Clint Eastwood (67 page)

The Gauntlet
was a script (by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack) Warner Bros. had in hand, and the studio first proposed it to Clint as a costarring vehicle with Barbra Streisand (whom he dated for a brief period later on); she, typically, hesitated over the project; he, typically,
grew impatient, deciding, finally, that he would direct and that he could probably carry the picture commercially without Streisand’s help.

To no one’s surprise, he cast Locke as Gus Mally, a shrill and foulmouthed Las Vegas prostitute with a college degree. “I thought,” says Clint, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to cast somebody who’s used to playing a kind of waify type as a hooker, instead of having a come-up-and-see-me-sometime vibe?” He thought it equally interesting to cast himself as a dumb cop, a sort of anti-Dirty Harry, a man who has never questioned authority, never done anything to call attention to himself and is, when we meet him, drinking himself into oblivion.

What we understand from everything the movies have taught us about ill-matched couples thrown together and obliged to take a dangerous journey together—he’s supposed to extradite her from a Las Vegas jail and escort her to his home city to testify in a gangland trial—is that she is going to reanimate him (“I love those guys who are learning as the picture goes by,” says Clint) and that he is going to tame her by touching the soft center hidden beneath a hard exterior. What we learn as this film proceeds is that the first thing she tells him is correct. Someone wants to murder her and that removing her from what amounts to protective custody is the first step in that process. We also learn eventually that that someone is Blakelock (William Prince), the Phoenix police chief, and that he has chosen Ben Shockley as her escort precisely because he is such a lousy cop.

Because Gus so violently resists removal from jail he has her gagged, strapped to a gurney and conveyed to an ambulance he has ordered to take them to a car he has rented. As they pull up to it, the automobile explodes. Immediately thereafter they find themselves pursued by two other cars. Evading them, they take refuge at her home, a dusty bungalow on a desert lot. Shockley phones Blakelock, requesting a police escort to the airport. Instead he tells the Las Vegas cops that a desperate criminal gang is holed up in the house, and they lay massive siege to it.

There follows one of the most remarkable action sequences in the Eastwood canon. The cops are armed with the latest in assault weapons, which they are eager to try out. When the call to surrender goes unanswered, they saturate the building with bullets (according to a press release, which probably didn’t exaggerate by much, 250,000 squibs were set in its walls, their bullet-sized charges set off electronically). The result is a truly terrifying, strangely comic and characteristically Eastwoodian excess. This is a full-scale firestorm, sustained far beyond our expectations. When eventually it subsides, we hear the house start to
groan and see it start to tremble, whereupon it shudders comically and collapses in upon itself.

In this sequence the camera picks up a sign reading, “God Makes House Calls,” and when it is over a cop offers an inane moral to the episode: “Cap’n, they should have surrendered.” Sign and dialogue both signal the director’s satiric intent, which was not merely to send up generic convention, but to comment on the observed realities of the moment. Clint says he got the idea for the sequence from television coverage of the Los Angeles Police Department siege of a building where elements of the Symbionese Liberation Army had gone to ground.

This sequence also encapsulates one of the film’s main themes, for just as Ben Shockley is Harry Callahan’s opposite,
The Gauntlet
’s characterization of authority is the opposite of
Dirty Harry
’s. Ben’s superiors are portrayed not as impotent prisoners of political correctness, but as fools of quite another kind, setting themselves arrogantly above the law, indulging in every kind of overkill to assure their ultimate victory. An analogy to Vietnam is inescapable.

At the time, Clint preferred to see
The Gauntlet
as a straightforward chase with some comic-romantic overtones. He drew particular attention to the woman’s role: “
The girl’s part is a terrific role, not just token window dressing like in so many action pictures. Her part is equal to the male part, if not even more so.” He suggested comparisons to
It Happened One Night
and
The African Queen
, with the latter perhaps being the more apt if only because it, too, posits a drunken and defeated hero reforming himself under the tutelage of a high-spirited woman.

But rich as it is in references to romantic comedy, the film’s dominant tone is bleak; the countryside through which the couple moves is relentlessly harsh, and photographed in hard, flat light by Rexford Metz, a legendary aerial photographer whom Clint had promoted to DP. Moreover, the film is once again full of Clint’s brutal frankness.

