rodrig58 Beautiful music signed by John Williams. Beautiful Swiss landscapes carefully shot by Frank Stanley and William N. Clark. I like movies with action on the mountains and especially when the genre is thriller. But this thriller has many flaws. The character played by Clint Eastwood is a classical art professor and collector who doubles as a professional assassin. Really? Well, only Clint Eastwood can be such a scholarly mixture, he's the only hit man with such elevate artistic taste in the history... The one who sends Jonathan Hemlock (Clint Eastwood) to kill, does not know the victim's name but knows that the guy limps and knows on what mountain he will climb... Really? From the start the movie has some problems. Three writers, Hal Dresner, Warren Murphy and Rod Whitaker, three brains, but so many things that are not credible. All those other three climbers break their safety strings and fall into the abyss, only Clint's strings remains intact and is the only one who remains suspended and alive. Well, he's the main character, the hero of the film, also director and producer (Malpaso Company), he's Clint Eastwood. He has to stay alive, to finish the movie and to do many other films. The character George, played by Brenda Venus, is a brilliant excellent climber, much faster than Clint, and also a crazy drug addict? I like the very sharp knife look and the way Clint talks, but he had to think better about the imperfections of the script. George Kennedy is very natural as always. The other actors too. Only Clint seems to have a great carrot deep in his ass all the time.

jc-osms A cool-sounding title for a film to which the actual movie itself doesn't quite match up. It's a strange mish-mash of a Bond-type espionage thriller and cliff-hanging mountaineering actioner which makes you think you're watching two films spliced together. It begins by introducing us to Clint as the oddly named Jonathon Hemlock, an art teacher by day, pushing away, albeit with a pat on the behind, the pretty young college girls who have the hots for him, but who's also a hired assassin for a secret Government agency in his spare time, where he answers to a mysterious / ridiculous albino, rasping-voiced boss called Mr Dragon you can barely see on the screen as he's bathed in infra-red light to alleviate his condition.Clint's Hemlock wants off the murder-go-round but is lured back for one last double-hit when an old colleague gets taken out by a pair of enemy assassins over the theft of a nerve-agent (read McGoffin) the ownership which of course could threaten world peace plus the mission has to take place during a climb up the north face of the Eiger alongside three other climbers any one of whom could be our man's target. Did I mention that Hemlock is a crack mountaineer who's twice tried and failed to climb the mountain or that he's a discerning art lover whose price per hit includes modern art masterpieces he keeps in a secret room?The problem with the movie is in the jarring schism between the two elements which the direction can't bridge. A Bond movie might give over 20 minutes to both these strands and move onto the next action set-piece but here the film dawdles over the scene-setting extended prologue before abruptly shifting to and then staying with the mountain scenes for its second hour.Naturally, along the way, a bevy of "Clint Birds" throw themselves at our hero, in a film which highlights (or should that be "low-lights" in retrospect the cliched and sexist way women were usually treated in action films of this type - one shapely minor female character goes by the name of "Buns" which pretty much says it all. The cliches continue with Jack Cassidy's turn or should that be twirl as a camp ex-colleague of Hemlock's who gets his come-uppance for past and current treachery and the depiction of a moody but athletic young Native American female beauty who inevitably rewards Hemlock for completing his exacting "training runs" with her by silently slipping into bed with him - anyone else would get a congratulatory clap on the back but of course, as ever, it's good to be Clint in his own movie. The climbing scenes are well shot and don't lack for realism or drama as Clint saunters through the unconvincing story-line even at 20000 feet on a snow-peaked mountain, but I personally found it to be more of an uphill climb over its 126 minute viewing time.

TxMike I watched this on DVD from my public library. It is one of seven Eastwood movies released on a set of discs. For an older movie the picture and sound are pretty darned good.Clint Eastwood had bit parts in many movies and TV shows and by the time he became somewhat "known" he was almost 30. But then his career really took off. By the time this movie, "The Eiger Sanction", came out he was a movie star. The movie is based on a book and it is directed by Eastwood. His role required a lot of mountain climbing so Eastwood became a mountain climber for the role, reportedly because he thought it was too dangerous to hire a stunt double. So we actually see a lot of Eastwood doing his own mountain climbing, including the scene near the end where he was dangling off Eiger Mountain and encouraged to "cut the rope above you." Tragically one mountain climber in the movie died during shooting.The title reference to "sanction" is to impose a penalty on someone, in this case to assassinate someone during a scheduled mountain climb on Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. Eastwood plays Jonathan Hemlock, professor and art collector, supposedly retired as an assassin for a secret government agency but is pulled out of retirement to avenge the death of a friend. We later learn that everything was a set-up for a totally different reason.With the amount of time spent on climbing, in Monument Valley to prepare, then on Eiger Mountain for the "sanction", it is clear those responsible fr this movie wanted to focus on the scenery and the climbing. Otherwise the story itself is pretty plain vanilla. But Eastwood is a star, his movies are always fun to watch.SPOILERS: As Hemlock goes into the climb with three others he doesn't yet know which one is his target. he supposedly was looking for a man with a limp. But and accident kills one climber, then bad weather forces them to retreat, and descent incidents kill the other two. So, unwittingly, Hemlock gets rid of all of them yet the man with the limp turns out to be his friend, played by George Kennedy.

arieleviacavafollis The events in the final climbing scenes are loosely based on the 1936 Eiger tragedy, when, during an attempt to the first ascent of the North Face all four members of the climbing party (Andreas Hinterstroisser, Toni Kurtz, Willy Angerer and Edi Reiner) died in circumstances that are picked up in this film. Willy Angerer was injured by rockfall during the ascent (the french climber in the film). After attempting to escape the face by ascending, the party decided to retreat but got stuck on the way down above the Hinterstroisser traverse. This passage had been first climbed by Andreas Hinterstroisser on their way up, however they could not cross it back due the fact that they had not left fixed ropes in place, combined with ice covering the rock since the weather had meanwhile deteriorated (as shown in the film). The climbers tried a desperate attempt to abseil down an overhanging section of the wall, approximately above the railroad window (as shown in the film), but Hintertroisser, Reiner and Angerer fell to their deaths in the attempt. Toni Kurtz, like Eastwood in the film, survived the fall but was hanging from a rope and unable to abseil or climb back. A rescue party of mountain guides managed reaching a position directly below Kurtz and provide him with a rope to abseil. Tragically, unlike Eastwood in the movie, Kurtz had by then reached the limit of his strength and, when his carabiner got stuck into a knot in the rope, he was unable to cut the rope above him with his frostbitten hands and free himself. He died only a few meters above his rescuers. These events have been later portrayed on film with more strict factual adherence in 'The Beckoning Silence' (2007) and North Face (2008).