With a good touch
of acrophobia, I should definitely stay away from mountain climbing movies
and really high escalators as well. I have a hard time watching this stuff
though I know obviously that it was safe. I guess. It sure didn't look safe
and this was made long before we had perfected CGI to the point where none
of these actors would have had to step outside. Clint Eastwood definitely
appeared to be doing some dangerous climbing. Apparently, he did his own
climbing and stunts. Since he was also the director, that makes him twice
as crazy. This made me very glad that in my fallow youth, I never took up
mountain climbing.
I had been looking forward to re-watching
this film having last seen it over 30 years ago. Oddly, I remembered the
plot points pretty well but had forgotten how generally clunky it is and
how little actually happens. There is a lengthy mid-section of nothing much.
The albino head of a US government assassin section, the black chick who
is the come on, the assassin who doubles as a university teacher of art when
he isn't killing to afford original masters ($10,000 for a Pissaro - prices
sure have gone up) - it all felt kind of corny. And it just moves at the
pace of a Master painting - through the training and up the Eiger - with
horrible stale dialogue sticking like little pin pricks all along - especially
between Eastwood and Vonette McGee who have the sexual chemistry of two rocks
laying near each other. I recalled who the target turns out to be so that
took what very little suspense there was out of the film. Only George Kennedy
who plays the ground man comes out looking good. But then he always did.
Hemlock is a professor of art who pats the
bottoms of his female students. There is a lot in this film that feels like
it was made in the last century from racism to homophobia. To a general misogyny.
Hemlock is a retired assassin - kills are sanctions - for the government,
but he is brought in with a threat to inform the IRS about his painting collection
worth millions. Since, he only gets $10,000 a sanction that computes to a
lot of kills. Just two more. The first is easy, but all they know about the
second is that he is climbing the Eiger. 64 people have died attempting to
do that. Hemlock has to join the climb and I need to look the other
way. The film was based on a huge bestseller from author Trevanian who called
the film "Vapid". Trevanian wrote a few best selling suspense novels but
for years no one had a clue who he really was until a reported revealed his
true identity in 1998. His Loo Sanction was a sequel to this book.
