UKH

For some reason I never got round to seeing this film when it was released in the 1970s. Last night I watched it for the first time, and wondered why I bothered? Weak plot, like a sort of James Bond film on the cheap, but the thing that really struck me was just how corny, misogynistic, homophobic, and racial  it was. Did we really accept and tolerate such attitudes to the extent that they were perfectly acceptable in a major film at that time? I try to think back to society's general attitude towards these things at the time and think what huge steps we have made since those days.

As for the climbing, some of the scenes were well shot, and worth watching, and again show how much equipment has evolved in the last 50 odd years. The final  scenes on the Eiger seemed to have been heavily borrowed from the 1936 Tony Kurtz tragedy.

Ah, the seventies. 'On the Buses', 'It Ain't Half Hot, Mum!'. Trouble is, some people look back on it as a golden age.

Quite a few films feel a bit cringeworthy to say the least now.

I did like the scene at the top of the climb where he suggests and the other one says, you crazy sod did you carry beers up that, to which he replies no, you did having put them in the others ones bag.

Cheers

Toby

There was a trend among Bristol climbers in the 1970s of sneaking rocks (sometimes hefty) into friends' rucsacs before going up to a distant crag, ah those were the days

Hamish MacInnes' recollections in Alpinist 41 - 

http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web13w/feature-alp41-clint-eastwood-cover

The Black and White Minstrel Show...

I think at the time it was considered so corny it was  actually funny.

The bit that got me was when he went for him training run in the desert wearing tight Levi's and cowboy boots.

Not just Bristol climbers ...

My mate Fast Eddy carried a brick up to Cloggy! The look on his face when he found it!

It is certainly dated on social issues, but still one of my favourite films - an enormously fun romp with some pretty good climbing sequences. I have the DVD. Watching it is a great guilty pleasure and I can quote more dialogue from from it than from any other film. Credit to Eastwood too for doing a lot of his own stunts, including the rope cutting suspended above most of the height of the Nordwand. 

I laughed during this scene as Clint was climbing the chimney. One minute he was top roping, then it changed to lead climbing a split second later then he was top roping but the belayer was giving out rope..... 😂 

Yet still more convincing than any rock climbing sequence Bear Grylls has ever filmed.

I know exactly what you mean (and i did see it decades ago, but not for probably about 20+ years) - I posted this on another thread (probably should have posted it here!) https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/rocktalk/one_less_white_oliver_vs_4c-7409...

The bit where the young female "trainer" (native American) in the desert removed her top (along with other incidents where , eg a busty woman would just turn up and be an airhead for the "men" to ogle at), really made me wince. But did i wince in the 1980s? Doubt it. Perhaps we're getting used (rightly) to the changing of the guard/attitude here. 

I still enjoy the mountain filming tho.  Breathtaking. Had to pause & replay the helicopter view in across from Mannlichen to the Eiger view. Stunning. 

The thing that spoils it for me is that he seems to be wearing a builders safety helmet on the climb. Did any real alpinists wear those hats back in the 70s?

I do like the fact that at the end of the film it is the old climbing partnership which runs deepest - actually quite moving. Good grief, I might have to watch it again later.....

It's still the only kind of helmet that doesn't make you look like a complete dork.

Actors have to keep up appearances....

There was a climber killed during the filming.  A chap I climbed with a long time ago told me he was climbing the Matterhorn when he  met an American tourist also solo. The American suggested they team up and they did so. Apparently it took some time before Phil realised the American tourist was Clint Eastwood. I had no reason to disbelieve him.

I still know plenty of cavers who hide big rocks in the tackle bags of others when doing an exchange trip

Dave Knowles from Preston, a very good and accomplished climber hit by rockfall on the west flank

I couldn't agree more.  It's totally dated on social issues, but has some fabulous scenery and the climbing sequences are pretty good despite the odd obvious fakery.  I was going to say the dialog was hackneyed, but went through an extended list of quotes whilst trying to recall a couple of my favourites - and there's actually a lot of well written, funny, ironic, snappy lines (amongst a fair few cringe-worthy ones, admittedly).  It's definitely my favourite climbing fiction movie, despite (or maybe because of) its faults.

