Required Viewing 06: The Eiger Sanction

We're in Wayne Media. We're in Wayne Media. One of our agents has been killed by two men. We want you to sanction them. Clint Eastwood.

Assignment, the Iger Sanction. The Iger Sanction, the international bestseller, now a taut, suspenseful film of espionage, romantic intrigue, and planned assassination on Switzerland's deadly Iger Mountain. Co-starring George Kennedy. Why the hell didn't he polish you off? Doesn't bother you a bit that you've blown my cover, does it?

And now Montaigne is either hurt or he's dead. I knew that being death. It's planned that way. Three men hold his lifeline. One is the assassin he's been sanctioned to kill.

Clint Eastwood in The Iger Sanction, rated R. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing. I am one of your hosts, Chris Stashew, and I'm joined by my good friend all the way from West Texas. He is a professor of media and communications over at the University of Texas Tech. Your friend and mine, the professor, Dr.

David D. Perlmutter. How are you doing today, sir? Howdy, Chris. Is it a good day to go climb a mountain?

Yes. If I could find one, I would definitely do it. We do have mountains. You just have to drive a little bit to get there. That's right.

I was going to say, with what you and I talked about early on in our podcasting days of this year, talking about movies that have to do with mountains or people climbing mountains, I think is rather apropos, given... Earlier this year, you and I covered an unusual and compelling force. Is that what it's called? Unknown compelling force. Unknown compelling force, yeah.

So I was going to say, we did a little mountain climbing movies earlier this year. We did a documentary anyways about the Dyatlov Pass incident. And then I ended up going down a little bit of a kind of a rabbit hole of like K2 and Everest. And I ended up watching some Everest movies and ended up reading some more stuff about that after literally after we did that, uh, that podcast. And so when we were just talking, uh, about, uh, you know, a week ago and I was like, Oh, we should do the Iger sanction of all things.

I, uh, Not that I ever get any pushback from you, but I was more just like, yeah, let's do that. I don't think it was front of the mind, but it definitely wasn't something of like, oh, well, this is questionable as to why we would talk about this movie. So on this episode of the CultureCast, we are going to be taking a step back in time to 1975 to take a look at The Eiger Sanction, which is directed by Clint Eastwood. So the film The Eiger Sanction is directed by Clint Eastwood on a script by Hal Dresner, Warren B. Murphy, and Rod Whitaker.

It is based on the book of the same name by the author... The one named author, pen name Trevanian, who was known as Rodney William Whitaker. The film is an adaptation of the book. The book is the book in the I guess the book and the film share the similar plot, which is a academic who kills people on the side so that he can afford paintings is comes out of retirement for one last one last assassination attempt where he has to go and climb the Eiger North Face and and kill the people he's climbing the Eiger North Face with. I think it's as technically impressive a film as you can do in 1975 for a whole host of reasons, but it is also a Clint Eastwood film from 1975 where he stars in it, so it's also got that going for it as well.

Dr. Perlmutter, I am so infinitely curious because I know that you are a lover of Switzerland and especially of mountains. So when Eiger Sanction came across your plate, I am so very curious to know, what did you think about doing it now? And had you seen this film before? Yes, I had seen this film.

I saw this film when I was very young and I was in Switzerland. It got, as you might imagine, there's not a huge number of films that are at least partly made in Switzerland. And they did use locations, including the actual Eiger Mountain, which it's not the A special effect. You can actually go to Switzerland and look at it. And then if you really want to try, you can climb it.

It is a very, very difficult climb. And people have been killed, including, as we'll talk about in the shooting of this movie, one person died. So it is a real dangerous mountain. It's one of the prides of Switzerland. So I remember... it got a big opening.

Like, oh boy, Clint Eastwood, American movie star, doing film in Switzerland and then coming out in Switzerland. If you just imagine, it's not quite the equivalent because Switzerland is a real country with a real flag and everything real. A proud country, a very successful country, but it doesn't get a lot of attention Hollywood-wise. So it was a big deal. And as you might imagine, because winter sports in Central Europe are part of their identity, When you watch the Winter Olympics, you'll notice that the Swiss, whether it's luge or skiing, the Austrians, the southern Germans, this is their hope.

Their dream for Olympic gold is the winter events in Just like you might have young kids in the United States growing up thinking about playing baseball or football professionally. A lot of kids in Central Europe with those mountains all around us dream of like, I'm going to win an Olympic gold. And so the mountain climbing is just in the blood, not necessarily always the climbing part, but like being near mountains, visiting mountains, climbing. And so there was a sort of a cultural affinity and having a big star like Clint Eastwood. It was very impressive to us that he did a lot of his own work.

I mean, it's pretty complicated. If you want to read the backstory of the film, they, they had a lot of spell skilled professionals there and they did, obviously they weren't going to, the studio wasn't going to let Clint Eastwood do everything by himself of a very dangerous mountain. So, but he, did quite a bit. And the movie, I think, was well-received by, you know, 10-year-old me. I thought, like, hey, neat, mountain climbing, Clint Eastwood, pretty girls, you know, which was a very, very important aspect of growing up at that point.

And excitement, and it had sort of all the elements a 10-year-old boy could want from a film. And we'll talk about what I'm looking at now many years later, but it was, we discussed recently that the movie timeline, uh, with, uh, your dad, Mark. And we said like, Hey, it's, it's okay. It passes by a couple hours and you're entertained. I think this film is entertaining.

The plot, although there are some issues with like the original book was supposed to be a parody and a satire of the super spy genre, uh, And I think Clint Eastwood mostly played this straight, although there are some moments of sort of silliness. But overall, like, This is a very good example of a well-done Hollywood movie in the good old days where you didn't immediately jump to CGI for everything that looked difficult. That, I think, for me, is definitely the thing about this movie that is... I wouldn't say the important part, but I do think it speaks to the willingness of someone like Clint Eastwood... to go out of his way to make a film like this, which is to say, like, he did not have to do any of the climbing.

He did not have to do a lot of what he did for this movie. And he did it, and I know why he did it as well as you do, because in 1975, this is the way you made films. If you wanted to make a film about the Eiger, about the Eiger-sanctioned book, you went to Switzerland and shot on the real mountain. I mean, you already alluded to it. There's no way to do this any at the time.

There's no other way to do this unless you literally just cut away to, I think Clint Eastwood called them paper mache mountain. I mean, you know, you could cut away to mountains that don't matter and try to convince us that, you know, oh, well, you know, Clint Eastwood and these three other men are climbing up this mountain and, oh, you know, the cutaway shots, those close up shots, it sure looks like they're not on the mountain, but Like you already alluded to, Professor, we can forgive it because, you know, it's entertaining. And that's not good enough for Clint Eastwood, seemingly. What Clint Eastwood wanted as a director was to film a film that is as true to what the book is doing in terms of the plot.

And that's the funny part. I... have a hard time understanding the tone of the movie, given I can 100% understand the tone of the book. Because the movie and the premise does sound like a gag in comparison to James Bond. I mean, what's funny is... and I kid you not, this book comes out in 1972. 1981, we get Raiders of the Lost Ark, which tell me that the beginning of this movie doesn't remind you of Raiders of the Lost Ark with this professor in front of the class and all these female students are really taken by him and they're trying to you know, be, you know, seemingly be intimate with him or at least imply intimacy with him.

All I could think when this movie opened was, oh, so this is kind of like Indiana Jones then. Like he's kind of like a, he's a dashing and daring, you know, world trotting professor. And it's so funny because I know that Trevanian, one of his ideas behind the satire was making this guy a professor, but also a retired government agent. Isn't that wild? And it's like, I guess you can play it as parody.

But five years later, you're going to have a director playing it straight because Indiana Jones is played straight as straight as this is played. I guess it's never a gag that he's a professor in Indiana Jones. And I don't think that it's I see. That's what I don't know. I don't know if it's a gag that he's a professor in this movie or not.

It does feel like it. The least believable thing that Clint Eastwood is in this movie is is a professor in academia. I believe that he could be a mountain climber. I believe that he could be a government assassin. But I don't believe that he is a professor at a school somewhere, an art professor.

