Unless I’m forgetting something, Clint Eastwood only has two movies that could be classified as spy movies, and both involve a mission to a mountain in the Alps. One is WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) and the other is this one, THE EIGER SANCTION (1975). I’d say it’s about 65% suspenseful mountain climbing thriller, 25% assassin intrigue, and 10% colorful James Bond type shit. That last portion includes all the sexy stuff and the sinister boss, an albino war criminal named Dragon (Thayer David, ROCKY).

Clint plays Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, a great pulp hero because he’s an ex-Green Beret, secretly a retired assassin, but famously a retired mountain climber (there are fawning magazine profiles of him), now working as a college art history professor, and has a side gig as a book critic. I wondered if this might’ve been an influence on RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK when I saw one of his students (Candice Rialson, CANDY STRIPE NURSES) making eyes and spreading legs at him in class. He turns her down because he doesn’t take advantage of students or drunks, he says. Good to know he has some limits.

Hemlock doesn’t seem fond of Pope (Gregory Walcott, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE), a thug for the C2 agency sent to get him for Dragon, or Miss Cerberus (Elaine Shore, THE SENTINEL), the cartoonishly grouchy nurse who screens him for contagions before entering the darkened chamber of her immuno-compromised boss. He also hates Dragon, the organization and the job and doesn’t particularly care that somebody offed one of the other operatives, Wormwood (camera assistant Frank Redmond), over some microfilm hidden in a pack of Bazooka Joe bubble gum. The only reason he agrees to one last job is because Dragon threatens to snitch on his collection of stolen paintings. Those are his babies. So he agrees to go “sanction” somebody in trade for documents clearing his collection with the IRS. I love that motive. This is a good movie.

The mission is a cinch, but obviously there’s a catch. On the return trip he brings home flirtatious flight attendant Jemima Brown (Vonetta McGee, BLACULA, SHAFT IN AFRICA), wakes up and she stole his money and IRS document. Duh, dude, she works for Dragon, and now you gotta kill another guy to get your prize. But there are some plus sides to it, including that he’s authorized to kill a guy who betrayed him, Miles Melough (Jack Cassidy, voice in Mister Magoo cartoons).

And it really is a mission he has a better shot at that anybody. He has to join an international climbing expedition up the north face of the Eiger mountain in Switzerland, because C2 believe’s one of them killed Wormwood. They’re working on figuring out which one before the actual climb, but you can guess whether or not that ends up happening.

To get ready he goes to a school run by his old friend Ben Bowman (George Kennedy, SMALL SOLDIERS), so this is in the elite category of Eastwood films that include training montages. Ben starts him off and then hands him over to George (Brenda Venus, FOXY BROWN), a nimble and silent young woman whose cut-off jeans lead him up hills and cliffs like that fake rabbit the greyhounds chase at the dog track. This joins ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN as one of the movies where Clint Eastwood does extensive jogging in jeans.

Eventually Hemlock and Bowman get to Switzerland and meet the other climbers. Some are more suspicious than other, which makes them less suspicious, but either way his life depends on people he doesn’t like. The worries about who’s throat he needs to cut before they cut his line are almost an afterthought to the actual ascent (which he previously failed at).

One of the main appeals of this movie is that they shot this stuff on real mountains. My kneejerk reaction was that it’s because it was made long before the digital era, back when more things were done for real, when you had less of a choice. Now you can just have computers do it, like when I checked Google to make sure I hadn’t reviewed THE EIGER SANCTION before and their patented World Destroying Bullshit Generator made up a fake opinion for me:

Amazing! I was just about to write that the director (some guy named Clint Eastwood)’s interesting lighting techniques aren’t particularly interesting visually, like most directors. They got me dead to rights.

But in reading about THE EIGER SANCTION I realized that even back then other filmmakers would’ve done some of it with soundstages, green screens and matte paintings. Clint’s insistence on really doing it was not standard operating procedure. In fact they had to develop special lightweight batteries just to be able to carry the camera and sound equipment up the mountains.

