Considered by many as the last true movie star in Hollywood, Tom Cruise goes out of his way to execute death-defying stunts on the big screen. Whether it’s rock climbing without a harness in Mission: Impossible II or flying his own planes in Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise’s movies always put the audience on the edge of their seat. Yet, in the decades before Cruise’s time, when stars such as Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery embodied the movie star persona, the legendary Clint Eastwood risked life and limb in the international thriller The Eiger Sanction.

Between assassinating targets globally, romancing beautiful women, and defying the laws of physics in the treacherous mountains of Switzerland, Eastwood’s fourth directorial effort in 1975, based on the 1972 novel by Trevanian, indirectly paved the way for Cruise’s mastery as a superstar performing eye-popping stuntwork. The then 45-year-old star of Dirty Harry and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars trilogy was at the height of his career worldwide. In helming a mystery suspense tale that rivaled the James Bond franchise, Eastwood performed the most dangerous stunts of his career along the treacherous Eiger mountains in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland.

Clint Eastwood Plays a Killer With a Double Life in ‘The Eiger Sanction’

Ex-government assassin Johnathan Hemlock (Eastwood) works as an art history professor when he’s called upon by his former employer Dragon (Thayer David) to come out of retirement to avenge the death of a fellow agent. Initially reluctant to carry out the “sanctions,” Hemlock is forced against his will to do the job because of the threat to his priceless art collection, which Dragon threatens to report to the IRS. Hemlock carries out the first sanction successfully, only to have his money and IRS exemption letter stolen by Dragon’s courier Jemima Brown (Vonetta McGee).

It turns out that Dragon had Hemlock’s reward taken in exchange for executing the second sanction. Upon learning that the slain agent was a Vietnam War buddy of the retired hitman, Hemlock agrees to the job, where he will be assigned to an international climbing expedition team on the Eiger. Once he arrives in Switzerland, it’s up to Hemlock to identify and kill one of the men on the climbing team while surviving the deadly snowstorm atop the mountain.

The Eiger Sanction was a different kind of performance for Eastwood in many ways. Unlike the stoic nature of the Man With No Name or the system-loathing Harry Callahan, Eastwood’s Hemlock leads a double life. There’s the highly articulate expert in rare paintings whose quiet charisma charms the women who come his way. Then there’s the skilled killer instinct part of Hemlock that comes out in the sanctions, as well as the people who betray him. The latter part of Hemlock’s personality is what audiences come to expect from Eastwood, with his signature gunplay and hard-hitting fists. When it comes to big stunts on screen, however, the actor had not faced a challenge like the one presented in The Eiger Sanction.

Clint Eastwood Did His Own Stunt Climbing in ‘The Eiger Sanction’

By the time The Eiger Sanction went into production, Eastwood was in full control both in front of and behind the camera. Though the first half of the picture is centered around Hemlock’s Bond-like exploits and training for the expedition, the movie’s selling point is the latter half on the Eiger mountains. This moment marks a significant shift from the movie’s initial tone as a spy story and evolves into a survival thriller. Detailed in Richard Schickel’s 1996 book Clint Eastwood: A Biography, the actor/director felt that the Trevanian novel lacked humanity and motivation for Hemlock, resorting to Eastwood’s decision to make the third act climbing sequence as authentic as possible.

Eastwood put his life on the line by performing his own climbing stunts. Part of the shoot called for the star to hang from 4,000 feet of rope above ground, where Hemlock has to be saved from falling just as other team members succumb to the snowstorm and falling rocks above them. Eastwood recalled to Roger Ebert that he instructed cinematographer Frank Stanley “to use a telephoto lens and zoom in slowly all the way to my face — so you could see it was really me.” Not everyone in the production was as lucky as Eastwood, however. Recounted in Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 book Clint: The Life and the Legend, rock climber David Knowles was killed during production of the Eiger sequence, and cinematographer Stanley suffered injuries that left him wheelchair bound. Eastwood soldiered on with the production despite the tragedies to honor the real stuntmen who make the stars look good.

Though The Eiger Sanction lacks the fantastical spectacle of a Bond film, it succeeds in depicting a morally complex hero surviving on his wits and physicality. In a time before CGI made technically challenging stunts safer to execute on film, Eastwood was putting in the craftsmanship to create the most authentic moments in camera to thrill his audience.

The Eiger Sanction is streaming on Prime Video in the US.

Release Date

May 21, 1975

Runtime

129 Minutes

Writers

Hal Dresner, Warren Murphy, Rod Whitaker