Last night movie-wise I was certainly in an odd mood. My potential selections, based on time constraints, ranged from the light hearted, (The Hudsucker Proxy) to the serious genre film, (Village of The Damned) thru the blockbuster (Jaws) to what I finally settled upon, 1975’s espionage thriller, The Eiger Sanction.

This was the fourth time that actor Clint Easton had stepped into the director’s chair on a film. In the decades that have followed Eastwood has been nominated several times and has won the Oscar for Best Director. While The Eiger Sanction is a good film, it’s not up to his recent standards.

Eastwood plays Dr Jonathan Hemlock – we never learn is that is an assumed name or not – a government assassin, now retired to teaching art as a college professor. When the Agency has need for an assassination or ‘sanction’ requiring Hemlocks unique skill set, they ruthlessly press him back into service.

A courier for the West has been murdered and standard practice requires that the killers be sanctioned as a display of displeasure to the Soviets. Two men participated in the killing and theft – microfilm the most used macguffin in filmland —  but only one has been positively identified. The Agency – directed by an Albino ex-Nazi code named ‘Dragon’ dispatches Hemlock to Austria to deal with the known assassin, confident the identity of the accomplice will be known by them time Hemlock will need it.

However the identity proves much more difficult to discover than C2, the intelligence branch, had estimated and they are left with a partial description. The Accomplice is male, a skilled mountaineer, walks with a limp, and will be part of an international team scaling the Eiger inSwitzerland. (Clearly this was a plot generated set of identifiers, I really wonder how they learned all this without even getting a description in terms of hair, height, weight or such of the accomplice.)

Hemlock is inserted into the international team after the original American member suffers an ‘accident’ with the mission of discovering the Accomplice and performing the sanction.

Starting with an already dangerous climb – the North Face of the Eiger is known as the ‘murderwall’ for the number of deaths it has generated among climbers, Hemlock can’t be certain that Accomplice hasn’t already discovered Hemlock true purpose and might perform a pre-emptive sanction.

Filmed on location – that is on the friggin North Wall of the Eiger (which is German for Oger) – this movie was plagued with accidents, including one death, but when you see Hemlock on the face of the mountain that is Clint Eastwood hanging on the Murderwall of the Eiger.

The photography is lovely and the scenery, fromMonumentValleyto the Eiger itself, is captured with scale and scope, making me wish there were a blu-ray release. The DVD’s lower resolution frustrated me at several moments during the evening.

The rest of the cast is very good, George Kennedy as Hemlock’s trusted friend and trainer, Jack Cassidy as the former friend turned enemy, now nervously awaiting the day Hemlock kills him for the betrayal, Thayer David as “Dragon” and  Vonetta McGee the Hemlock’s love interest and fellow agent.

When the film started and the music began playing I felt a familiarity with the music from The Omega Man. This score had a tone, beat, and style that to my untrained and untalented ears felt hauntingly the same, so much so I would have guess that the two pieces shared a composer. I would have been wrong. This film was scored by John Williams, and most of the movie scored with simply strong and guitar music and very little of the sweeping sounds so familiar to a Williams score. (The Omega Man was scored by Ron Grainer best know in the SF community as the composer of the Dr. Who theme.)

This film is a wonderful example of 70’s cynicism, the ending is a moral no-man’s land and clearly this is a world where no one can be trusted. Films always reflect the times that they are craft from, and this is particularly true of spy films, (with Bond standing on the outside, always a step or two closer to the superhero genre than true espionage.) I was very happy to add this film to my collection, though its reception  in 1975 can only be described as ‘mixed.’ It dark anti-hero and pyrrhic victories are your cup of tea, this is a movie worth watching.