Supposedly Eastwood did all of his own climbing – even the big hanging scene at the climax where he’s suspended 4,000 feet above the ground – and it certainly looks like that’s true. It made for a thrilling movie, but maybe it was a mistake. Director of photography Frank Stanley (who had previously done BREEZY, MAGNUM FORCE and THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT) blamed Eastwood for a fall that left him in a wheelchair for a while. (They never worked together again, but Stanley continued to work on movies including CAR WASH, CORVETTE SUMMER and GREASE 2.) I don’t know if anyone blames Clint for this, but a climber named David Knowles was killed by a falling boulder while filming. It’s a good movie but not worth a human life, I’d say.

I was amazed when a helicopter shot revealed that Eastwood and Kennedy really were somehow sitting on top of the 640 foot Totem Pole rock formation, enjoying a six-pack of Oly. As I suspected, they were lowered onto it by helicopter, but in order to get permission from the Navajo Nation they had to have a pair of actual climbers go up and remove hardware embedded into it by people who had illegally climbed it in the past.

THE EIGER SANCTION was playing in theaters when I was born, so it’s pretty fuckin old, and so are some of its attitudes. The albino spy boss and flamboyant gay rival (who names his dog the f-slur!) are entertainingly colorful characters but at the expense, in my modern day opinion, of respecting the humanity of real humans in those groups. There are questionable comments about Jemima’s name and Native American stereotype jokes made to George (though “screw Marlon Brando” is hard to deny), and more befuddlingly Hemlock makes a rape joke to Jemima right before they have sex. Most of this stuff my generation sees as inappropriate but we sort of remember the world being like this and understand it. That last one though surprised me, I definitely don’t get why he thinks that’s cute.

In the spy movie tradition there’s also a higher than usual amount of objectifying women and presenting a fantasy of what it would be like to be a walking aphrodisiac. Buxom young women are constantly hitting on Hemlock. Some he rejects, and at least one (uncredited as far as I can tell) he may not even notice behind him sunbathing and making eyes at him. But it’s a regular enough occurrence for him that just within the course of the movie he sleeps with two women who turn out to be working for someone. As the narrator of the vintage promo featurette on the Kino blu-ray puts it, “Glamorous women move in and out of his orbit, and he loves them frequently and well.”

I know why it’s hard to let go of this stuff. I am not immune to the appeal of Hemlock waking up to a phone call from Vonetta McGee saying “Good morning, baby. There’s coffee by your bed.” And then he comes home to find her in his house saying, “Wild Turkey on the rocks? Hmm?” She knows the way to a man’s heart. But it’s pretty clear to me there are men who want real human women to only be like that, and it’s fucking up the whole world. I’m against it.

One of the women Hemlock loves well, George, is either supposed to be of Native heritage, or Hemlock just assumes she is and starts making racial comments. The actress, Brenda Venus, is actually of Spanish and Sicilian heritage. Not long after this movie she purchased a book that had inside it an envelope with Henry Miller’s address, so he started writing to him. In the last four years of his life he wrote some 1,500 letters (4,000 hand-written pages) to his supposed muse who was sixty years his junior. Some were published as Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus in 1986. She was later both a centerfold and columnist for Playboy. In 2002 the gymnast Svetlana Khorkina starred in a Russian play about her life. I would argue that George is pretty intriguing for a non-verbal sex object character, but the real woman is more interesting, as tends to be the case.

(As another example, the character “Buns” is played by Susan Morgan Cooper, who never acted again but did direct the documentaries MIRJANA: ONE GIRL’S JOURNEY and AN UNLIKELY WEAPON.)

As retrograde as these characterizations are, there’s a message at the heart of the movie that’s timeless. Eventually we learn that (SPOILER) the whole Wormwood mission was a set up anyway. They wanted those (apparently fake) chemical weapons plans to be stolen, and they’re only “getting revenge” on the killers to make it seem real. So Hemlock is being forced into a dangerous and immoral mission that is entirely pointless. If I understand correctly, it’s not even that important to C2. It’s all just to trick the enemy into wasting a little time on a fake recipe.

That part at least seems to be in the spirit of the hit 1972 novel it was based on, the debut of a writer using the pen name Trevanian. What kind of an asshole would write under a made up mononym? Fuck that guy.

