Receiving an apparently negative answer, Shockley suggests: “Well maybe you could send your kid out. “Would you have anything like room service in this joint,” he asks. While Mally is taking a bath, casually enough to leave the bathroom door open, which already builds erotic tension for the scene, Shockley calls the motel desk. Mally and Shockley seek cover in a run-down motel in a small Arizonian town near Phoenix. However, the detail of the roses, which Shockley orders for Mally in a key scene before the action finale, interestingly speaks against this generally warranted presumption about Eastwood. Despite (or precisely due to) such rapidity, Eastwood’s films paradoxically feel slow to quote critic Pauline Kael, there is a “dead feeling” and a “passionless quality” in them. To put it bluntly, and this also explains many of the issues in the two exceptions, Eastwood is too fast and impatient of a director to trust in budding developments and tender subtleties. The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Breezy (1973) are the rare exceptions – and the less said about the latter the better. Known for his macho westerns and rough detective stories, Eastwood the director has never had much of a knack (let alone a penchant) for creating romantic relationships on screen. ![]() Having survived the ordeal and revealed the prevalent corruption in the police force, they walk away to their future together. Their journey culminates in the film’s well-known finale, a ludicrously absurd sequence where Mally and Shockley drive an armored bus through the titular gauntlet of police officers shooting at them all the way to Phoenix City Hall. While running away from Blakelock’s henchmen, Mally and Shockley begin to fall in love. Blakelock chose Shockley because he assumed the drunken bum would not get the job done. What’s supposed to be a routine job of escorting “a nothing witness” for “a nothing trial” turns out to be a rather unnecessarily elaborate hoax to get both of them dead because Mally has incriminating information about Blakelock, the Phoenix head of police, who gave Shockley the assignment. An alcoholic middle-aged good-for-nothing cop Ben Shockley, played by Eastwood himself, has been given the task of bringing a prostitute with ties to the mob, Gus Mally, played by Eastwood’s then-partner Sondra Locke, from Las Vegas to Phoenix in order for her to testify in a trial against the mob. It is a bouquet of red roses that appears in one surprisingly subdued scene whose restraint tone, however, remains hidden beneath the noise of gunshots in the film’s louder sequences.ĭespite the show-off spectacles typical for the action genre, at its heart, The Gauntlet is a love story about two lonely castaways on the run. Rather than commending the film or “re-evaluating” it as a whole, I would like to point out a small detail in one scene of the film which, despite its minuteness, I believe, embodies a less discussed but intriguing aspect of The Gauntlet and Eastwood’s cinema in general. ![]() I am not going to challenge this received view of the film. ![]() It’s shallow, unoriginal, and childish action entertainment. Widely panned by critics, Clint Eastwood’s sixth directorial feature The Gauntlet (1977) is not generally considered a good film. Details may vary from a single shot, a particular cut, or a piece of sound to individual scenes, objects, and other elements in mise-en-scène as well as larger-scale motifs in the film under scrutiny. Film Details is a blog series of posts focusing on a specific detail in a film.
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