Rape???

Clint always liked to shock with his dialogue.

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The movie was not p.c. at all. Hemlock talked about rape. He kicked the dog and called him a "prick" And remember the name of the dog? You cannot do that stuff in movies today

Yes, exactly (although it's more that Hemlock shook the dog off his leg). Released these days, The Eiger Sanction would have upset all sorts of interest groups, even though it's quite an egalitarian and cosmopolitan film that features multiple interracial sex scenes, a slender and articulate black woman (remember, we're talking about seventies cinema here), and an athletic and empowered Native American woman. But remember, Eastwood sardonically wisecracks at one point, "I wish Custer would have won!", a line that wouldn't fly in the current era. Likewise, the slender and articulate black woman is acerbically named "Jemima Brown" after the caricatured pancake "mammy."

As I indicated earlier, the 1970s constituted a culturally liberated epoch. The decade festered between the earlier age of primly straitlaced taboos and the subsequent era (beginning at some point in the eighties) when political correctness and special interest self-protectiveness again reduced the full spectrum of expression. But in the seventies, the old conventions and restrictions had dissolved and the political culture had become scrambled but not fully restructured in the midst of the chaos. Henceforth, there was a kind of "anything goes" openness about the kinds of topics that could be broached, the statements that could be made, and the language that could be spouted. Within this kaleidoscopic mélange and amidst the cultural upheaval, reactionary and radical mentalities sometimes became one, as it was unclear where the line between them stood, or if there even was a line anymore. A film such as The Eiger Sanction (Clint Eastwood, 1975) could thus seem both reactionary and radical, conservative and liberal, with the signals constantly crossing in amalgamated fashion. Is this film a testament to crude, red-blooded machismo and cold killing in the name of country, with treacherous women of color basically serving the erotic pleasures of the white male hero? Or is the movie a caustically deconstructionist take on C.I.A.-style operations and governmental machinations, exposing American Cold War conduct as fraudulent while amplifying and merging sexual, racial, and gender liberation? Are sexually aggressive women (the kind mainly featured in this film) a projection of masculine phobia or masculine enlightenment? Are blatantly acerbic racial jokes a sign of callousness or a manifestation of the willingness to confront stereotypes? Does featuring an immobile albino as the head of the C.I.A.-type apparatus make fun of disabled people or iconoclastically mock a once prestigious institution in American life? Is it all a complete set-up, or is there stinging candor behind the exaggerated representations?

The cultural and cinematic liberation of the 1970s allowed for such unfettered films where the signification of signifiers slipped into frequent slippage and exposed a vast array of fluid meanings for different viewers. Nowadays, society’s artistic motifs tend to be neater, because any ambiguous content that may slip outside an easily decodable box is likely to draw someone’s ire and threaten the commercial prospects.

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what was the dog's name?? I forgot.

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But when she grew up, she wasnt brainwashed into political correctness. It was a funny joke.

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