The Gauntlet (1977)

(YouTube Streaming, December 2022) I honestly wasn’t planning on having as much fun watching The Gautlet. Dating from a ponderous decade in which lovers-on-the-run thrillers were as frequent as their protagonists’ tendency to die violently at the end, The Gauntlet approaches modern action-movie pacing and satisfaction. It features real-life couple Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke as, respectively, a tough cop and a prostitute with damaging information on an influential figure. His mission is simple: escort her from Las Vegas to Phoenix, where she’s slated to testify. The plot isn’t complicated (although if you’re expecting someone to be a turncoat, then you know exactly what this is about), but that doesn’t matter, considering that it justifies one action sequence after another in a grueling odyssey across the American Southwest. Eastwood is at his steely-eyed best here, even if the nature of the two protagonists approached misogyny at times. Locke herself has a good role to play—she’s just as beautiful as ever, but she gets to do a lot of acting on the way from point A to point B. Two of the biggest, most spectacular sequences include a house being riddled with bullet holes, and another where a helicopter tracks the lead characters until a fiery crash in a power line tower. The ending is probably more suspenseful than intended, considering the tendency of 1970s action movies to deny satisfaction to audiences—it’s a palpable relief to see it end like it does. (Compare and contrast to the not-dissimilar Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry to see how New Hollywood nihilism had played out its welcome by the mid-1970s.) None of this makes The Gauntlet a particularly good movie: there’s a cartoonishness to it that clearly prevents it from being much better. But it’s a fun and satisfying thrill-ride as long as you play into its period atmosphere, and that’s more than I was expected from a film of that time. It occasionally feels more modern by about ten years, so closely does it play into some later 1980s action film stereotypes. In other words—The Gauntlet is the kind of solid action movie you watch just for fun, knowing it’s better than average.