The Clint Eastwood Archive: The Gauntlet 1977

The Gauntlet is a 1977 action film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The film also stars Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, William Prince, Bill McKinney, and longtime personal friend Mara Corday who would appear with Eastwood in another three films.

Ben Shockley (Clint Eastwood), a cop from Phoenix, is well on his way to becoming a down-and-out when he is given the task to escort witness Gus Mally (Sondra Locke) from Las Vegas. Mally soon reveals herself to be a belligerent prostitute with mob ties and is in possession of incriminating information concerning a high figure in society.

From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Below: How The Gauntlet would have opened when seen in UK cinemas with its original X certificate

Above: Check out this great fan made trailer for The Gauntlet

Below: A nice new HD, Widescreen version of the original theatrical trailer

Below: The Gauntlet 1977 Clint Eastwood UK QUAD poster 30x40

The Gauntlet 1977 U.S. Original rolled half sheet poster

The Gauntlet 1977 Clint Eastwood Original Australian Daybill poster

The Gauntlet 1977 Colour mounted Slides x 3
The Gauntlet 1977 Japan Original full colour mini Poster

The Gauntlet 1977 Japan Original Thick fully illustrated colour Brochure

The Gauntlet 1977 Jerry Fielding's Great Jazz Score re-issue CD, shame that the original album artwork was dropped and replaced with this rather poor excuse..

The Gauntlet 1977 Lobby set x 13 French

The Gauntlet 1977 Lobby cards x 7 German

The Gauntlet 1977 Lobby set x 8 USA 14 x 11

The Gauntlet 1977 Mini Lobby set x 8 USA

The Gauntlet 1977 Original U.S. Jerry Fielding LP with great full art Sleeve

The Gauntlet 1977 Original Postcard from 1977 with the film’s poster artwork
The Gauntlet 1977 Original Trailer 8mm (Below)

The Gauntlet 1977 Original Warner Brothers Press Release

The Gauntlet 1977 Germany, an original Der Mann der niemals aufgibt (The Gauntlet) 1977 large German Cinema slide / transparency in its frosted paper Diacolor pouch.

Size: 3.3" x 3.3" in silver card mount.

The Gauntlet 1977 10 x 8 Press Stills b/w x 69 + 6 colour

The Gauntlet 1977 UK Original Press book

Below: The rare advance promotional folder

The Gauntlet 1977 UK Original Press sheet

The Gauntlet 1977 USA Original large Press Book

The Gauntlet 1977 US Original large press book supplement

The Gauntlet 1977 x 3 Original film tie in Paperbacks
Below: The UK 1st edition Paperback

Below: The UK 2nd edition Paperback

Below: The U.S. edition Paperback

Below: The Gauntlet L'épreuve de force - Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack - 1978 French Paperback which featured the full poster artwork

The Gauntlet R2 1977 DVD

The Gauntlet R1 1977 DVD (First issue) Includes Original Trailer

The Gauntlet 1977 U.S. Laserdisc Widescreen Remastered Clint Eastwood (note that Sondra Locke's image has been removed from the original artwork)

The Gauntlet 1977 VCD, Philippines 2 Disc Panned and Scanned, but some very nice artwork.

Below: Here's the Original U.S. Laserdisc (Pan and Scan) version

Below: An Original UK Trade advertisement from December 1978

Below: A rare advance Trade advertisement for The Gauntlet

Below: A super rare candid shot taken during a lunch break while on location for The Gauntlet

Below: The 3 regular B2 Japanese posters

Below: The U.S. Insert poster

Below: The Gauntlet Turkish 1 sheet poster

The Evolution of a poster..remembering the great Frank Frazetta
Frank Frazetta's stunning and super-stylized artwork is a classic example of a 1970's action movie.
'Sometimes I had nothing left to draw on but toilet paper. As I got older, I started drawing some pretty wild things for my age. I remember the teachers were always mesmerized by what I was doing, so it was hard to learn anything from them. So I went to art school when I was a little kid, and even there the teachers were flipping out'
Frank Frazetta's Self Portrait (1962)

Below: An early drawing by Franzetta, with his ideas on the character concept.