  And the spouse of one the climbers sums up climbing pretty well in a single sentence:

Anna Montaigne: I consider mountain climbing the biggest nonsense.

"We shall continue with style".

How good is that? 🙂

Loads of things don’t look good through the lens of hindsight, but when it came out it was an entertaining yarn with some really exciting footage. Even now after a huge climbing boom, climbing and especially mountaineering is at best a marginal sport so the climbing content is great. 
It’s only beaten into the best climbing film first place by Cliffhanger, where all the above caveats apply. However they’ve got bolt guns, and Wolfgang doing the climbing footage and handing Stallone his ass on set with one finger pull-ups.

Cliffhanger is a cracking film despite (or perhaps because of) the ludicrousness. The absurdity of the Dolomites standing in for Colorado, the bolt gun, the breaking harness and the double dyno ice climbing all pale in comparison to John Lithgow's "English" accent.

It also has some of the most impressive aerial stuntwork ever performed.

I love climbers criticisms of climbing in movies.

It is a movie, it is fiction, exaggerated behaviour, hamming, clowning. What do you expect?

If climbing were an exciting spectator sport, the would be banks of seating below Malham Cove, high ticket prices and tribalist hooliganism. It isn't (thankfully) and so requires the Hollywood treatment to give it mass market appeal.

Trevanian (aka Rod Whitaker) was a superb writer. The Eiger Sanction and its successor, The Loo Sanction were satires of the James Bond type super-spy genre. He was bitterly disparaging about the film of the The Eiger Sanction and, I suspect, was deeply saddened by the death of Dave Knowles (which should never have happened). 

A later book, Shibumi, was epic in its scale and remains a favourite of mine. Its epic scale has been much imitated but I've never seen it done better - or even remotely as well. Another book, The Summer of Katya, is brilliant and terrifying. 

And there's a route, Professor Whitaker, by Johnny Dawes...

Mick 

Fully agree, light hearted entertainment not a training film. As you say would be a non starter if no exciting moments were added.👍

Agreed, although maybe needs the entire bit:

Anderl Meier: You’re very good. I have really enjoyed climbing with you.

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock: We’ll make it.

Anderl Meier: I don’t think so. But we shall continue with style. 

Probably my favourite ever climbing quote is from the movie "White Tower":

To rest is not to conquer.

I remember that I saw a picture somewhere - probably Climber and Rambler, as it was then called - of someone holding up a very large boulder.  This was polystyrene, painted grey, and had been left behind by the Eiger sanction team who had used it to enhance the scenery (as if it needed it).

I thought the climber holding the rock was Eric Jones and that this dated back to his own film about soloing the north face, but I couldn't find anything about it in his autobiography.  Plenty about his climb though!

T.

Thanks for the background on Rod Whitaker. Any idea if he had any direct insight into climbing or was it a case of a good writer doing his research? How did he end up in Somerset?

Who is/was Professor Whitaker dot dot dot ? 

Wasn't that Five Days One Summer?

I read the book quite recently. Not great literature but a good long enjoyable read. Not seen the film.

I read the book after seeing the film as a teenager. I thought it was dreadful trash compared to the film. It seemed to lack the almost self parodying humour completely. And of course the Clint factor magic.

Well bizarrely much of the most ridiculous stuff (excluding Lithgow's accent) are passing nods to bizarre historical facts. The plane crash in Yosemite is inspired by  https://activenorcal.com/remembering-the-time-it-rained-6000-pounds-of-mari... and the cliffhanger premise was the owners looking for it, although drugs had to be swapped for money or the film wouldn't be acceptable at the target audience/certificate

The climbing harness bit was written only just after www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-05-11-we-3605-story.html where Choinard equipment was shut down after a harness accident lawsuit.

We could nerd out on other details and references in the film, but you get the idea!

There are two readable novels based on the Yosemite plane crash; Angels of Light by Jeff Long and Vortex by David Harris (the latter also reprinted in the One Step in the Clouds omnibus)

It was recently on the Enormocast that John Long said that he had pitched the original Cliff Hanger story to Hollywood following his involvement in weed plane crash shenanigans.  I don’t think the bolt gun was in John Long’s version.  