I just, I don't know. That part is kind of the leap too far because, again, Clint Eastwood doesn't strike me as an academic out of hand. I mean, even with Indiana Jones, they got Harrison Ford to look slightly bookish. They had him, oh, he's got glasses and he's got the tweed on. Clint Eastwood in his glasses and jacket at the beginning of the movie, he just looked looks like Dirty Harry with a jacket on.

He literally just looks like Dirty Harry with a jacket on. And that's the thing. I see where Trevanian was coming from with the idea of like, well, it's going to be a professor and that's going to be funny and it's going to be satirical. But Clint Eastwood plays it straight. And so it loses so much of what could have been this kind of weird juxtaposition of kind of the serious with the absurd and But because it's Clint Eastwood and I don't know if that man has a sense of humor about certain things, it's played completely straight.

I mean, played shockingly straight. And the only amount of humor we get is Clint Eastwood kind of wryly doing like one-liners, essentially. Essentially one-liners. But even then, he seems kind of like, I'm going to have to grit my teeth and say these dumb lines. That is Clint Eastwood.

That's what I think of. I always think of Jim Carrey... doing that Clint Eastwood, where it's just like, I'm so annoyed by all the stupidity of these movies. And it's like, yeah, Clint Eastwood just strikes me as like a very serious guy, which makes sense why this role is not the jokey, satirical kind of take that Trevanian is putting forward in the book. But I do think, all of that aside, Clint Eastwood's choice for tone for the movie works. Only because he's the star, though.

If it had been anybody else, it would have been like, the tone of this does not make any sense. Because like you said, it's so far-fetched and high concept that you know you're sitting there and Clint Eastwood's like well I know this like this is silly because you know Clint Eastwood thought this was silly which is why he's playing it straight and I mean this movie has an albino a former an ex-nazi albino who now works for the US government who's having people call like calling people in to do like sanctions aka assassinations like it's it's not a serious movie it's a very silly movie like it is a silly film and yet Clint Eastwood playing it like shockingly straight. But again, if you know Clint Eastwood, that's not a surprise.

It's just even with something like this, he's like, I don't I don't want to do this any other way than serious. It's like, OK, Clint, fine. But you do know there is an albino Nazi in this movie, right? Like, OK, all right. Yeah, I I think you're right there that it works because Eastwood does not try to adapt himself for the story.

I mean, basically he's Clint Eastwood. And let's, one of the definitions of a movie star, and I say that with a rising intonation, like a star, a star. Capital S star. And a capital R. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is somebody that almost any circumstances they're in on the screen, you're happy to spend time with, right? So, you know, you did an entire series on Sean Connery and we've talked about Michael Caine and Jaws 4. And there are certain actors. I put Michael Caine, Sean Connery in that classification. I certainly put Clint Eastwood.

I would say that. I would say that they're in there. Yeah. Yeah. Clint Eastwood probably in terms of like consistent quality among some duds in terms of films.

Clint Eastwood outranks both of them. But they were people who, yeah, I could have watched Sean Connery read the phone book. And that was like a joke in the 70s and 80s and 90s that Sean Connery would open on Broadway and just take out the phone book. I have to explain to your younger listeners, this was a book where everybody was doxxed. Everybody's phone number and address appeared in it and some advertising.

And Sean Connery, or Michael Caine, or Clint Eastwood could have opened on Broadway and just said, you know, Tom Abercrombie, 371 Mortimer Lane, you know, and just kept going, and people probably would have sat there for two hours. And so I grew up with Clint Eastwood. He was always in that list of, like, from my consciousness, there was such a thing as a movie star. He was one of those figures who just appeared, conquered every genre, that he was in, especially, of course, his cop movies and westerns and was willing to do a lot of things. And he's there being himself.

Crazy things happen around him. Silly things happen around he has a sense of humor about himself. Like, I mean, I, I, my 10, 10 year old me appreciated some of the, the quote unquote jokes in this movie. And frankly, looking back somewhat misogynistic things like 10 year old me wasn't doing that kind of analysis at that time, but like he just sits through it and he's like this steady ship, you know, going through the storm toss sea. And sometimes there's like a, paper mache monster Godzilla coming out of the water and sometimes there's actual like pirates and he just keeps on keeping on and just sails through it yeah you talked about that one scene there where what we would now call an MCU villain you know like in red light a blood transfusion going on speaking in a very super villain tone.

And he's the boss of the good guys, right? Who's representing the United States government. And there's this complicated mission, which I don't think I've completely understood the mission. But then there's a reveal, which is actually not an unclever reveal, although it was sort of derivative from a lot of previous spy movies, like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where you find out that the mission... was actually not the mission and so on. By my 1970s, you sort of expected a spy movie that there would be a twist, that whatever mission they started out on wasn't actually the mission.

But Clint Eastwood is just this steady rock or the steady ship, whatever metaphor you want to employ, that makes it interesting because you want to find out what's going to happen to him. You know he's not going to drop off the mountain and die. And Jack Cassidy, who played the leering Dylan probably as good or better than anyone. He was on Columbo five times, I think it was. Bro, you took.

The words out of my mouth. That first Columbo episode that Steven Spielberg directed with him in it, I was just. Like, man. Jack Cassidy is the best choice for a 1975 villain at this point in time. It's like, who can you have as this kind of really irritating villain self-righteous villain jack cassidy perfect choice.

Sophisticated sniggering uh you know uh living the high life uh you you sort of forgive him i mean a little bit you know no matter how much evil he does evil with such panache and charm that you almost say like oh okay i'll give you a pass on these murders you know just don't do it again or something like that like that and We should also mention Score by John Williams, right? So this is, like all Clint Eastwood productions, this is an A-list production. Again, great stunt work, great photography. The movie still looks fantastic in terms of, I mean, I was watching it on a streaming service, but I thought the color and everything popped out and the mountains were beautiful. Everything was there.

It's just that it was originally written as... a parody, and it shows. And you put it, Russ, if you'd stuck almost anybody else in that role, it would have just collapsed like a house of cards. But Clint, you know, like Samson or something, kept the temple up just long enough for us to see the end of the movie. Well, and that's I think that's the thing that's really interesting, because, you know, Trevanian would write another book that I think the the other books intention is much more obvious when the name of the book is The Lou Sanction. For those of you that are American and don't know what the Lou is, the Lou is the toilet.

So I I don't I don't think that Trevanian's original book even sounds like a parody compared to his second book which is like oh well this is much more clearly a parody like this this this movie i think you know in a lot of ways i think it shares the title with the book i think it shares the plot with the book but yeah when you have someone who is as specific in their tone and purpose as a Clint Eastwood and his willingness and ability to kind of do his own thing, as it were. It is very interesting to me that his wanting to make this movie a serious thing, it shows. And I guess it's what is the thinking, I guess, that you can't make a jokey movie where you climb a mountain at the same time. It has to be serious. because we're climbing a mountain.

It's like, yeah, I get that. I actually understand that sentiment of like, what we're doing, if we make a parody of this, it will somehow diminish what we're making. And I'm not saying that that's what Clint Eastwood thought, but Clint Eastwood seems like an old-timey, old-school customer. He doesn't seem like a very... I don't know, seems like the kind of guy who unironically will talk to an empty chair.

Seems like the kind of guy who doesn't have a sense of humor. It's not that he doesn't have a sense of humor about himself, but I don't know if he has a sense of humor about the acting practice that he is engaged in. And when he's talking to a Nazi that's an albino in a room that's red-lit, all I can think to myself is, does Clint Eastwood not realize that this is supposed to be funny and kind of weird and... Like he's playing it straight. And I think that for me, you know, as we kind of open this episode, like that's the thing for me that's so odd because I remember when I watched this movie for the first time when I was in my teens.

