The Gauntlet by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack
In which somebody actually does shoot the tyres.
“She took his hand. As she stood there, looking at the tired, determined figure who straddled the dirty motorcycle, she felt suddenly as if she’d spent her entire life with him. ‘Shockley, you’re one hell of a cop.’ ‘Yeah, me and Dirty Harry. Now climb on.’”
THE MOVIE
The Gauntlet hails from that era in the 1970s when Clint Eastwood was starting to coast. Quality anomalies like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (directed by Michael Cimino) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (directed by Eastwood) popped up occasionally, but this was otherwise a time of Clint idly playing to the crowd, who seemed easily pleased.
This one is about Arizona cop Ben Shockley (Eastwood), tasked with escorting a low-level witness in an unimportant trial from Las Vegas back to Phoenix. The witness is Augustina “Gus” Malley (Sondra Locke), a hooker who, it turns out, actually knows enough to tank the Phoenix police department on corruption charges. Shockley has been set up to fail. The mob has posted escalating odds on “Malley No Show”, and cops and crooks alike are intent on stopping her and Shockley from ever reaching that Phoenix courthouse by any means necessary, including massive overkill.
It could have been a hardboiled neo-noir, a neo-Western or a screwball romantic action-comedy, but in Eastwood’s hands it’s just an amiable stroll with a misogynist mean streak; a paradoxically unhurried chase movie; sluggish where it should have been nimble. This is the start of Eastwood and Locke’s infamous on-screen and off-screen relationship, their second film together (after Josey Wales) and first as headlining co-stars, but weirdly they don’t have much chemistry. They barely have characters either, which might be the problem.
Locke complains and Eastwood grimaces. There isn’t much more to it than that. Eastwood’s catchphrase in the film is “Nag, nag, nag…” and Shockley’s first action on meeting Malley is to slap her in the face. He hits her again later on, but she kicks him in the balls. That’s The Gauntlet’s equivalent of demonstrating that their relationship is progressing.
In the wake of later films like Tightrope (Richard Tuggle, 1984), in which Eastwood started to interrogate and undermine his snarling maverick cop persona, you might just about detect an early, very embryonic attempt at self-satire as The Gauntlet’s half-assed narrative unfolds. Thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired: at a house that collapses under the barrage; at a car that’s similarly turned into a colander; and ultimately at the armoured bus that Eastwood uses in the climax to run the gauntlet of the title up to the steps of City Hall. But Dirty Harry himself shoots nobody — although he does wave a Magnum around and at one point shoots a motorcycle in the gas tank. With a bit more thought that latter scene might have been excised so that he makes it through the film without firing a single bullet. But it stayed in because clearly nobody cared, or was thinking very much. That carelessness extends to the final scene where, despite streets lined with hundreds of cops all blasting away at Clint’s wheeled fortress with handguns and shotguns and machine guns, nobody shoots the tyres. Eastwood’s mentor Don Siegel also wryly observed that he’d have liked to have seen a pull-back to a wide shot of hundreds of dead cops killed by the crossfire and ricochet.
By far the best thing about The Gauntlet is the poster by the artist Frank Frazetta, famous for providing similarly muscular work for the Conan the Barbarian paperbacks of the 1960s. That one-sheet boasts considerably more wit and energy than anything in The Gauntlet itself. One of the film’s own producers, Bob Daley, told Eastwood he thought it was one of the ten worst movies he’d ever seen. He hadn’t seen the monkey comedies yet.
THE NOVELIZATION
Adapting their own screenplay, it’s clear from the start of the novelization that the writers had actually envisaged something tonally quite different, aiming for the bleak, downtrodden world of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Butler & Shryack’s version of The Gauntlet is more obviously a half-smart inversion of Thompson’s The Getaway (filmed in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah), in which our damaged anti-heroes head directly towards what’s threatening them, rather than for the freedom of the Mexican border. It’s still crude and sexist, but it’s at least trying to come off as hard boiled.
In terms of plot trajectory, film and novel follow the same map. Most of the dialogue is word-for-word too. The chief difference is that of character. Shockley is washed up, heading over the hill, an unambitious plodder who in 15 years has never broken a significant case and has frequently been passed over for promotion.
Eastwood was never going to cast himself as a schlub, so on screen he’s just your standard Clint cop, with a vague intimation that he drinks and is insubordinate. He’s introduced in the film rolling out of a car with an empty bottle of whiskey. In the book he begins at home in his sad apartment, drinking coffee before heading out to work in his “tired worsted”.
