Clint Eastwood's Capra movie: "The Gauntlet" (1977)

Checking out the recently issued Blu-ray disc of Clint Eastwood’s 1977 The Gauntlet (a nice disc, by the way, but noth­ing to write home about; also note that all the screen grabs here were taken from the standard-definition DVD), it occurred to me that the pic­ture was a loose remake of Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night.

Structurally the films are prac­tic­ally identic­al. Boy and girl are thrown togeth­er against their wishes, reluct­antly unite for the pur­pose of get­ting from point A to point B, encounter seem­ingly insur­mount­able obstacles along the way, and even­tu­ally over­come their dif­fer­ences (which were all defense and bluster any­way) to find true love togeth­er, which makes get­ting to point B all the more essen­tial. Only in It Happened One Night, the obstacles for Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are things such as missed bus con­nec­tions and road thieves, where­as in The Gauntlet, Eastwood and Sandra Locke face down hun­dreds of men (from both sides of the law) with hun­dreds of guns, heli­copter snipers, and a degen­er­ate motor­cycle gang. Aside from that, same thing. 

It’s prob­ably a bit of a stretch to say that the scene in which Locke’s char­ac­ter, heart-of-gold-hooker and star wit­ness Augustina “Gus” Mally, offers her­self up to some strays from that biker gang to dis­tract them from poten­tially beat­ing Eastwood’s dis­sol­ute cop Ben Shockley to death has some cor­res­pond­ence to Claudette Colbert’s fam­ous leg-baring in the hitch-hike scene in Night, but then again, maybe not. 

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There’s no arguing, though, that the qual­it­ies of ini­tial ant­ag­on­ism between the two pairs of future lov­ers match per­fectly. Gable’s Peter Warne dis­misses Colbert’s Ellie Andrews with “You’re just a head­line to me,” while Shockley dis­par­ages Mally as “a noth­ing wit­ness in a noth­ing case.”

The Gauntlet nods to anoth­er Capra pic­ture, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, in the scene where Ben and Gus first encounter the bikers. Here they’re out in massive force, and Ben really lays on the bull (aided partly by his fire­arm) to try to pur­suade them to ske­daddle. Maddy’s reac­tion is of extreme exas­per­a­tion that can­not mask adoration—rather like Jean Arthur’s expres­sion as she watches Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith filibuster. 

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I know, I know—for whatever salut­ary qual­it­ies she has, Sondra Locke is no Jean Arthur. That does­n’t mean she was­n’t going for Jean Arthur, though. 

I do won­der what’s with the film’s hint of a reli­gious sub­text. The pic­ture begins and ends with the won­der­ful trum­peter Jon Farris stretch­ing out on the gos­pel hymn “Just A Closer Walk With Thee.” (Jerry Fielding’s score is ter­rif­ic through­out, and the oth­er cred­ited instru­ment­al soloist is the great alto man Art Pepper.) And after two scenes of extreme may­hem, Eastwood cuts to these road signs:

Like I said, I dunno. If this is sup­posed to be a theme, I’d say it’s a little underdeveloped…or maybe unre­solved. But I’ll cut Eastwood some slack (nice of me, I know)—The Gauntlet, while his sixth dir­ect­ori­al effort, was cer­tainly the most ambi­tious action film he made up to that point, and its set pieces are more than extremely bravura. The whole film really is a blast.