I didn't get the sense that Clint Eastwood was, I guess, I didn't get the sense that the book was so different from the movie and that the book being so different for the movie, it's like, it's such a choice to make it so tonally different. And I didn't realize that the first time I watched it. And so watching it now with that in mind, with the understanding that it is so different than the book, It cracks me up because, again, like there are so many movies that come out that are kind of poor adaptations of books. I mean, we just talked about Timeline and that movie suffers in a lot of ways from being a lesser adaptation of a, you know, it's a fine book, but it's not, you know, it's not the book that's, you know, moving the needle for the gross of humanity.

And everybody is like, wait, do you remember where you were when you read Timeline? And not saying Iger sanctions that way either, but it's interesting to see a director really reject the tone of the source material because of whatever reason. In this movie, I get it. My assumption with Clint Eastwood is Clint Eastwood just is a serious guy. And so he's just, like you said, he's always going to play himself.

If you know anything about Clint Eastwood in a movie, it's going to be Clint Eastwood in a movie. It's like Kevin Costner. They're movie stars. And there's a difference between actors and movie stars. Not all actors are movie stars.

But all movie stars, I think... are attempting to be actors in some capacity. And that's the thing. We don't really have actors like Clint Eastwood anymore that are well-known for acting. And the ones that are out there, like a Tom Cruise, I would say, is probably a good example. Actors like that, I mean, it's just they're not they're not they don't come they don't come along every day.

I remember reading an article a couple of years ago that was like Tom Cruise, the last of the movie stars. And it's like, yeah, I mean, kind of. I don't know if there are actors working right now that have as much immediate pop culture notoriety or visibility like a Tom Cruise. But Clint Eastwood in 1975 was a Tom Cruise equivalent. He is the huge actor at the time who can do pretty much anything he wants in terms of directing or acting.

Because again, to go back to the Clint Eastwood of it all, this film comes out in 1975. At this point, Clint Eastwood had been acting for 10 years already. More than that, 15 years. So Clint Eastwood's a known quantity in the industry on top of everything else. He started working at 54.

This movie comes out in 1975. He's 20 years into his acting career by the time. That this movie comes out. This is why we are saying this is required viewing, is that this is a great opportunity to ask questions. We often talk about the direction, how film was directed, and whether the director placed an imprint on a film.

We might watch a Sidney Pollack movie and Sidney Pollack was a real great journeyman director, but you couldn't really see necessarily a signature, like this is a Sidney Pollack movie, whereas Stanley Kubrick, you inferred off or saw directly, like, yeah, this is by Stanley Kubrick, and then there's other famous directors out there, David Fincher or Wes Anderson or something like that, where you can really see, yeah, this has got to be one of those. Well, we've talked about acting, but of course... Most of the time, unless it's a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock or somebody, we don't really see the director, but the actor is up there on the screen. And that has to, as I tell my students, that has to reward the engagement.

Like you have to want to spend two hours basically with him in every scene. There's very, very few moments that he is not on the screen, right? There's no 20-minute cutaway of people at the Pentagon talking about, I don't know, this guy, he's sort of unreliable, and he was a rogue and a maverick, and should we be sending him on this mission? It's basically, you're seeing Clint Eastwood's face cut to a mountain, cut to somebody talking to Clint Eastwood, cut to somebody trying to kill Clint Eastwood, and then back to Clint Eastwood's face, right? And Clint Eastwood's face and the mountain have some similarities, you know, that steadiness.

I mean, he built, if you go back to the 1950s and wagon train, as I recall, right, was that? Yeah, it's Rawhide, which I have watched episodes. It's very interesting. I was reading this story, and then about him, I read a biography of him, and then I watched some interviews from the Rawhide days. And very early in his career, people noted something about him which was not typical of actors, was that he wouldn't just say his lines and then go to his trailer or his room or to the catering he would hang around and watch the guys set up the next scene like the cinematographer and the lighting people and he'd ask questions like you know what are you doing there and okay i see you so you want to you want to get some some flicker off that window i see okay and so he was really interested apparently very young very early and i don't know whether this was part of a systematic or like a quest in his part.

Like one day I shall be a director, Academy Award-winning director or something like that. But he just seemed like he loved film and making films and wanted to learn as much as he could. And of course it paid off because he had, I mean, he's still around with us, of course, but he had this amazing, probably almost unique career in the amount of work that he's done behind the camera, as well as in front of the camera. And sometimes he's shooting himself and sometimes he's not even in the film. But I think that's the point about how rare it is.

You see today people who are in movies, but they're not the movie. And there was this generation of stars, Cary Grant and John Wayne and Hedy Lamarr. You go down the list of the great Hollywood stars of the classic Hollywood systems of the 30s and 40s. And then Clint Eastwood was the second generation, right? I mean, actually third, if you count like silent film stars.

And because he started, didn't start his movie career until I believe the 60s. But He was still of that generation where the audience just wanted to spend time with this person and found them intrinsically fascinating. The smart one, and I think Clint Eastwood, his whole career was a smart one. I'm not saying Sean Connery and Michael Caine were dumb ones. They famously admitted they took the paycheck, but Clint Eastwood seemed to always be aware of of what film would work with him that he didn't want to be in a movie that would embarrass his himself.

He seemed to, I don't know if he'd phrase it that way, but I think he knew his own limitations as an actor. And so he didn't say like, I've always wanted to do Shakespeare in the park, you know, like, like some actors who become tight cast too. So I just, he's a great example, 360 of somebody who has navigated his own career pretty brilliantly and, as well as navigated the audience that he brought along and new audiences for generations. It's very rare that you get to talk about an actor who has been working as long as Eastwood because there aren't a lot of actors still around that have been working as long as he has. I mean, a lot of his contemporaries have passed away.

A lot of them have passed away. And so he's kind of the last of a... He's the last of a certain kind of actor who, like you said, they worry about something else on top of all the things that they already worry about in terms of what the movie they're making is about and how they're going to be received and what is the movie that they're making going to do to their career and how is it going to affect them. And it's just taking a direct involvement factor in your career is... I guess I don't know.

I guess my perception of things now is that people don't do that anymore. But they do. It's just different. It's very different. And it looks different.

And what's funny is Clint Eastwood kind of set that mold for... all right, I'm going to be an actor. I'm going to do the actor thing. Okay, I'm going to do a directing. I'm going to do the directing thing and be good at it. I'm going to be kind of involved in things exterior to acting and I'm relatively decent at that.

I mean, you know, Clint Eastwood has kind of been directly involved in like political things as well and he's a rather well-known in terms of that sphere as well like Clint Eastwood I think is one of those well-rounded actors who has kind of checked every box as it were in terms of what what is he doing and what can he be doing and is he going to navigate and take advantage of every opportunity within the opportunities that he's being given and And that is the case. I mean, you know, we always talk about, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of being a actor turned politician who was able to kind of do that and do that. I mean, again, your political views may vary, but successfully in terms of actually getting elected and people voting for him.

Clint Eastwood, same thing. I mean, maybe not to the extent of being the governor. But Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea for two years. So he was, again, he's just, it's weird. Clint Eastwood just is a different cat.

I would say that maybe the last contemporary of his that existed in our kind of world was maybe Paul Newman. It's just the actors like this don't come along anymore, and they don't really exist the way that they used to. And a movie like this, I think, is a prime example of that because It is on the page, not a serious undertaking, not a serious endeavor other than the climbing of the Eiger of it, which is funny to me that this is a book that is meant to be a lark, and yet it contains some of the most complicated filmography and imagery around mountain climbing that one would expect of actors if the film... if the book is adapted into a film. And that's the other thing. I mean, when you write a book, especially like a entertaining piece of fiction, there is a good possibility that it gets adapted.

So Trevanian sitting there writing the book going, well, can you imagine if somebody adapts this into a film? It's like, yeah, if the right person does it, it's going to be a massive undertaking. And that's the other thing. All of what we see on screen is such a massive undertaking for a film that, for quote, all intents and purposes, is a parody of James Bond. Like, you know, normally parodies don't go to these lengths to do these kinds of things.

