Another interesting thing to note -- whenever he'd just done a Dirty Harry sequel, he always seemed to jump into a pic that played against that persona (another example being TIGHTROPE coming straight after SUDDEN IMPACT).
Yeah, true. Likewise,
The Gauntlet (Clint Eastwood, 1977) directly followed
The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976).
Also, as for the ending's lack of "realism," consider the ending of
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), where Cary Grant and Eve Marie-Saint scramble about on the heads of Mount Rushmore.
The Gauntlet, while much harder and harsher in tone, uses hyperbolic spectacle in a similar way, for purposes of parody and ironic social commentary.
Interestingly, you can almost view THE GAUNTLET as Clint being a bit ahead of his time -- anticipating the high concept big-budget action pics of the 80s.
Agreed. Coming in the late 1970s,
The Gauntlet does represent a bit of a turning point between the seventies action film and the eighties action movie. Also,
The Gauntlet uses that action in ironic and socially subversive ways, to make a point about police brutality and corruption, violently excessive overkill, self-righteous authoritarianism, and blind conformity.
Personally, I think THE GAUNTLET is a fun, rough-and-ready yarn in the classic B-Movie mould that Clint sometimes liked to idulge in back before everybody loved and honored him as a grand old man of the movie biz.
Yeah, the film does feature a certain
noir quality with its emphasis on institutional conspiracy, its "gullible Joe" hero, its equal male-female partnership, and its flight-by-road. Of course, these elements are posited in a modern action film, but there is a certain screwball/
noir lineage there.
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IzzyTree
15 years ago
I'm not usually an action movie kind of gal, but I loved it (for what it was). Especially since there's so little actual _blood_.
The ending (actually the whole movie) prefigured Peter Weir's _Witness_. The ending was almost identical, except the bad-cop leader got shot instead of handcuffed. The only reason the two of them weren't shot at the end, seemed to be that then, there would be too many "witnesses" who saw them shoot an unarmed duo. Like at the end of _Witness_, where Harrison Ford starts shouting at the bad police captain, "You gonna shoot me? You gonna shoot HIM too?" ("HIM" being the little boy), while all the Amish are watching.
Plus, Sondra Locke rocked. She played that part to perfection!
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MitchConnor24
15 years ago
Miami Vice is pretty much the worst movie I've seen from recent memory, when I was a kid I went to the cinema and watched "The Stupids", that was pretty diabolical too. I was only 8 at the time, but even I thought it was bad.
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moxey (141)
7 years ago
"you can almost view THE GAUNLET as Clint being a bit ahead of his time -- anticipating the high concept big-budget action pics of the 80s"
Except the James Bond films had been doing it for over a decade prior to this crap.
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