Malley meanwhile is “no classical beauty” but has a “steeliness” and a “strong, sensual quality”, and she’s a bit older than Locke would have been (the studio had envisaged Barbara Streisand; presumably aware of the casting by the time they were writing, Butler & Shryack hedge that Malley looks a decade younger than she is). Both Shockley and Malley are eventually given long, awkwardly placed biographical flashback scenes: Shockley’s during the motel interlude, and Malley’s on the bus just before the shooting starts. They grind the narrative to a halt on each occasion, but they do provide some useful character context. Shockley was in street gangs as a kid in the 1940s, but bailed out when they got too criminally serious. After the death of an Irish cop who’d taken him under his wing, Shockley joined the Phoenix PD, partly in tribute and partly because he had no other prospects. Malley likewise drifted into hooking for want of any other earning potential. She and a friend did it together in Las Vegas — more as “escorts” than street walkers — and even rather enjoyed the life until the mob got involved and it all went sour. The gonzo supercop and the brittle but sassy moll of the film become, in the novel, two losers who throw in their lot together and gamble everything — including their lives — one last time on an impossible win. The print version makes a lot more sense.
Malley’s house still gets shot up, but not quite to the extent that it falls down. We “see” the vile highway patrolman played in the film by Bill McKinney die, graphically bullet-riddled, from inside his car, as opposed to the film’s coy focus on the vehicle’s exterior (again, Butler & Shryack are writing the Peckinpah version here). The encounter with the bikers sees only one of them end up bikeless, whereas on screen Eastwood ultimately deprives three of them of their rides (wrecking one and commandeering another that belongs to a couple).
That has a knock-on effect on the train sequence later on. In the film, it’s therefore three bikeless bikers that Eastwood and Locke re-encounter in the empty freight carriage — providing Eastwood with another woman to punch in the face. In the book, it’s just the one guy (plus two hobos) who, no longer in possession of his hog, has been beaten up and ousted from his gang. Malley submits to a more graphic sexual manhandling to distract the biker and save Shockley from having his throat cut (her sexual ordeal at the hands of Lieutenant Commander Blakelock, incidentally, happens twice in the book, with Butler & Shryack using it as a prologue while retaining Malley’s description of it later on). And Shockley guns the biker down before throwing the body and the still-alive hobos from the train. So Shockley’s bodycount in the book is actually one, as opposed to the film’s zero.
As for the final gauntlet itself, there’s a small scene after the hijack of the bus in which Shockley ropes in three locals to source all the scrap metal and help him weld it: still unlikely but at least explained more than it is on-screen. And once the Greyhound is on the move and under fire, it does lose its tyres, “shredding rubber giving way to the heavy rims that scored the road with brutal scars”. No dead cops that we learn of though; the correction for realism doesn’t stretch that far.
THE AUTHORS
Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack were one of the hottest screenwriting partnerships in Hollywood at the time of The Gauntlet. Shryack was a former talent agent and had represented Butler, a screenwriter and assistant cameraman with the John Wayne vehicle Brannigan already under his belt. Teaming up, their first joint work was The Car, which they sold to Universal for an unprecedented $300,000, 15% of the net profits, and a further $55,000 for the paperback novelization. For The Gauntlet, Warners paid them half a million dollars on top of their 15%, and the novelization scored them a further $100,000. Those were the days!
As a team, they went on to write Flashpoint, Code of Silence and Eastwood’s Pale Rider. On his own, Shryack also became the first writer in history to earn a million dollars for a single screenplay — for the Tom-Hanks-and-a-dog comedy Turner & Hooch.
About the Novelization Station project…
I’ve always had a soft spot for novelizations. As a kid, growing up pre-VHS, they were a way to re-experience films I’d enjoyed. In my early adolescence they became a way to “see” films that I wasn’t old enough to access. And into adulthood I continued to find them weirdly fascinating as warped, parallel universe versions of the things they were supposedly adapting: sometimes based on much earlier screenplays than the ones that were ultimately filmed, and sometimes crazily extrapolated and embellished by the authors themselves. They were — and still are — both hack work and a definite craft. My first major published magazine feature, more than a decade ago now, was an investigation of why they still exist when you can buy the DVD. In the age of Netflix, I still think that’s an interesting question.
They’re a niche interest and they’re not much studied, so my intention here is to create a platform to talk about them. I’m planning to publish one of these pieces every couple of weeks — at least when other work allows. I’m using the American spelling of “novelization” for SEO reasons and I will not be worrying about spoilers. Length and format of these pieces will vary, I think, depending on what there is to say. I’ve got my own list, but if there’s anything you’d like to see covered, give me a shout below the line or on Twitter.
Arriving next: Batman (1989)