You know, they tend to stay inside of a very narrow lane because to do something like this is expensive. It's a lot of work. People literally died and were horribly injured in the shooting of the film. Like, Normally, if you're doing a parody film, you just kind of are putting in very low effort, if any effort at all. And this movie, again, because it's played straight, there's none of that kind of, oh, well, Clint Eastwood's in on the joke too.

It's like Clint Eastwood is like, this is not a joke. I refuse to have this be taken as a joke. Take this seriously. And it's like, okay, I will take it seriously because you're taking it seriously. But the premise of this movie is so kind of goofy and out there.

The setup for this movie is so kind of goofy and out there. that the only reason I take it seriously is because of Clint Eastwood. I wouldn't be taking this seriously otherwise. It's just what the film is is so kind of intentionally angled as such a clear send-up or parody of James Bond that the best thing about this film for me is that Clint Eastwood was the one who was involved. because it makes it feel like an actual spy movie, as opposed to this kind of like, well, there's a lark. This is a little bit of kind of like a needling of the James Bond movies. Because there are those kind of things that seem like they would be needling a James Bond movie if you were to take a step back.

But again, in the hands of Clint Eastwood, he is not engaged or interested in really doing any of that other than his kind of one-liners that he almost kind of grumbles through and is kind of seemingly frustrated that he even has to deliver to begin with. Not saying Clint Eastwood's not a fun guy, but when you hear him talk about acting, he talks about acting the way his contemporaries who grew up in the United Kingdom, who were being trained as actors, were acting as a profession over there, the way that it kind of was sort of in the United States. But in terms of this is where acting kind of came from, this is where Shakespeare's from. Clint Eastwood reminds me more of his contemporaries from across the pond than he does with a lot of his contemporaries that were working stateside in terms of taking this seriously as a job.

Yeah, I'm trying to articulate something that I think I'll bring up again from our discussion of several mountain movies, and that is this idea, culturally, that in Central Europe, you did not have a frontier to conquer. There's the famous idea about America being culturally defined by the Western expansion and the conquest. The conquest not only of people who were there already, but this... often forbidding land, deserts and plains and high mountains, my mountain passes and snowstorms and, you know, rock hot summers. And you, you come to some places like West Texas where you go like, man, I, you know, I, a friend of yours tells you where my air conditioning that is out in August. And you're, you're thinking about like, wow, you know, somebody has to do without air conditioning for a day.

And then of course, a hundred years ago, that wasn't even, uh, But in Central Europe, conquest was vertical. And so part of the great manhood quest was the idea of conquering a mountain. The Eiger is a character in this movie, but I think one critique, and this is, this is a question for somebody who's making a movie that has an ultra specific setting, which locally has cultural, not just value, but like has something to add. And I, I think this comes out more in the book and it comes out more if you're European than if you're American. And I, it's this, I guess if I had a negative criticism is that I wish there had been like one or two minutes more about how the Eiger, especially the north face of the Eiger, is very, very dangerous.

It's this sort of unique, flat rock. When you think of a mountain, you tend to think of like a pyramid, you know. But we're talking about a very, very flat rock face. It's often hidden from the sun, so it's colder. A lot of people, a lot of very skilled climbers have died climbing the Eiger.

It's known as a pretty dangerous mountain. Again, it's one of those things where you can go up to a tourist lodge and have your, you know, your melted cheese and your beer and look at it. But so it's not like you have to travel to Tibet to challenge it, but like it is a very dangerous mountain. And it is so important within the culture, this idea of like defeating, proving yourself by defeating the mountains. And I know that Eastwood must have known about that.

I think he made a decision. I think the studio made the decision and he made the decision. The team, we don't necessarily say that he made every decision to just like, well, that would be too complicated to add too much about that. It's a mountain. It's dangerous.

People have died. We're just going to say mountain. We're not going to like go off on the specialness of mountaineering. this mountain but i think it could have been in there just like when we've discussed with some other films where they cut some things out where it might have added a little bit of flavor to it and and you see how in the choices a filmmaker makes you can see how it can be overdone right you can imagine a scene where somebody says well wait a minute you know professor hemlock you're talking about climbing the eiger the mountain of death oh so many people have died there and And you can see how that would be off and silly if they emphasized it too much, right? And so I don't necessarily have a solution because I'm not making the remake of The Eiger sanctioned, but it is the kind of choice that you have as a filmmaker when your hero faces some sort of great threat, and it might be a monster or it might be a mountain.

Like, how much do you build up the threat Or you just let it be seen as a threat. And that's the part that I find so amusing about the movie is we do have at the center of this movie Clint Eastwood training with George Kennedy, of all people, to climb the Eiger. And it's very funny because, like you said, that should be enough. If you see just shots of the Eiger and imagery of the Eiger, it is a stunning scene. mountain and it and the face that they're climbing is for all intents and purposes i mean it's a sheer vertical cliff face i mean it's a cliff it is a vertical mountain face and that is not for the faint of heart because i've never even i've i've done mountain climbing but i've not done that i have not done free climbing i've never done anything that it's well if if this goes you're gone it's like i've never done any mountain climbing that has that level of stakes and that's Like you just talked about, there are so many things in mountain climbing that are unbelievably dangerous.

And I, you know, having spent, you know, earlier this year after we did that episode together, I like I said, I sat and watched some mountain climbing stuff. I read some books. I want to say, well, I read John. I read John Krakauer's Into Thin Air. And then I read. read a couple other things.

I think I read something about K2 and then one or two other things. And it's just like... What you are being asked to do in this movie is already so dangerous as a film crew that it is wild to me that we don't have more of the mountain. But I also think that there's just enough of the mountain because, you know, we do have a one of the crew members on the film dies. During the production of the film, Clint Eastwood almost suspends the filming of the film, but ends up continuing and completing it because he's convinced by the other mountain climbers who.

And again, that's the other thing. Mountain climbing is a very dangerous sport, but it doesn't have to be a fatal sport. It's just by definition, what you're doing is danger, but it doesn't have to be. Well, you go up the mountain and, you know, something bad happens and you die. Plenty of bad things happen on mountains all the time and people survive because they're well-prepared.

You have to be, especially to do something like climbing a mountain phase. And that's where, you know, half of this movie comes from is just Clint Eastwood preparing to climb the mountain. And, you know, they they spend an hour of the two hour movie building up to the point where Clint Eastwood is finally on the Eiger with the rest of the climbers. And, you know, it feels well earned because we have had this whole kind of set up with George Kennedy and them in Monument Valley, which I think, you know, we haven't even mentioned that. Talk about shooting Monument Valley for a film that doesn't use Monument Valley for anything.

It is, I mean, for, you know, to go to the John Ford of it all with the Monument Valley being so well shot by John Ford and kind of being such a part of his filmmaking kind of canvas. And then in this movie, they're like, well, we are going to Switzerland, but, you know, we can shoot Monument Valley and have him training in Monument Valley and doing all these things in Monument Valley. It's like, Okay, so you're just trying to make this film extra hard then? Because, I mean, again, you know, we talk about him climbing the Eiger, but Eastwood also climbed the Lost Arrow Spire, which is... When you see those shots of him and George Kennedy climbing, it is...

It's obvious that it's Clint Eastwood. George Kennedy, not so much obvious. But Clint Eastwood did all of his own climbing at every point in this movie. And it shows. It really, really, really shows.

And I think that having them shooting in these real places helps kind of get across the idea of like, this is a serious thing. These places that they're going are not just, you know, Oh, we're not just going to go train in a gym somewhere. They're in monument Valley. Like they're, you know, they're training on location and it is just, I don't know. It's such a different way of making films.

It's this is the, it's, they're not rushing. I mean, we don't get enough Iger because we're setting up for the Iger is what this feels like. And because we have Jack Cassidy's character that is occupying what would be the first half of this movie. Anyway, uh, But it is funny that this kind of parody film ends up being a serious endeavor because we have an actor who's like, I want to shoot all my own climbing. It's like, oh, OK, Clint, just making this harder for everybody. which is, again, the results that the film yields, I think are worthwhile.

