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For the Charles Bronson dream of "leaning against a mantelpiece with a cocktail," Clint Eastwood has a simple solution: Direct it yourself, make it crazy. Following a prologue that compresses The Quiller Memorandum under the opening credits, there's Eastwood as bespectacled college professor and aesthete (works by Matisse and El Greco adorn his private den). The mock-suavity is but one veil in a tale of disguises (another one is adduced from Bogart's book-collector in The Big Sleep), the former government assassin is lured out of retirement for a Pissarro canvas and the opportunity to avenge a colleague. Off to George Kennedy's climbing-school-turned-swingers-spa in Monument Valley, then the snowy precipices of the Bernese Alps. "Here's to the selfish killer and the patriotic whore." A balmy anagram of bergfilme and The Maltese Falcon, with the auteur's arid persona cunningly set against baroque absurdities: The "impatient albino" in charge (Thayer David) adjusts Kasper Gutman with a dash of Mabuse, while Joel Cairo becomes Jack Cassidy's grinning swish, complete with lapdog. When not engaging in rape-joke repartee with the snappy courier (Vonetta McGee) or begging to be scalped by the Native-American trainer (Brenda Venus), the hero dabbles in erudite art analysis ("Involuted style really makes my ass drag"). It builds to a matter of cutting the wires before taking the plunge, so it pays to have "a talent for describing the indescribable." Gross machismo or its send-up, does it make a difference? A Herzogian side plus the mathematics of espionage, Nature has the final word in a cosmos of double agents. Actual scaling in actual mountains, Eastwood has the meta-spectacle of athletes before the camera while Kennedy peeps through the telescope's iris-eye and shoos pesky critics. "In your opinion, do those men climb to prove their manhood, or...?" Cinematography by Frank Stanley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |