Thread by @shaneharris

Expanded my spy movie education with The Eiger Sanction. I can't speak for the novel, but the film feels like it burped out of a mid-70s cultural stew of paranoia, misogyny, and thrill-seeking. Recommended. imdb.com/title/tt007292…

I won't give away the plot. It stars and was directed by Clint Eastwood, who plays a 35-year old (lol) ex-CIA assassin (what?) turned art history teacher who's an expert mountain climber. Hired for a "one last job," the aforementioned "sanction," or hit, adventure ensues.

The photography is breathtaking. The climbing scenes are harrowing. The story is intriguing and the direction taut. But there's some ham-fisted dialogue here that hits you harder than a falling rock from the north face of the mountain. (See, I paid attention.)

More than a few scenes are wildly racist and homophobic. (There were some dropped jaws at our viewing.) When contemporary audiences encounter this sort of material, you often hear, "Oh, it was a different time..." Um, it was 1975. These filmmakers knew what they were doing.

To say there are elements of misogyny is a near-criminal understatement. It's like if soft-core porn makers tried to do a Bond movie. There is no sexual charm or tension. There is no subtly. There are actually rape jokes. One redeeming quality, tho...

The women are hero sleeps with are smarter and stronger than him. They seduce HIM. One tries to murder him. But the movie is still suffused with so much butt-slapping and ogling that you can't really find a theme of empowerment.

The espionage is actually pretty good. Intriguing. Appropriately international. The hero's boss, head of some maybe-CIA syndicate, unclear, is a gut-busting amalgam of Blofeld, Howard Hughes, and a Nazi doctor. His dialogue is ham-fisted. He repeats jokes. Brilliant.

Like a lot of spy movies, this one says more about the filmmakers' impressions of espionage than the craft itself. Notably, like so many Eastwood movies, this one resolves around a reluctant hero who can't live with the life/can't live without it. That works quite well here.

It's tempting to characterize (and dismiss) the movie as a mid-70s artifact, but I think it's better taken as pure Eastwood. It's brilliantly shot. Smarter than most garbage of the genre--awful bits of dialogue aside. If I were doing his retrospective, I'd put this on the list.

You can draw a line through Play Misty for Me, Dirty Harry, The Eiger Sanction, The Every Which/Any Which duo, Bronco Billy, to Firefox. 70s/Cold War-era paranoia stories, with a ruggedly individualistic hero who says the world has gone to hell but has found his way through it.