There's a sense of humour - but it's terribly acerbic. The Loo sanction is largely more of the same. In Shibumi, Whitaker's essential decency begins to break through. I believe he was quoted as saying that he viewed writing in different genres as akin to method acting. 

Some of his views in Shibumi are not ones I'd endorse - but it remains a favourite. My first copy has now disintegrated after so many readings in the last 40 years. 

Mick 

Not sure, but I think that may have been Mo Anthoine holding up the 'boulder'?

Quite a few Americans made it to Europe on the proceeds following the dope plane crash. The one massive stroke of irony was that Jim Bridwell was out of the valley, so missed out. I remember him lamenting to me in Buenos Aires about it.

Re climbing, I suspect he simply did research. (There's a lot of caving detail in Shibumi.) Don't know how he ended up in Somerset. His writing conveys a contempt for his home country (USA); I suspect he'd have liked the British sense of humour. 

There's a route on the Lleyn (Cilan Head), spelled Professor Whittaker, done ground-up, by Johnny Dawes, originally given E7. It's rumoured that Whitaker used to live near Llanberis and, despite being fairly well advanced in years at the time, apparently the local hard cases viewed him with utter dread (guess they should have left him well alone!) Thus the name, I've been told.

I suspect he was a very nice man, much more so than his writing would suggest - but emphatically not one to cross. 

Mick  

loved it then - love it now. But i am a 56yr old dinosaur. 'i warn you Pope I may have to mess you up a bit'

And after doing so at Kleine Scheidegg, breaking his fingers: "You're alright now Pope; of course you might not be able to play the clarinet for a while."

That episode was one of the best yarns in Valley Uprising, especially Dale Bard saying, "Some guys built their houses from that." 

CantClinbTom: the Chouinard harness thing you're think of was Vertical Limit which features (spoiler alert) a death resulting from a slipping harness buckle. It was iirc a BD harness and given how BD had come into being they demanded that if their gear was going to be used in such a way that all labelling etc was removed.  

No Tom's correct, that was Cliffhanger. There's been a rumour abound for years that BD sued and the result was a disclaimer in the end credits that the harness had been specially modified. I'm not sure whether the lawsuit is an urban myth or not but the disclaimer is there.

Ah, OK. It was a while ago. I remember the Chouinard case well but the film intrigues less so.

Thank you. 

I'd heard the 'Professor Whittaker' the route was named after was viewed as a nasty piece of work, hence naming a Llŷn horror after him. Is he also the author of the Eiger Sanction? Worth a note in a guidebook historical if that's the case.

About 100 posts on the movie and no mention of the greatest scene in the film?

Maybe I am still living in the 70's....lol

Well, if you like old stuff (which I do) then I found it quite enjoyable.  I wouldn't necessarily choose anything based on my opinion of what's good though - it seems to be at odds with most other people's

The tale I heard came from a very well connected Llanberis local and it seemed that the gentleman in question could be very scary indeed if prodded the wrong way. In The Loo Sanction, there's the best 'philosophy of combat' I've ever read. I imagine it was written from personal experience! 

Whitaker wrote that his wife suggested 'Trevanian' as a nom de plume for The Eiger Sanction, etc. For many years, various rumours circulated about his true identity. At the time of his bestseller status, the concealed identity added to the allure.  

After The Summer of Katya, he disappeared from the literary lists for decades, then reappeared. I've not read his later books - have always meant to but am probably concerned that I'd be disappointed. 

An interesting man!

Mick 

Saw The Eiger Sanction as in-flight movie on the way to Yosemite for the first time, in 1975. We were wearing coiled ropes under our jackets to avoid excess baggage so could prove we were climbers to the row in front of us who had been making comments about the film.

I was also there in May '77 when the Camp 4 climbers were suddenly rich - fun times!

Apart, of course, from the mysterious death of Jack Dorn, falling off the falls trail during a rescue mission at night. Rumoured at the time to be due to having found the 'black book' that was associated with the recovered dope but actually considered to be a tragic accident. Nice chap, had drunk beer with him. Very sad.

I would have thought a CGI retrospective removal of the logo would have been a better outcome and pretty easy to arrange