Below: Frazetta's work begins to take shape and begins to look familiar.

Below: The finished clean version has now become a classic example of film artwork

Below: Another drawing for The Gauntlet

Below: Clint, Sondra and their artist, Frazetta

Below: Clint is handed the original painting commissioned for the poster art

Another Rare shot of Clint, with Sondra in car - with Heidi - Frank's Daughter

Sadly, Frazetta died of a stroke on May 10, 2010, in a hospital near his residence in Florida. Recently one of Frazetta's paintings', 'Conan the Destroyer’, sold for $1.5 million. It was bought by a private collector and is the highest paid for any of Frazetta's paintings

Below: A great painting of Clint in The Gauntlet by Boris Vallejo. "Clint" by Boris Vallejo

While this image was taken from the 1994 Comic Images card set Boris 4, I believe the art was intended for the great 1977 flick The Gauntlet. The card back reads:

This piece was done as a finished sketch for a Clint Eastwood film. The painting never saw the final stage, a fairly frequent occurrence when dealing with the movie industry.

Below: The Blu Ray Hi Def release of The Gauntlet

The Gauntlet By Roger Ebert
January 1, 1977

"The Gauntlet" is classic Clint Eastwood: fast, furious, and funny. It tells a cheerfully preposterous story with great energy and a lot of style, and nobody seems more at home in this sort of action movie than Eastwood. He plays a cop again this time, but not a supercop like Dirty Harry Callahan. He's a detective from Phoenix, and no hero: He drives up in front of police headquarters, opens his car door, and a whiskey bottle crashes to the street.

Eastwood hasn't compiled the most stellar record in the department, but somehow the police commissioner thinks he's the right man for the next assignment: Fly to Las Vegas, take custody of a hooker there, and bring her back to Phoenix to be a witness in an important court case. It sounds routine to Eastwood, until he flies to Vegas, takes custody, and discovers that the Mafia is quoting sixty-to-one odds against his witness leaving Nevada alive. Maybe, he begins to suspect, this isn't a totally typical witness....

The witness (played by Sondra Locke) isn't a totally typical hooker, either. She's a college graduate, spunky, pleasant. She tells Eastwood he'd be wise to catch the next flight home, because there's a contract out on her. Eastwood's too stubborn. He's taken the assignment and he'll carry it out through hell and high water (which turn out to be just about the only two things he doesn't have to survive on this mission).

The return trip gets off to a slightly shaky start when they survive an auto bomb. Then, after Eastwood commandeers an ambulance, they're involved in a high-speed chase with three gunmen. They take refuge in Locke's house, which is promptly surrounded by dozens of police marksmen, who open fire, achieving overkill so completely that (in one of the movie's many mixtures of humor and violence), the house simply topples over. Still ahead of them are nights in the desert, an encounter with Hell's Angels, a fight on a moving freight train, a chase in which their motorcycle is pursued by a rifle marksman in a helicopter ... and then the grand finale, in which Eastwood hijacks a passenger bus, armor-plates it, and drives himself and his witness through downtown Phoenix against a hail of machine-gun fire. You see what I mean about the plot's being cheerfully preposterous.

Eastwood directed himself again this time, and he's a good action craftsman (as "The Outlaw Josey Wales" demonstrated). He's also good at developing relationships; despite the movie's barrage of violence, there's a nice pacing as his cop and hooker slog through their ordeals and begin to like and respect one another.

As in most Eastwood movies, by the way, the woman's role is a good one: Eastwood has such a macho image that maybe people haven't noticed that his female sidekicks (like Tyne Daly, Dirty Harry's partner in "The Enforcer") have minds of their own and are never intended to be merely decorative.

"The Gauntlet" will no doubt be attacked in various quarters because of its violence, but it's a harmless, pop-art type of violence, often with a comic quality. The wall of gunfire during the final bus ride up the steps of the Hall of Justice, for example, is an extravaganza of sound and action during which, incredibly, no one is killed. Eastwood himself fires his pistol only twice: once at a door, and once at a gas tank.