But I do have, and I was curious your thoughts on this because this is the first time we've done something like this. Watching a film where someone directly involved in the making of the film died is an unusual thing. A lot of the time when we're talking about that, it's not something where they're going and climbing a mountain. It's often like, a stunt gone awry or a genuine accident. But in this film, it's like, of course someone died while they were filming this movie.

They were filming on the north face of a mountain in Eastern, in Europe. Like, of course someone died. Like, I'm not surprised just looking at where they shot the movie and the movie itself, not surprised. But I do have somewhat mixed feelings about a movie where someone dies in the making. Yeah, there's so many interesting questions here that I really want to call out Mr.

Eastwood and see if he answers and just say, hey, we got a couple of questions here. We're in the middle of a podcast because I found and we're getting into sort of metaphor here. But I found this interesting statement, even though, yeah, it's a little bit disjointed, a little bit uneven toned. serious and silly, but I liked this parallel between the impersonality, the coldness, the uncaringness of nature. Mountain climbing is a sport where no matter how good you are, you can be the world's best mountain climber. You can have conquered Everest and K2 and something can slip, you know, a rope can fray and you will die climbing, you know, 50 feet in your backyard.

I mean, so the people who engage in mountain climbing know that, and to segue to this line that Clint Eastwood makes to, I hate to even say her name here, but his girlfriend. Oh, yes. The athlete titled Jemima Brown. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yikes. Well, I think they thought, well... I guess they thought that was funny. They more or less explain the joke on screen.

They're like, this is why this is funny. And it's like, yeah, I get it. But that's where the parody and satire of the book pokes through into the movie. And you're like, oh, so if it had been that, it totally would not have worked at all. Yeah.

Well, anyway, so he says to her that he quit the assassination business as opposed to the professor business because of mathematics, right? And so people who are climbers know that, yeah, it's math. Like the more you climb, the more chance, let's just say, you know, there's a 1% chance you will die climbing any mountain. It doesn't matter. Obviously that 1% may go up to like 5% if you climb.

10% if you go up Everest. But there's a 1% chance. Well, odds don't work that way or people would be rich playing roulette. But the fact is that if you climb 100 times, then you're playing that rolling those dice 100 times. And, you know, maybe it's more likely you're going to get that one, that, that, You know, we are die roll and you're going to die at no fault of your own.

You were you were doing the exact same things that when you succeeded. So that impersonality of nature, nature doesn't care. The mountain is still there. The mountain doesn't weep. Nature doesn't care.

It's like looking in the eyes of a tiger or your house cat. You know, you look at your beautiful. We both share a love of cats and we both have a cat. And I have held up my delightful little house cat, and I've looked into those eyes, and I see the hunter-killer that is still there, that we have not bred out of cats. If you look at wild cats that have almost the same DNA as our house cat, we really haven't done that much to cats as opposed to dogs.

If you go to the vet, you see this almost a circus of like tiny little Weimaraners and huge Great Danes and things like that. Cats, you know, most people, most cats are within 10, 15 pounds of each other there, except for the, you know, the big cats. But the point is that nature doesn't care. And then, to me, it's an interesting parallel, and one that if you're listening, and even at 10 years old, I sort of got it, they make this point about the government bureaucracy of assassination doesn't care. It doesn't care about its agents.

And at the end of the day, it really doesn't care about its enemies. It's a machine. And the machine tries to achieve its goals. And if somebody dies, well, that's just part of nature or the machine. So I did think that that was interesting.

Like, like if, if the movie made a statement and, and Clint Eastwood, I think another good thing about his direction or his, the roles that he picked for himself was that often he would, there might be a message in the movie, but he rarely slammed it home with a hammer. And sometimes he, He would even question himself the message. But I thought that that was just well done. You know, the parallel between the impersonality, the coldness of nature and of modern, the bureaucracy of at that time, it wasn't even mentioned, by the way, but it was the Cold War, right? Where there was no anger.

There was just bureaucrats playing against other bureaucrats. And we'd seen that before in like a movie we should do sometime, John le Carré' s that book, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, sort of famous spy movie. In fact, there are plot points and characters that are straight out of Jean Le Carre here. In fact, I think that was part of what Trebanian was sort of parodying. But it is a very thought...

To say that this film has some thoughtful elements can show, again, in terms of required viewing, that even in something that is essentially a vehicle for a star... is an action thriller adventure. You can have these moments that make people think. We talked about Three Days of the Condor recently, and we talked about, you know, the Max von Sydow character at the end of the film just being like, All right. Well, my my my sanction, as it were, is not with you anymore. It was it's with him.

And the sanction that he had with me is now null and void because he is gone. So there you go. And that matter of factness is reflected in this movie where, you know, talk about Jack Cassidy a little bit, who is for all of the misogyny of which there is plenty. I will say, as someone who is bisexual myself, I do find the portrayal of Jack Cassidy's character to be very of a time and of a place. and of a stare. It's very much a stereotype.

Like the character that Jack Cassidy is playing is a stereotype. I won't repeat the name of his dog on this podcast, but just know that his dog is a slur for gay people, which is just absurd in, in, in 1975. But again, it goes back to that. This is a parody and Jack Cassidy's character that he is playing is is on the page meant to be a parody of these kinds of characters the character that is a a assassin or an agent as well that does a really poor job at hiding the fact that he's an agent and honestly just can't shut up about the fact that he's an agent and i love that there is a character like that in this film But what's funny is because this film is not a parody, that character almost makes no sense in this film whatsoever.

He stands out like a stereotype as opposed to a cog in the working machine that is this kind of send-up of spy movies. But because he is, again, almost from a different movie, it seems more like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, where it's like, this is just a really classless and lazy stereotype. In this movie, that's not the case because the book is a parody. But it is very funny that Jack Cassidy's character interacting with Clint Eastwood is like from another movie entirely. But because it's Jack Cassidy, it kind of works.

It still works in spite of that. But this is what happens when you adapt a book that is so tonally different and turn it into a movie, but you don't necessarily readdress all the tonal choices and changes that you've made. and how they work against and with one another. Because Clint Eastwood in those scenes with Jack Cassidy, it's like it's from another movie entirely. It's from what the book is more like than what the movie ends up being in terms of tone. We're focusing on actors here.

And I do want to mention that, again, I'm sure we have an audience that varies in terms of age, but there were actors. And today I would put someone like Paul Giamatti in that classification where In the classical era, for me, growing up 60s, 70s, but watching films from the 40s and 50s in the same way that, say, somebody in the 2020s today would watch films from the 2000s, there was Jack Cassidy, George Sanders, and Claude Rains. And there's a wonderful line in a song by the Kinks. And it's interesting how it's inserted into a rock song, but they say, George Sanders, you could have covered him with garbage, but he still would have starred. And there were these actors who just had this...

Sometimes they played leading men. I mean, George Sanders did play King Richard the Lionhearted, and he was in Children of the Damned as the lead there. But mostly, they played a secondary but incredibly supportive character. So like Claude Rains plays the French police inspector... in Casablanca. And I think everyone agrees that the film works on so many different levels, but if you pull out the French police inspector, it falls apart.

You couldn't even imagine that movie without that role. So Jack Cassidy is, It was a good example of something that maybe I don't see this as much in films anymore, where you have this actor who is just so fascinating. And that's why they brought him back on Columbo. And by the way, you know, obviously, we haven't done the show about Columbo. I haven't done anything about Columbo with you.

But like some at least a couple of other places, I've talked about how when you were when we were watching as kids, Columbo, I had to have somebody explain to me that Jack Cassidy didn't go to trial, get off and then come back, change his name and then kill somebody again. And Columbo kept trying to get convict him, you know, I hope, I hope this time it'll stick, you know, that's right. But he was so popular and it was completely acceptable in television at that time that you'd have somebody come back and play a completely different role, uh, Nobody felt it was weird, but this is a long, circuitous way of saying, you're right, they're in two different movies, but I can see why he was cast. He sort of brightens things up for a couple of minutes.

