl) - are well-sketched in a few exposition scenes, and their dilemma ascending the Eiger's forbidding North Face results in scenes as harrowing as any in adventure cinema. Eastwood and his costars were involved in at least some of the ascent (although stuntman David Knowles died filming an especially perilous scene) and the realistic depictions of frigid weather, climbing injuries and teeth-clenched camaraderie certainly stick with the viewer. It causes the viewer to wonder why Eastwood and Co. didn't just ditch, or at least minimize the spy shenanigans and turn it into a mountaineering epic.
Clint Eastwood's persona, usually electrifying, can morph into something ugly with the wrong material. He's hilariously miscast as an art professor (resulting in an Indiana Jones-esque scene of co eds hitting on him), and seems too old for a professional mountaineer; as a sneering assassin, at least, he seems in his element. While one can complain about the politics of the Dirty Harry films, they offer artistic compensations and thematic shading that Eiger lacks. The film is just straight up Clint the Reactionary putting treacherous minorities, scary queers and mouthy women in their place, whether through violence, grunted slurs or his undeniable sexual prowess; there's no problem that can't be resolved by punching someone in the face. All that's missing is the pet orangutan.
The supporting cast are largely ciphers. Faring best is George Kennedy, whose amiable doofus role is at least a nice break from his usual thugs. Vonette McGee (The Great Silence) fares well by providing sass, sarcasm and sex appeal, making her scenes a highlight even when Jemima's motivations make no sense. Jack Cassidy's camp killer and Walter Thayer's albino ghoul are too outrageous to offend. The various Euro stars manage their parts fairly well, considering how thinly they're written. But it's all Clint's show, and his costars largely set dressing.
The Eiger Sanction is a mess that points up Eastwood's deficiencies as a filmmaker. It's designed to show off Clint the Macho Badass, and as such it largely succeeds...but it also makes him seem like a camera-hogging boor whose idea of comedy is yelling "Screw Marlon Brando!" at a Native American. Never mind the ridiculous plot, or the nice photography by Eastwood regular Frank Stanley, or a serviceable early John Williams score. Never mind that the spy stuff feels completely incidental to the climbing story, or that the ending renders it all pointless. As long as Eastwood can shoot, punch and climb his way through an action movie, well that's all that really matters.
