The Eiger Sanction (1975) on Netflix
Art professor and collector Jonathan Hemlock, once a government assassin, is blackmailed by his employer into hunting a killer. The man is somewhere in a climbing team preparing for the Eiger.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.4/1025,042 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jonathan Hemlock teaches art history, climbs mountains, and once killed for a secret government agency called C-2. The money from those jobs paid for his collection of rare masterpieces. When the agency's director, Dragon, demands that he kill the men behind an agent's death, Hemlock refuses, so Dragon threatens to hand the collection to the Internal Revenue Service. He agrees, travels to Zürich, and completes one of the two killings. Dragon then reveals that the dead agent was Henri Baq, an old friend. The second target belongs to a climbing team preparing for the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. Nobody knows which climber it is, only that the man limps. Hemlock goes to Arizona, where his friend Ben Bowman runs a climbing school, to train.
Cast
- Michael Grimmas Meyer
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Eiger Sanction (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While filming on the Eiger's north face, 26-year-old British climber David Knowles was killed and cameraman Hoover was left with a fractured pelvis when a huge rock broke free and smashed into them. The two had rappelled back down to a ledge to take point-of-view footage of boulders crashing down on the climbers.
- One of the most dangerous stunts Eastwood ever attempted had him hanging from a rope 4,000 ft above the valley floor. He refused to use a stunt man, he said, because he wanted to use a telephoto lens and zoom in slowly all the way to his face, so that audiences could see it was really him.
- After the rock that killed climber David Knowles and injured Hoover, and an impromptu wake for him, Eastwood considered canceling the production; the climbers persuaded him to continue, assuring him that they all knew the risks of their trade and did not want Knowles' death to be meaningless.
- Cameraman Frank Stanley also fell while filming on the Eiger and was left needing a wheelchair for a period afterward, and he publicly blamed Eastwood's lack of preparation as director for the accident.
- Paul Newman was originally cast as Jonathan Hemlock in 1973 but dropped out after reading two drafts of the screenplay, deciding the story was too violent for him.
- By 1974, forty one climbers had lost their lives trying to climb the north face of the Eiger, a wall so renowned for treacherous climbing that it earned the German nickname Mordwand, or murder wall.