He makes a great villain, and he's so anti-Quint Eastwood in every way. He's the 100% Eastwood. diametrically opposed just him and having his dog there with him and just sitting there and just making such a big scene of everything is just so diametrically opposed to Clint Eastwood as the person or Clint Eastwood's character in the film either way right. So my last point on this just please I want to hear your opinion but Now, here's another choice you have as a filmmaker, right? You have Clint Eastwood. It's Clint Eastwood.

Like, in his physical prime, late 60s through mid-70s, he's always playing a tough guy. He's playing the fastest draw. He's playing the police detective who can punch the hardest and outdraw, too. And now he's going to play a mountain climber. And, of course, he's a genius art collector, professor. everything, and he's an amazing assassin, and he's an amazing mountain climber.

Is there a term for a male Mary Sue? He's just good at everything. Of course, James Bond, that's what was being parodied, right? That James Bond could throw off his tuxedo and then jump out of a helicopter firing his Walter PPK. But when you're, you're, you're just, you're thinking you're Cleanswood.

Okay. And you're thinking like, I, I need a villain that is my equivalent. Now you can do a couple of things. I it's funny. I've only watched a little bit.

I think I watched the first season of the Jack Reacher television series, which is very successful. And they cast an actor who is incredibly physically imposing to play Jack Reacher, which I've never read the books, but like he, the, character of Jack Reacher has been described in the books by people who I know who read the books as a sort of one-man gang. He's not Tom Cruise. He's supposed to be a big guy who can take on 12 other people and clean the bar full of them. When you have a choice, who's going to be the nemesis of somebody who already is as tough as Clint Eastwood or as tough as Jack Reacher?

You can go up and out and You can say, okay, we'll find somebody twice as big, right? Or you can have somebody who is challenging and evil, but in a completely different way. And I think that that works here. Jack Cassidy as a nemesis, that because he's so radically, physically, tonally, mannerismally different than Clint Eastwood, it's a successful solution to How do you find a villain to match your incredible hero? It reminds me a lot of the difference between Pierce Brosnan and Jonathan Price in Tomorrow Never Dies or Matthew Amalric and Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace, where it's like you have a small, less imposing guy opposite a physically imposing or serious stone-faced guy, and just having the dichotomy between those two work.

Because no, maybe he's not a physical threat. Henry Silva's not a physical threat to Steven Seagal, as we all know, having seen plenty of Steven Seagal films. And the moment Seagal gets his hands on him, he's going to just kill him immediately, which is literally what happens in a lot of those Seagal movies. I mean, I remember, what is it, Out for Justice, or the one with William Sadler, where it's like, this guy's not a physical threat. The moment Seagal gets his hands on him, he's going to rip him apart.

And there's like this small gentleman's agreement in this film that that doesn't happen until Jack Cassidy kind of breaks it and hires George Kennedy's daughter, question mark, to murder Clint Eastwood. after they're intimate together because that's the other thing Clint Eastwood no I mean again the parody of James Bond is right there every woman in this film is making eyes at Clint Eastwood you know the they always talk about like the male gaze in films and you know the kind of luring male gaze Clint Eastwood the female gaze I mean he's a good looking guy there are shots of him climbing a from a low angle where his his butt in jeans is full on in the screen for everybody to see. I mean, Clint Eastwood's a good looking guy.

And so you have an actor who is good looking, is serious opposite. And I'm not saying Jack Cassidy is not good looking, but Jack Cassidy looks like he's out of central casting. And then they give him what I would say is a very weak mustache. And he looks definitely like he's out of central casting but that kind of interplay between the two you know i'm i'm a student of professional wrestling i'm a fan of professional wrestling everybody who's opposite john cena doesn't have to be brock lesnar they can be you know the kind of skeevy heel who wins by cheating or doing something underhanded or doing something you know I'm going to have somebody come in and take the pin for me, or I'm going to operate within the rules, but kind of breaking the rules somehow.

That translates into film, and not every villain needs to be, you know, to go back to the Indiana Jones comparison. not every villain in Indiana Jones is the giant hulking bald Nazi that he fights outside of the one, the, the, the Una wing plane in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Uh, the, the actor who plays Belloc in, in, in Raiders of the Lost Ark is smaller than Harrison Ford. Like he's a small guy, but again, like, That's that's that's kind of stymied by the fact that he has a massive Nazi army with him. But not every villain in these films needs to be a physical threat. And I think it's smart to leave the villain in this film, not a physical threat to Clint Eastwood, because, again, it doesn't make your character. character or hero look strong if we have all these threats to his physicality and he's not a big guy.

Clint Eastwood is not this like massive, hulking, Chris Evans, The Rock style actor, Jason Momoa style actor. I'm not sure who I would compare Clint Eastwood to now for people who are trying to look for a comparative to Clint Eastwood because he's just so kind of specific in what he was doing that again like you can have someone like Jack Cassidy opposite him and it work but again like it's it's hard to take someone seriously in these movies because they're never really given a lot of opportunity to be anything other than a mild inconvenience to Clint Eastwood we never think for a second Clint Eastwood is actually in danger like you said and that's intentional because that's not why we're watching a lot of these movies right We're watching a lot of these movies because they're a, they're a, I want to be him and women, women want to be with him and I want to be like him.

And that wasn't just the case with James Bond in cinema in the sixties and seventies. There were actors in American cinema like Clint Eastwood, like Paul Newman. That's like, I, or Robert Redford, who we just talked about with three days of the condor. And, you know, Carl Maymer talked about it. He's like, there were, you know, for as much as, uh, what is a Bo Derek?

Uh, the Farrah Fawcett poster, right? For as many boys that had that Farrah Fawcett poster on their door or on their wall, there were just as many adult women who were like Clint Eastwood. Oh my God. Like he really gets my like engine revving. And I see why.

Like, he is just when he's on screen, there's not anybody else that looks like him. And the energy that he brings is so singular that it's like, OK, like, just put the camera on this guy and he knows what to do. And that's just not as much of a thing as it used to be. Yeah, there's been discussion. I don't know how far this goes back, this idea of.

And I'm sure that it really went back to like the earliest pantomime of the Paleolithic ancestors, maybe acting out a hunt or something. through the plays, tragedies, and comedies of the Greeks and the Romans, the physicality of an actor being a factor in their acting. I've mentioned before sort of like my belief that there are perfectly terrific actors, and they tend to be ones who spend their lives doing television, where it's basically they're really good with their face and their voice, and they they're just a very good actor. And then there are other actors where you get more of a sense of movement and sort of torso. And then there's some actors where, man, their, their shins are doing a fantastic acting job here. and, today we certainly have we have to i can make a list and i'm sure you can make a list of a lot of really terrific actors who are working today and i don't think it's true that in 1940 they had all great actors and today we have lesser actors if especially if you watch some of the higher end british you know period dramas that are coming out today you'll see yep you know the 14th uh imperial horseman from the left is doing a really good job acting that that's great but we really seem to have a shortage of these physical total presence actors like lynn eastwood that just first light up the screen like they enter and like all eyes male female whatever whatever your interests immediately go to them second whatever they're saying even if it's a very small amount of dialogue and, and, you know, famously for Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti Westerns, he, he threw out a lot of dialogue, you know, wanted to have as little dialogue as possible because he knew. that that character wasn't going to be somebody who's fast talking and, you know, talking his way out of trouble.

He'll just say a few things. And it was in response to his time on Rawhide where a lot of the mystique was taken away from his character because he just talked all the time. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, that's true of a lot of actors. But we do seem to have trouble finding people who have that enormous physical presence that just mesmerizes you.

And part of it is I did see this movie and it, you know, it's a mountain climbing movie. So it, it, it, at least in my memory, being on a giant, theater screen i remember going like oh wow that's that's the eiger and that's physically imposing that's amazing like that is this incredible mountain and i had seen it in real life and like walk up to it i hadn't climbed it but i'd walked up to it you can't walk up to it and look look again and then Again, it's hard to describe. And I think, you know, you have a 100-inch screen at home and you're watching on streaming or something like that. It's not completely out of your realm of the senses there. But the cut to Clint Eastwood's face, you would see the similarity in the effect it had on you emotionally and in terms of your intimacy with what's going on on the screen.

