Deposit “The Gauntlet” smack dab in the middle of the Clint Eastwood collection.
It’s neither “Pink Cadillac” awful nor “Unforgiven” great, just a genre exercise handled with a modicum of class until the preposterous finale.
The film also allows us to see Eastwood and former flame Sondra Locke cozy up on screen without that interfering Orangutan getting in the way.
Eastwood plays Ben Shockley, a Phoenix cop who’d rather drown his sorrows in Jim Beam than fight crime. But when his superior assigns him to a special case – bring a low-level witness to a low-level crime from Las Vegas to Phoenix – he’s eager to oblige.
His boss tells he was selected because he’s known for getting the job done.
Most Eastwood characters would have grimaced at such piffle, but Shockley is shattered enough to take the bogus compliment.
The witness, “Gus” Mally (Locke), has the goods on a crime boss with ties to someone within the Phoenix police department. She’s a hooker with a heart of tin and a mouth that needs a thorough scrubbing.
Soon, Ben and Gus are running for their lives as one mother of a double cross leaves them both at the mercy of more bullets than any duo ever faced.
Eastwood does double duty here, directing himself as a cop who’s one good bust away from redemption. The actor’s easy way with a camera gives the thriller a welcome sense of place. This isn’t another Manhattan cop saga, and Eastwood maximizes the mid-west settings like a true cowpoke.
The screenplay struggles to make the Ben/Gus banter both playful and hard-edged, but too many lines sound like outtakes from a failed cop show pilot. And watching Ben go all mushy for Gus later in the film is enough to make any “Dirty Harry” purist puke.
“The Gauntlet’s” signature theme is gunplay aimed at stationary targets. It’s effective the first time around, but the gimmick feels beneath Eastwood.
“The Gauntlet” proved the bridge to a brief comic turn in Eastwood’s career with his twin ape movies, but seen today it’s a serviceable thriller that showed the actor could hit most of the right action notes without breaking a sweat.
(Photo: The poster for “The Gauntlet” came from the canvas of late illustrator Frank Frazetta.)
Related posts:
on 
on 
on 
on 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I always thought it was very disturbing that Clint Eastwood would have the characters played by his then girlfriend, Sondra Locke, raped or nearly raped in his movies. In addition to “The Gauntlet”, this happened in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, “Sudden Impact”, and “Bronco Billy”.
Maybe he was just sick if seeing her in his own movies, like I quickly became.
I’ve been re-watching a lot of Clint’s older films, and I’m struck by the treatment of women in them. Hard to say if it’s typical of the time (I was 9 when “The Gauntlet” hit theaters) or Clint has a mean streak toward the ladies that (hopefully) resolved itself.