The Gauntlet

A road film running from Arizona to Nevada. Shockley is a policeman. He drinks, his career is finished, and nobody expects anything of him. He is given an assignment. He is to collect a witness from Las Vegas and bring her to Phoenix; the case is small, he is told, the witness unimportant. The witness is Gus. She works as a prostitute, is foul-mouthed, and understands the situation far better than he does. Things go wrong in the first hours. The house they stay in is fired on, their car explodes, and the police are after them. It becomes clear that the witness is not wanted alive. Shockley was given the job because he was thought incapable of it. From there the film is a chase. A motorcycle, a train, a desert road, a helicopter, and a bus in the last section. What the narrative is interested in is not policing but being used: the man realises his own institution picked him to be spent, and the film leaves no mystery about it. The relationship between the two begins as forced. She insults him constantly and that is the narrative's source of humour. The violence is exaggerated and deliberately so. A house is demolished entirely by gunfire, and the scene goes beyond what is physically possible. The finale takes the same idea to its end. An armoured bus drives into the city and ranks of police open fire; a great many blank rounds were spent for the scene and the vehicle's body was left riddled. The tone is uneven. The narrative is at times a serious crime film and at times an open cartoon. Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle and William Prince are in the cast. Clint Eastwood directed and stars. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard action films of the 1970s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the logic is abandoned entirely in several places and the writing of the woman is uncomfortable today.