I watched the old Eastwood flick "The Eiger Sanction." Not a fan of condemning old movies for expressing old values — context! — but 1 grotesque sentence/scene after another. Almost parody! Here, real-life bi Jack Cassidy's dog is "Faggot," jokes about rape w/a woman named Buns. pic.twitter.com/BNUhuvwCG5
— Matthew Rettenmund (@mattrett) November 27, 2023
I watch old movies fully aware of context. I don't expect them all to be progressive! But I was mindlessly watching some Eastwood movies (In the Line of Fire holds up, Absolute Power is laughably bad) when I came upon The Eiger Sanction, which came out in 1975.
It honestly feels like a parody of an un-PC movie of the past. It has women of color throwing themselves at Eastwood (including a Black woman named Jemimah, whose name and race are the butt of quite a few jokes, though he falls for her and they end up together) and just one aggressively offensive line after another.
The Native American babe who screws Eastwood (in order to deceive him) at one point is working his ass off on a preparatory hike and he actually sneers, “Fuck Marlon Brando,” mocking the then-relatively recent Oscars flap with Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather.
I couldn't look away!
The worst was real-life bi queen Jack Cassidy playing a mincing queen with a dog named “Faggot,” making the movie's second rape joke to a ski bunny named ... Buns. Cassidy is killed off mercilessly by Eastwood's character — left to roast in the desert. But — as Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet pointed out decades ago — it was not insignificant that the dog was allowed to live.
Fascinating.