The Gauntlet (1977) By VINCENT CANBY, New York Times Published: December 22, 1977

IN "THE GAUNTLET," his new film as both director and star, Clint Eastwood plays a detective in Phoenix who is described as a drunk and an incompetent. It is, you see, a character role. So, too, is that of Sondra Locke, the pretty, fresh-faced actress who made her debut in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." Miss Locke plays a Las Vegas hooker who graduated from Finch College. "The schoolgirl look is very popular right now," someone says by way of explanation.

Explanations aren't really necessary. "The Gauntlet" has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with Clint Eastwood fiction, which is always about a Force (Mr. Eastwood) that sets things straight in a crooked world.

"The Gauntlet," which opened yesterday at the Columbia I and National Theaters, is about the rigors faced by Mr. Eastwood's detective when he attempts to return the hooker from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify at a mob trial. Along the way the detective and the girl establish a revivifying relationship (he will give up his Jack Daniel's if she gives up her johns), though the movie is more concerned with the mob's efforts to prevent them from completing their trip.

There are escapes in ambulances, gunfights in speeding automobiles, a helicopter attack, a ride on a stolen motorcycle and, for the climax, a sequence in which a bus, armored like the Monitor, runs a police gantlet through downtown Phoenix to reach City Hall.

It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time. It's not simply that the film is noisy. It has a kind of violent grace, as when a house, which has been bombarded by the heavy artillery of the police, quietly gives up and collapses into fine rubble. Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack wrote the script which exists to accommodate the mayhem much in the way that the book for a Broadway musical supports the songs. Mr. Eastwood's talent is his style, unhurried and self-assured, that of a man who goes through life looking down onto the bald spots of others. Miss Locke is not only pretty, but also occasionally genuinely funny.

In supporting roles, Pat Hingle has nothing much to do and as Mr. Eastwood's fussy, nannylike cop-friend, and William Prince models some very dapper haberdashery as the mob's highly placed contact within the Phoenix Police Department.

THE GAUNTLET, directed by Clint Eastwood; screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Stiryack produced by Robert Daley; director of photography Rexford Metz; editors, Ferris Webster and Joel Cox; music, Jerry Fielding; a Malpaso production, distributed by Warner Brothers. Running time: 111 minutes. At the Columbia I Theater, Second Avenue at 65th Street, and National Theater, Broadway at 4th Street. This film has been rated R.

Ben Shockley . . . . . Clint Eastwood

Gus Mally . . . . . Sondra Locke

Josephson . . . . . Pat Hingle

Blakelock . . . . . William Prince

Constable . . . . . Bill McKinney

Feyderspiel . . . . . Michael Cavanaugh

Waitress . . . . . Carole Cock

Below: Here is the Original Making of featurette for The Gauntlet. A big thank you to my friend Davy Triumph for uploading this to Youtube. It's an incredible travesty that this has never been included on ANY home video format. The original source is 16mm film.

Below: A rare Japanese cinema ticket for The Gauntlet - Thanks to Davy Triumph

Below: Three super examples of unused artwork for The Gauntlet

Below: An extremely rare original final draft copy of the 'Gauntlet' script, dated January 31st 1977

Below: An extremely rare photo taken on location during the filming of The Gauntlet

Below: I could only scan half of this large US Newspaper advertisement, the bottom half is just the rest of the art. I do love this advert for Jerry Fielding's The Gauntlet soundtrack - especially the tagline at the top.

Below: A great shot of Sondra and Clint on location directing The Gauntlet

Below: Clint with Pat Hingle in The Gauntlet

Ben Shockley: How's our Assistant D.A. these days?

Josephson: Shit! He couldn't convict Hitler.

Below: A super rare shot taken during the making of The Gauntlet, the image was originally spread over two pages from a French magazine article

Below: The rest of the French magazine article which also contained some rare images

Below, The Gauntlet A very unusual set of Italian Fotobustas from Italy

Below: Clint with Raul Castro (Governor of Arizona 1975 - 1977) at The Gauntlet Film Reception; Phoenix, Arizona - probably around November - December 1977