So this was a good choice. for him to do as a movie I mean again part of his smart career choices and I hate to say like you know Michael Caine has made that you know a lot of bad career choices and Sean Connery made a lot of bad career choices but and Michael Caine has a good sense of humor about this I think Sean Connery had some of it too but Clint Eastwood is also a role model in terms of required viewing and like In managing his own career and in thinking, like, I fit into this role and that I can add something to this role. It's not just a passing vehicle and I'll just earn a quick buck. I don't think I just I don't know him personally. But like I said, I wrote one biography and I saw some interviews, but I just get a sense that he cares about his art the way.

You'd think most actors would, but in the end of the day, you know, I can understand you take a paycheck and move on to Jaws 5. And, you know, you mentioned it with mountain climbing, right? Like the more the more mountains you climb, it's not that the likelihood that you die or something bad happens. It's not the percentage goes up, but just the more times you engage with it, the higher percentage chance you have of that thing happening. And I think that Clint Eastwood is one of those actors who didn't act in every single thing that came down the pipeline. that came across his table, that went to his agent.

And I think him being so discerning in what he chose to do, you know, allows you to kind of have a certain feeling about your career that other people like a Nicolas Cage or, you know, even a Jack Cassidy just kind of, you know, there are actors that are working act and that's what they do is they work and they act for a living. And I'm not saying Clint Eastwood wasn't a working act, but he's a different kind of working act. He got so famous and had so much notoriety and early success. that he didn't have to take every, you know, stereotypical or tropey, you know, bit part. You know, it's very funny, you know, Jack Cassidy almost, you know, my typecast is a term that they use Talk about now and, you know, people don't want to be typecast as a villain.

But here you have Jack Cassidy playing a villain all the time and many of the things that he's in. And he was clearly OK with doing it because there are actors that are just OK with playing. You know, somebody's got to play the police chief. Somebody's got to play a cop. Somebody's got to play another cop.

Hell, somebody might even have to play a Nazi or a Western Eastern or European cop. or German character. And there are actors that that was their entire career. They made an entire career off of just playing the same kind of character in the same kinds of movies or TV shows. And it's not that they were weren't complaining about it, but that was, you know, acting was a profession. And Clint Eastwood, I think, was able to be had the luxury and privilege of being discerning with his career.

And I think that there are plenty of people that are discerning with their career that can't back it up. I think Clint Eastwood can obviously back it up, which helps. But the more opportunities you make that with you make, you know, making movies, the more chances you have to make a bad movie or be in a bad movie or put in a bad performance. And when you're Clint Eastwood and you don't do every single movie that anybody offered to you, you kind of avoid some of the duds. And, you know, at some point you are Clint Eastwood.

So you can just say, well, I'm Clint Eastwood and I don't want to do this. And that's I mean, not wanting to do it for that reason as any actor is fine. But it's more, I guess, acceptable and understandable if you're someone of Clint Eastwood's caliber. His his name and notoriety dictates a little bit more than just, you know, Joe Schmo coming off the street. Yeah, I want to tell now what is one of my few actual Hollywood stories about that.

Because one of my points of admiration for Clint Eastwood is that he accepted that there are limitations on what he could play. And also, he realized that he shouldn't even try to play. play some role. So if you could imagine somebody said, hey, Clint, let's just throw everything out the window. You play the Jack Cassidy role, and we want you snickering and giggling and laughing and making wild motions. And we're going to cast Jack Cassidy as the intelligent but lethal, sophisticated kid.

He would have said, no, you're crazy. Now let's go back to the script, right? Okay. So here's my one Hollywood story for this. So I did spend some years in Los Angeles.

I had a lot to learn, but I learned a lot. And I made friends with this wonderful man, now passed away, may blessed be his name, High Averbeck, who started out very early in Hollywood, Dick Van Dyke show directing. many episodes of MASH. And I met him in the mid to late 80s, and we became friends. And I love to hear him tell stories about mostly television. He did direct this movie, I Love You, Alice B.

Tolkis, which was sort of a forgotten classic. Yeah. But which we could do sometime there. But anyway, he told me this story where a particular Hollywood character actor who had been on television a number of times and was known as the guy who you would always cast as the pompous bureaucrat, the pompous mayor, the pompous corporation president who was sort of a blowhard. And that's who you'd call to play that role.

And he told me the story that that guy who he was friends with tell them once, you know, I am so tired of playing the same role all the time. Like I'm making good money. You know, I, I, they call me once a week to play this role, movie television, but I want to break out. I want to do something completely different. And so high says, okay, you know, I've got an episode of X shooting in three weeks.

I'll tell you what, there's a role of a guy who's a bold rebel and he's a maverick and he's, you know, fighting the system. It's a small role, but like, give it a shot. And so the guy says, thank you so much. This is going to be my opportunity to prove. So the day of shooting comes along.

This guy shows up. He's dressed right. You know, he's in jeans or something. He's looking Al Pacino-ish, you know, 70s, right? And he starts acting.

And well, of course, he's acting exactly like the pompous bureaucrat, even though he's playing the bold counterculture rebel. And high says, okay, cut, cut, cut. You know, he goes up to him and says, look, you know, you asked me for this. You do understand you're going to have to change here. You're going to have to act completely differently.

You're gonna have to be the opposite of what you've, you've done. You said you wanted to break out. I understand. So they do like 30 takes. And, and, and, and I love, loves this guy.

He doesn't have any negative, but like the show must go on, right? You can't just spend time shooting the same scene over and over again. So he goes up to me and says, you know, uh, tomorrow we're shooting the pompous bureaucratic police chief. And I haven't cast that yet. Do you want to play him?

The guy says, yes, I very much want to play him. Yeah. And so, you know, it's a stereotype in Hollywood, like people don't want to be typecast. But the fact is that a lot of people made a very good living over many decades just accepting that they were going to play a certain role. And not everybody is as talented in the dimensionality of their acting to change.

And I think Clint Eastwood was very, very smart in saying, I can do these roles, but those other ones there, I can't and I'm not going to even try. And it's not to say that, you know, a Tom Cruise type actor can't go and do something else. You know, we're recording this on the on the precipice of Digger, Alexander, Alexander, Alejandro Inarratu's latest film that has been getting kind of mixed reviews. And it has a Tom Cruise performance in it that is seemingly very divisive. But at the same time, I looked at it and I thought to myself, I haven't seen Tom Cruise do anything that interesting since he was in Tropic Thunder doing something very similar where it's hard to tell that it's him.

And he's not trafficking in him being him on screen. He's trying to not look like him. I mean, obviously, it's kind of hard to hide it when you're advertising Tom Cruise's in your movie, unlike Tropic Thunder, which kind of got away with it because, again, it didn't traffic in Tom Cruise as much. But yeah, you know, there is something to be said for just being good at what you do, being an expert, being adept, being good at what you do. I mean, we talked about, you know, people having... a set of skills and being able to use those skills and use those skills well.

I think Clint Eastwood is one of those actors. He is a beyond competent actor. He makes acting look easy because he is an immensely skilled and immensely competent actor. And yes, to your point, he did have somewhat of a limited range, but he did all kinds of stuff. Bridges of Madison County.

Professor, don't forget, he was able to be in those kinds of movies, too. Much later in life. In movies, right? But we agree he didn't play a radically different persona. No, and I think that that's to your point, though.

I was going to say, to your point, he's in that primarily because people would never have expected him to work in that kind of movie. But to be fair, that role in that movie is also tailor-made for someone like him. I mean, it's a role that he is not... They would never have cast Clint Eastwood to be part of the Stonewall Riot, okay? They would never have had Clint Eastwood be like, the lead character in a film about the Stonewall riots or stuff like that.

Like he's just, that's not who he is. That's not the actor he is. That's not the roles he portrays. I agree 100%. Clint Eastwood knew his, I wouldn't say knew his lane and knew how to stay in it, but he knew what kind of car to drive and he knew how fast to drive it.