For example, there is Ben and Gus’s escape from Las Vegas. Still trusting Blakelock, Shockley asks for him to send an escort to meet them at the Nevada-Arizona state line, and he commandeers a police car driven by what seems to be a good ole boy (played with his usual relish by Bill McKinney) to take them to this rendezvous. As they proceed, however, this nameless cop launches into an ugly fantasy about Gus’s life as a hooker that amounts to nothing less than attempted verbal rape. She resists with a cool catechism of everyday police piggishness and thuggery, as vicious a case against law enforcement as the screen has ever offered. She concludes by saying that the filth she encounters in her life can be soaked off in a long hot bath, while the rot in his brain can never be excised—except by blowing it out with a service revolver. By the
way, she sweetly wonders, does his wife know that he masturbates? The man screams, and almost loses control of the car.

She reduces her tormentor to impotent, quivering rage, and Gus finally convinces Ben that caution is the better part of valor. When they near the state line, they send the cop on alone, and, sure enough, he and his car are decimated. It is a repeat, on a slightly smaller scale, of the bungalow shoot-out—excessive force excessively applied. They take refuge in a cave and play their extremely broad equivalent of the Walls of Jericho scene in
It Happened One Night
.

He: “For two cents and a stick of gum I’d beat the shit out of you.”

She: “Whatever gets you off, Butch.”

He: “After I was through, where would I leave the money?”

She: “I don’t want your money, Shockley. I love you for your mind.”

Whereupon he slugs her, and she doubles him over with a knee to the groin.

The next morning, he taxes her about why, exactly, everyone is so interested in her. She tells a story about a mobster setting her up with a memorably perverse John, who obliges her to strip and lie facedown on the bed in his hotel room, where he holds a gun between her legs with one hand. What he was doing with his other hand is, as she says, not hard to imagine. We are far beyond a conventional hooker hard-luck story here. More important, Shockley recognizes Blakelock from her description.

As he does, however, the silence of their refuge is shattered by the roar of motorcycles as the usual scruffy gang draws up outside their cave. Trapped, Shockley brazens it out, threatening to arrest the lot of them: “I got this gun, I got this badge, I got the love of Jesus in my pretty green eyes,” he shouts. It is, of course, a variant on another classic movie scene—Cary Grant’s single-handed threat to arrest the entire Kali cult in
Gunga Din
, except that Clint plays this as a mad scene, a ploy that turns out to be more effective than Grant’s brilliant parody of heroic cool. He drives the gang off, all except three of them—one whose cycle he has shot up and a couple whose bike he takes for his and Gus’s use.

Soon a police helicopter is chasing them in an expertly managed action sequence that ends with the chopper crashing into a high-tension tower. Now they hop a freight—and find themselves sharing an empty boxcar with the three cyclists they left behind at the cave. They get the jump on Shockley, tie him up and start to beat him insensible. Gus diverts them by pulling open her blouse and offering herself to them. As they assail her—the woman is a full participant—Shockley manages to free himself and throw them off the train.

Recuperating from their ordeal in a motel room, Shockley and Gus
confess their variously broken and unfulfilled dreams. By the end of this conversation she is proposing to him in perhaps the only way a woman could propose to such a character—indirectly. She calls her mother in New York and describes this man she’s met and the life she says they are going to share—after they take care of some business they have in Phoenix.

Yes, Phoenix. For he has decided he can run no farther. He must confront Blakelock and try to bring him to justice. “At least someone will know I tried.” “Who? Blakelock?” asks Gus. “No. Me.”

It makes sense on one level. If they continue to run, inevitably they will be caught and dispensed with on some anonymous back road. On the other, more practical, hand, the scheme is ludicrous. He proposes to hijack a bus, armor it with steel plate and then drive it, via a preannounced route, down the main streets of Phoenix, encouraging Blakelock to assault it with all the forces at his command. Just why Shockley is so certain of Blakelock’s response is never made clear, nor is the case persuasively made for his not having the bus quietly apprehended on the open highway before it arrives in town. Hey, we’ve got a movie to make here, and one in dire need of climactic spectacle.

