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.

Comments

[Campaspe]

You might not guess it from my site, but I am a big Eastwood fan and I like this movie a lot. So I am, to be honest, just a wee bit irked that I didn't notice this stuff myself. Your analogies work for me here but I'll have to rewatch The Gauntlet to be sure.

[Steven W.]

Sondra Lock and Clint had one of the most disturbing relationships between a woman and a man that I have ever heard about.

[gary dobbs AKA WESTERN WRITER JACK MARTIN]

Eastwood is a legend - never saw the connections between this and capra before. An interesting post

[Dan]

I'll be seeing it soon. Thank God for Netflix!

[Dale Halford]

Do you know where I can buy the score to "The Gauntlet"?
Not recorded music, the printed score.

Thanks

[Dennis Cozzalio]

Nice comparison, Glenn. Don't know what it says about me, but I recently saw both movies and never drew the connection, which you make seem fairly apparent.

I was glad to see that the movie held up better than I thought it would. The Blu-ray disc is very well rendered, but better than that, the movie itself, despite my aversion to some of Locke's overmodulation, really is as solid as I remember it (having seen it, what, 6 or 7 times when it came out theatrically).

Interesting that Locke gets to "do" Colbert and Arthur here, and three years later her Lombard in Bronco Billy is, to my eyes (remember, they're the ones that didn't see the Capra thread), a much more successful calling up of the spirit of a screwball queen.