And there are plenty of actors who try to do 8 million different things and aren't able to. I think of Jim Carrey, like, I don't know if Jim Carrey's really ever been able to get out of the world of comedic acting. He tried. He really tried. But he was not successful.

Adam Sandler was rather successful at getting outside of his world of comedic acting. I mean, comedic actors have this problem where they can't do anything else other than comedy. And their kind of typecast is like, oh, you're going to be the funny fat guy in this movie. And can't ever be taken seriously. And I think that that's unfair because some of the best horror movies that I've seen in the last 10 years were directed by comedy writers who were, you know, Jordan Peele, Get Out, Nope, Us. all fantastic horror movies written by a comedy, you know, a comedian, a sketch comedy writer.

Like it's the lane, sticking in one's lane normally tends to be the case, but there are plenty of people that are proving otherwise, I guess. Not every Bruce Willis as Bruno is a failure. You know, Donald Glover is a, multifaceted actor he is able to direct he's able to write he's able to music Clint Eastwood you know pretty famously was huge into jazz and bebop music and I mean obviously he directed the the film about bird with Forrest Whitaker but Clint Eastwood probably would say that he's a bit of a frustrated musician at heart because you know as successful as he is as a as an actor and a director he's He probably never got the fame and success he wanted as a musician. And it's like, well, Clint, you know, it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball.

Like, I wish I could be as good at one thing as you are at that thing, but you want to do something else. And, you know, I'm I am good at podcasting and I'm good at other things, too. But like, this is the thing that I excel at. And I am not considering myself as good at podcasting as Clint Eastwood is at acting. But There are just some things I know I cannot do.

Don't ask me to do, don't ask me to be your math guy. Don't ask me to be your, you know, the guy doing the long equations in the back. Like that's not what I'm best suited for. And sometimes specialization is important. Specialization is just as important as having someone who's a generalist.

And Clint Eastwood, I think, you know, for as much as we're talking about, like he knew what to do and he knew his lane and stuff. He's also an immensely successful director. So Clint Eastwood, I think in terms of being successful at the career of being in acting and filmmaking, Clint Eastwood is a success all the way as a director and an actor. And that is That's a rarity in and of itself, because being good at acting does not mean you're going to be a good director at all. And it really doesn't mean that you're going to have an eye for directing.

And it doesn't mean that you're going to have an eye for directing so much so that you win Academy Awards and win Oscars. And, you know, and what's even funnier is Clint Eastwood as an actor, the longevity of his career is primarily based on the fact that he was able to continue directing. Because as we both know, in Hollywood, After a certain age, actors of a certain age are just not used as much as they, you know, as much as they were when they were younger. Clint Eastwood kind of breaks that mold because he is Clint Eastwood and there is no one else like him. But at the same time, his ability to be a really successful director, I think, helped extend the length of the tail on his career.

Because he was directing movies up until, what, two years ago? Three years ago? It's 2026. It's like 96 years old. It's like, Clint, go home.

Relax. What else do you have to prove at this point? It's like, nothing. You just love, you love the craft so much that that's why you're doing it. And that is readily apparent to me in a film like Eiger Sanction, where it's like, you know what?

He loves the craft of filmmaking and acting so much that he wants it to be as good as possible, even if this is effectively, on the face of it, a lark. Yeah, that's my wrap-up, is that this is a lark. It's got these moments of silliness. It's got these moments of what today, and probably in 1975, we should have labeled as cringe. and oh gosh did you really have to have her say that and have her do that we haven't mentioned some of the just embarrassing. Moments where we didn't mention it for a good reason.

Yeah you know you you it i mean i was 10 years old so that's that was my defense but like uh when i was re-watching this movie i for a couple of scenes i just looked over who I was watching it with, and I had a look of apology on my face. But the point was, this was fun, exciting, thriller at a time where, yeah, and we have the evidence in the mortality of one of the people who worked on this mountain climbing part, stunts of the film, that this was real film by people who loved making movies, loved entertaining audiences, loved doing their best at what they did, and It's always going to work when you have that kind of combination of formula, even if it's a little creaky around the edges. And, you know, I think Eiger Sanction, if you wanted to play it straight again, I don't think that there's any like need to readapt it, but maybe do something else where it is a, you know, I don't think we've had a good mountain climbing movie in some time.

It's been a minute since Cliffhanger. Since the last time we had actors venturing into the mountains, into real mountains to do real things. I mean, again, you know, those those adaptations of the John Krakauer books, maybe not so much. But, you know, Eiger Sanction, I think, also stands alone as just a impressive piece of filmmaking, like you said, for a whole host of because Clint Eastwood is such a good actor and so dedicated to his craft. that even a film that could be a lark or is a lark in a lot of other hands or other people's kind of thoughts and ideas of why they wanted to do this or how they wanted to approach it Clint Eastwood says, you know what? No, I'm going to do it straight.

We're going to do it serious. We're going to do it in a way that is just it is a James Bond. I mean, I don't know how else to put this, but like, you know, we kind of danced around it this entire episode. This about is about as close as Clint Eastwood is ever going to get to being in a James Bond movie. And you know what?

I know they always talked about, well, James Bond has to be British and there's no way James Bond could ever be an American. I think James Brolin was as close as they ever got. But I would make a case that if you had been casting James Bond at a certain time in film history, Clint Eastwood's name would have come up a couple times in conversation. And watching him in Eiger Sanction doing a, quote, send-up, unquote, of James Bond, I think it's very smart... that he is just like, you know what? No, I just want to do James Bond.

Let me do James Bond. And even though, like you said, it's creaky around the edges, I think this is one of the more fun films I've watched in quite some time. I have not had such fun with a movie in a long time. Yes, there are parts of it that have not aged well. And there are parts of James Bond, you know, to speak to the James Bond of it all, There are parts of James Bond that have not aged well either.

James Bond is a little less misogynistic than Clint Eastwood is in this movie, which is crazy because James Bond is pretty misogynistic. But, you know, in this movie, Clint Eastwood is sexually harassing his students, literally, at the beginning of the film. Now they play it for laughs and they go a different direction with it, but still what he's doing, not okay. And, you know, like you said, taking that out of it, it's still a great movie. Even with it in there, it doesn't get in the way of things.

This is a, you know, it's not a movie that gets discussed all the time in Eastwood's filmography. There are a lot of other movies. You mentioned the Man With No Name trilogy, Bridges of Madison County. Like there's a letters from Iwo Jima, a film that I know you want to cover at some point. There's a lot of film that Clint Eastwood has made and he has had a very he has had a varied career.

And I am so, you know, kind of lucky that we are able to enjoy his career now. And as he's kind of done with with directing, we're able to look at everything that he's made because. he has made a varied amount of things. And there's probably a podcast out there or an idea out there of someone to watch all the films of Clint Eastwood, either directed or starred in. Because again, he has really spanned the gamut of things. And I have not talked about him a whole lot on my show.

He is kind of a blind spot, as it were, on my own show. But anytime I get to watch him in a film, I'm really grateful because he is a fantastic actor in a way that, you know, that mold... The mold of Clint Eastwood was broken when they made him, clearly. But, you know, like Dr. Perlmutter mentioned, there's plenty of other Clint Eastwood things out there that aren't him climbing mountains to talk about.

And we probably will talk about some of them in the future because yeah, there's a lot. But until we talk about maybe one of those films, either for required viewing or the culture cast, you can find this show over at weirdingwaymedia.com where all the shows that I work on can be found. And yeah, all the shows that everybody that I work with can be found. You can find Projection Booth, Midnight Viewing, Movie Meltdown, Filmentaries, Feminine Critique, 80s TV ladies. All that can be found at weirdingwaymedia.com.

So head on over there, do your due diligence, listen to as much or as little as you want, but listen to something. And like, rate, and review it on iTunes and then Spotify in that order, because that's the order that helps. And yeah, as always, we'll catch you on the next episode. Thank you.