The Clint Eastwood Movie That's Pretty Much A James Bond Parody

Casting James Bond is always a high-profile thing, and many intriguing names have been linked to the role over the years. I often lament that we never got Oliver Reed as 007, but I can definitely live without Rex Harrison, Dick Van Dyke, Adam West, and Mel Gibson versions of the super spy. At the time of writing, you can get 200/1 odds on Gerard Butler, Adam Driver, or Steve Coogan donning the tuxedo next if you're the gambling type. All terrible ideas, but how about Clint Eastwood back in the day? He was reportedly offered the chance after George Lazenby's one-and-done turn in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" but turned it down because he felt the role still belonged to Sean Connery, who did indeed reprise the role in "Diamonds Are Forever."

Probably the closest we got to seeing how Eastwood would have interpreted Ian Fleming's suave secret service agent came four years after Connery's disappointing return to the franchise. That movie was "The Eiger Sanction," based on the 1972 best-selling novel by Trevanian, a.k.a. film school teacher and secretive author of pulp fiction, Rodney Williams Whittaker. Although Eastwood confessed he wasn't really interested in spy thrillers, directing and starring in the picture gave him a chance to get out of his contract with Universal and work far away from the prying eyes of studio executives. To the latter point, "The Eiger Sanction" features some of the most spectacular and authentic mountaineering scenes committed to celluloid, shot on location in Monument Valley and the fearsome north face of the Eiger mountain.

Released in 1975, "The Eiger Sanction" made an underwhelming return at the box office and received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert called the plot "unlikely and confused" but praised the realistic mountaineering sequences, while Pauline Kael (who loved trashing Eastwood movies) called it a "travesty." Viewed 50 years later, it is perhaps even more apparent why it wasn't a critical and commercial success at the time. The film is very odd, with a first half that plays like a crass parody of James Bond flicks before turning into a straight-faced man-versus-nature adventure once we get down to the serious business of tackling the titular peak.

Eastwood plays Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, a mountain-climbing art history professor with an expensive taste in black market paintings. In the past, he has funded this hobby by moonlighting as a hitman for the C-2 government agency. This shadowy setup is run by a very Bond villain-esque director called Dragon (Thayer David), a photosensitive former Nazi kept alive by blood transfusions in his darkened office/lair. Dragon approaches Hemlock with a classic one last job. A C-2 agent codenamed Wormwood was murdered by two assassins in Zurich to obtain a microfilm containing a formula for germ warfare. Dragon wants Hemlock to perform a "sanction" on the killers.

Part-hired and part-blackmailed by Dragon, Hemlock reluctantly accepts the gig and quickly tracks down the first of the assassins in Zurich, dispatching him with little fuss. On the way back to the United States, he's seduced by a stewardess called Jemima Brown (Vonetta McGee), who turns out to be working for Dragon. She robs his safe, leaving Hemlock with no choice but to accept another sanction on Wormwood's second assailant –- a negotiation made easier when Dragon belatedly reveals that Wormwood was Hemlock's faithful old war buddy.

There is a snag, however. Dragon doesn't have intel on the second killer's identity, but he does know the man will be part of an international team preparing to scale the lethal north face of the Eiger. The mountain has thwarted Hemlock twice before, so it's off to the Arizona desert for some training with his friend and climbing partner Ben (George Kennedy). Matters are further complicated by an alluring female assassin and the presence of Miles Mellough (Jack Cassidy), another former pal who betrayed Hemlock during the Korean War.

Once Hemlock arrives in Switzerland and meets his fellow climbers, he faces the challenge of rooting out his target while trying to survive on one of the world's deadliest mountains. The only clue to the killer's identity is that a witness described him as walking with a limp, an affliction that doesn't seem to apply to any of the team. Once they're up on the cliff face, however, they all behave appropriately suspicious enough to keep us guessing until the nail-biting climax.

Negative critics of "The Eiger Sanction" and its sequel, "The Loo Sanction," called the books inadequate Bond rip-offs. Rodney William Whittaker claimed that they were intentional spoofs. When the first novel was published in 1972, the Bond series was already veering towards self-parody and it's not clear whether anyone got that Whittaker was deliberately riffing on the 007 format. Least of all Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood definitely isn't above sending up his tough screen persona, as we saw when he starred alongside an orangutan a few years later in "Every Which Way But Loose." But humor has never really been his strong point as a filmmaker or an actor and he plays "The Eiger Sanction" pretty straight. This is perhaps where the movie's weird tone originates. The excellent location work and stunning photography grounds it in the realms of other paranoid thrillers of the era like "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Parallax View," which sits at odds with the goofy Bond-like elements of the first half.

And what a first half it is. If you think that the Bond franchise is problematic at times, wait until you get a load of this. The leisurely build-up to the main action is brimming with sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes, including a pet dog named after a very offensive slur. One might argue that it spoofs similar attitudes in the early Bond series, but that doesn't feel very convincing thanks to Eastwood's tin ear for comedic dialogue. He is also spectacularly miscast as Hemlock, playing the supposedly suave hitman and professor like a slight variation on Dirty Harry.

The ghastliness of the first half's humor has the unfortunate effect of making the mountaineering sequences feel pretty flat. That's a real shame because Eastwood went to great lengths to make it as authentic as possible, undergoing training and shooting on the face of the Eiger itself. The decision proved fatal and he almost canceled production when a climber was killed in a rock fall, but the crew member's colleagues insisted that his death shouldn't be for nothing. Eastwood also took his life in his own hands with a dangerous stunt at the film's climax, the one truly suspenseful moment in the whole movie. "The Eiger Sanction" is a very flawed film, but it proves one thing at least: Clint was right to turn down James Bond.