At least another 250,000 squibs were rigged on the bus, the streets were cleared, the extras—mainly off-duty Phoenix policemen—were uniformed and armed, and the gauntlet was run. Why no sharpshooter ever took aim at the naked rubber tires of the vehicle remains one of those great unsolved movie mysteries—rather like the one about why the Indians didn’t shoot the
Stagecoach
horses. In the end, the bus collapses under the weight of the firepower directed at it, just like the bungalow and the police car before it. But it does attain the courthouse steps, where Blakelock goes bonkers when his awed, cowed police force refuses his order to kill Ben and Gus. It is she, indeed, who kills the police commissioner after he has wounded Ben.

Bob Daley thought the whole sequence senseless: “Three hundred thousand bullet holes and not one tire went flat, and nobody got nicked. The audience—we lost them right there.” Don Siegel took another tack. After seeing a rough cut and making some complimentary remarks, he said there was just one more shot missing. What was that, Clint asked. “I’d like to have seen a shot with four or five hundred dead cops
lying
in the street.” What he meant was that with officers lining both sides of the narrow streets and firing madly at the bus, they would inevitably create carnage in their own ranks.

Clint was not amused. Whatever strain his concluding sequence placed on credulity, it represented, like the film’s other set-piece action
sequences, tour de force moviemaking, quick-cut and complex in a manner he had not previously attempted.

Daley remembers Clint confronting him one day for his lack of enthusiasm. “You’ve been telling people
The Gauntlet
is one of the worst movies you’ve ever seen,” he said to Daley. “No, that’s not true. It’s one of the ten worst, but not the worst,” Daley replied. Recounting the exchange he adds, “I meant it to be humorous, but it didn’t sit well with him.”

Neither did a series of mishandled sneak previews in the Mid-Atlantic states. One of them was scheduled for the night a local team was playing a championship football game, so that the audience was full of older people volubly offended by the film’s violence and bad language. None of the previews was supported by print, television or radio advertising, and John Calley remembers making frantic calls back to the studio, trying to mobilize some last-minute support for the showings. He also remembers hand-lettering cardboard signs and tacking them up in a desperate effort to fill the gap. Fritz Manes called a media-buyer friend in the middle of the night, seeking help in getting a few last-minute commercials on the air.

A Warner Bros. executive lost his job over this incident, and Manes thinks Calley’s heroic generalship may have saved the studio’s relationship with Clint. For the star was present for the chaos. Ironically, he had in his possession part of the solution to whatever marketing problems the picture presented. This was a spectacular painting, the work of the celebrated fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, which he and Sondra had picked up from the artist in Connecticut and were carrying in the back of a new Ferrari Clint also acquired on the trip. The artwork represented a substantial investment on the studio’s part (and a substantial worry as it knocked about unguarded in the car), for it was intended as the centerpiece for the film’s advertising campaign, a ripsnorting montage featuring the bus looking menacing, an overmuscled Clint looking heroic and a bosomy Sondra looking imperiled. It was hip-regressive, its air of old-fashioned movie ballyhoo proposing old-fashioned thrills.

It worked.
Newsweek
’s David Anson suggested that Frazetta’s work caught the “captivatingly lunatic” spirit of a movie that he said was “like a sword-and-sorcery epic recast in tacky Southwestern drag.” His tone of bemused indulgence was adopted in many of the reviews. Vincent Canby, for example, wrote that even though the movie did not have “
a single thought in its head … its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it’s impossible not to pay attention most of the time.” He even offered a few words of sharply observed (if backhanded) praise for Clint’s performance: “Mr. Eastwood’s talent is his style, unhurried and
self-assured, that of a man who goes through life looking down at other men’s bald spots.”

Curiously, the improbable invincibility of the bus as it crawls through the concluding gauntlet didn’t seem to bother most reviewers; even Pauline Kael’s predictable screed omitted mention of it. Like Gus Mally’s little house, the critics were beginning to collapse under the weight of Clint’s seemingly irresistible firepower. It is odd that so many of them picked this, the most blatantly violent movie Clint had ever made, to abandon their resistance, but such was the case.