4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
Clint Eastwood made his directorial debut with the suspense thriller “Play Misty for Me.” He also stars as Dave Garver, a deejay at a small Carmel, Calif., radio station whose life spins out of control following a one-night stand with Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), a devoted fan who requests the same song every night.
Determined not to be pigeon-holed, Eastwood’s fourth film was the espionage yarn “The Eiger Sanction.” He plays Jonathan Hemlock, a college art professor, expert mountain climber, and retired assassin for a shady government organization.
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“PLAY MISTY FOR ME”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray, 1971, R for violence, language, and brief nudity and sexuality
Best extra: The new commentary with screenwriter/producer Alan Spencer
“THE EIGER SANCTION”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray, 1975, R for violence, language, and brief nudity and sexuality
Best extra: The new commentary with author/film historian Justin Humphreys
INTENTIONAL or not, timing really is everything. With Clint Eastwood’s courtroom drama “Juror #2,” the 40th film directed by the 94-year-icon, generating Oscar talk, Kino Lorber’s release of two of his early films couldn’t be more, ahem … timely. Doubly so because Warner Bros., for some lame reason, put “Juror” in just a handful of big-city theaters in advance of its Dec. 20 premiere on Max.
Until then, “Play Misty for Me” and “The Eiger Sanction” will do nicely — “Misty” in particular because it was his audacious debut as a director and, 53 years on, still shocks the you-know-what out of you.
Eastwood plays Dave Carver, who spins smooth jazz and recites poetry at a small Carmel, Calif., radio station. He’s also angling for a job in San Francisco and wants to put down roots with the artist who left him. But Dave’s a ladies’ man, so when Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter, “Arrested Development”), a fan who makes the same request every night — “play ‘Misty’ for me” — tracks him down at a bar, the two hook up for what he thinks is a one-night stand.
(1) “Play Misty for Me” premiered Aug. 4, 1971, in El Paso, Texas. (2) Garver takes a request from a listener. (3) Director Don Siegel, one of Eastwood’s mentors, plays Murphy, the owner of a bar that Dave frequents after his shift. (4-5) Donna Mills co-stars as Tobie Williams, Dave’s old flame. Evelyn isn’t happy when she returns to Carmel and the two re-connect.
Hardly. Evelyn sees theirs as a romance for the ages, and starts stalking him. She’s also handy with a knife, but Walter, in a tour de force performance, doesn’t play her as a psycho. Evelyn is desperately lonely, and even though Dave is as honest about their relationship as a heel can be, she’ll have none of it. She moves in with his old flame Tobie Williams (Donna Mills, “Knots Landing”) and holds her hostage. The ending is a shocker.
“The Eiger Sanction,” Eastwood’s fourth time in the director’s chair, is less memorable mainly because it can’t decide whether it’s a James Bond-type spoof or a dark spy tale in the vein of a Graham Greene or John le Carre novel. In this one, Eastwood is Jonathan Hemlock, a college art professor and retired assassin for the shady government organization C2. When another agent, Hemlock’s best friend as it turns out, is killed, he’s forced out of retirement and takes two sanctions to find and kill the killers. Hemlock is also an expert climber — good thing since the trail leads to the treacherous north face of The Eiger in the Bernese Alps. He’s led to believe that one of the other three men on the climb is one of the killers.
Eastwood gives it the old college try, but an actor like the great Michael Caine, so polished at being glib in the darkest situations, would have been better suited for the role. That’s not to say “Eiger” isn’t entertaining. It is, and then some. Even though he spends too much time on Hemlock’s training for the climb, Eastwood, who did most of his own stunts, and cinematographer Frank Stanley (“Magnum Force”) serve up some spectacular images. The opening and closing set pieces are first-rate.
(1) Dave doesn’t pull any punches when he tells Evelyn exactly where they stand. Her smile is just for show. (2&3) Later, she confronts him during his lunch with a San Francisco radio executive (Irene Hervey) and he sends her away in a cab. (4) Evelyn goes off the deep end.
VIDEO/AUDIO
Even though “Misty” (1.85:1 aspect ratio) and “Eiger” (2.39: 1) were remastered in 2K four years ago, Universal and Kino Lorber’s new 4K scans, both sourced from the original 35mm camera negatives, are significant upgrades. “Misty” is a dark film and, truth be told, there are a few times when the shadows seem a bit thick and the grain is overwhelming. Most of the time, the Dolby Vision/HDR10 grading delivers more nuance, along with healthy skin tones, vivid colors and detail so sharp that you’re tempted to press pause. Likewise, “Eiger” checks all the boxes, and both films were encoded onto 100 GB discs.
As for the audio, KL gives viewers an option: the original DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono or new DTS-HD MA 5.1 tracks. The latter plays better in the outside channels, but because both films are dialogue-driven, the difference is negligible. Speaking of dialogue, it’s always clear and the ambient sounds, especially as the team scales snowy Eiger, are authentically organic. The scores by Dee Barton (“Misty”) and the great John Williams have room to spare.
“The Eiger Sanction”
(1&2) In “The Eiger Sanction,” Eastwood plays Jonathan Hemlock, a college art professor who gets the come-on from one his students. (3) Also a retired government assassin, Hemlock accepts two sanctions from his old boss after his best friend and fellow agent is killed. (4) One of the killers (Walter Kraus) is soon dispatched. (5) Vonetta McGee is only pretending to be a flight attendant when she chats up Hemlock.
EXTRAS
Kino Lorber hits the nail here, too, accessorizing both films with a choice array of archival commentaries, interviews, video essays, documentaries, short features and image galleries. And KL didn’t stop there. “Misty” and “Eiger” both feature a new commentary that’s among the best you’ll come across.
Move over, Glenn Close. Screenwriter/producer Alan Spencer is on the money when he says at the beginning of his commentary that “Misty” was “unofficially remade as ‘Fatal Attraction’” in 1987. Spencer, who does a bang-up Clint impersonation, also touches on the production’s history, explains why Eastwood cast one of his mentors, director Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry”) as Murphy the bartender, and talks at length about Walter’s brilliant, Oscar-worthy performance.
Did you know that Steve McQueen (“The Great Escape”) was originally offered the role of Dave Garver? He turned it down because the female lead was stronger. That’s when Eastwood stepped in. Spencer says that it says “a lot about his humility that he was willing to play second fiddle while conducting the orchestra.”
“Eiger,” says author/film historian Justin Humphreys, was a product of its time, in keeping with other political subterfuge thrillers like Robert Redford’s “Three Days of the Condor” and Warren Beatty’s “The Parallax View.” And, just so you know, it’s about as politically incorrect as a movie can get.
But it also showed that Eastwood, a bona-fide megastar, had firmly established himself as a director, one who would not be pigeon-holed. Those first four films make Humphreys’ point: “Misty” was followed by the May-December romance “Breezy,” “High Plains Drifter,” a Western in which Eastwood doubled down on his anti-hero image, and “The Eiger Sanction.”
“He always wanted to try something news,” Humphreys says.
— Craig Shapiro
(1) Eastwood did most of his own stunt work when he took to the mountains. (2) Hemlock and another climber of The Eiger team save a team member who was struck by dislodged rocks. (3) George Kennedy is Ben Bowman, who runs the school where Hemlock trains and climbed with him back in the day.
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