He was shy about revealing his real name, and even sent fakes to do interviews in his place (like MF DOOM sending “Doombots” to do some of his shows for him). He claimed in a rare 1979 interview to write “under five different names on several subjects: theology, law, aesthetics, film.” He actually did publish The Language of Film (1970) under “Rod Whitaker,” a shortened version of his given name. But he continued using others, telling Newsweek he would imagine himself as another writer as a form of Method acting. “I ask myself, ‘Who can tell this tale best? Who would already have this information?’”

He was from New York but earned bachelor’s and masters degrees in drama at the University of Washington – I researched it and I think he just missed overlapping with Bruce Lee. His master’s thesis play Eve of the Bursting was performed in 1960, Bruce enrolled in ’61. It’s more likely that he encountered Tobe Hooper and/or Tsui Hark while teaching film at the University of Texas at Austin. These are the types of things I think about. Not sure if you’re the same.

In a 1998 written interview Trevanian said the idea of The Eiger Sanction was to write “a quick little spoof on the then-popular super-spy/action genre,” though he’d only seen two films like that and read “only a third of one of Ian Fleming’s books – all he could manage before boredom weighted his eyelids.” He seemed proud of performing “the necessary task of ridiculing and diminishing the CIA” since he felt that “the Bay of Pigs-sort of CIA bungling was the one thing most likely to bring the world to atomic disaster.” But he was frustrated that critics and readers, especially in the U.S., took it as a serious spy novel, so he made the sequel The Loo Sanction (already published before the movie came out), a spoof of his initial spoof. “Alas, no. The book became a second international bestseller and was gobbled down as another scintillating example of the super-cool spy genre.”

(I’m sure he was thankful that his 1979 novel Shibumi, described as a “meta-spy thriller” and “cult novel,” was received tepidly and only built a following over time. Many seem to consider it his masterpiece, and Chad Stahelski is supposedly gonna direct a movie version.)

It definitely seems like Whitaker, much like Hemlock in his opening lecture, had disdain for “the unwashed masses.” He credited disillusionment with American materialism as the reason he lived and died in Somerset, England. He called the movie “vapid,” though he’s credited as co-writer, having written initial drafts with Hal Dresden (the guy who supposedly contributed “What we have here is a failure to communicate” in COOL HAND LUKE) when Paul Newman was going to star.

Eastwood had issues with the novel and existing script, but was looking for an opportunity to finish off his contract with Universal and move to Warner Brothers. He called Warren Murphy (creator of the The Destroyer books, basis of REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, which has some similarities to this), who had never read Trevanian’s book, written a screenplay, or even seen a screenplay. But he read the book, “thought it was useless but pleasant dreck,” and wrote a new script in eight days. Eastwood had him add the revenge motivation. He didn’t like how amoral the character was in the book (though from the sounds of it that was part of Trevanian’s point).

I really like THE EIGER SANCTION and I’m glad I chose it as my traditional Clint Eastwood first-review-of-the-year. Hopefully it brings not-as-bad-as-expected tidings. As I look down the list I’m running kind of low on un-reviewed Clint movies, but there are a few more, and then I’ll just start over, I guess. These Clint reviews have brought us all good luck these last dozen years – imagine how shitty things would’ve been with bad luck. Jesus.

To really get 2025 started off right, here are some screen grabs I made for anyone who shares my appreciation for 1975 fashion. Happy new year everybody!

SPOILER POST-SCRIPT: I don’t entirely know what to make of the betrayal revealed at the end, but I kinda like that about it. Somehow Miles helped George get off of drugs – what qualifications does he have for that? It’s funny to have to accept that weirdo having a good side to him. Also you gotta wonder if Ben knew his daughter was gonna fuck Hemlock before she drugged him.

APPENDIX:

Previous entries in the Clint Eastwood new year tradition:

2013 – TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

2014 – A PERFECT WORLD

2015 – THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES

2016 – KELLY’S HEROES

2017 – PINK CADILLAC

2018 – TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA

2019 – THE MULE

2020 – WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART

2021 – THE GAUNTLET

2022 – ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ
2023- JOE KIDD
2024- HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER