by Marc Eliot
At least part of what made Tidyman so sure was his familiarity with the so-called Gold Rush Syndrome that sooner or later afflicts every star in Hollywood—the desire for official anointment by the faceless little statue called Oscar. Clint had every reason to believe his performance as Harry Callahan had a shot at the big trophy in 1971; it was, after all, one of the biggest box-office movies of the year and had screwed Clint into the consciousness of its viewers. It was therefore something of a letdown, if not a total surprise—so-called pure action films are rarely considered “important” enough by the elitist Academy—that he wasn’t even nominated.*
After his disappointing stint with Sturges, Clint believed more than ever that no one could direct him like Don Siegel, and should never even try. But it seemed too soon to work with Siegel again—some of the critical fallout from Dirty Harry had to fade—so he decided once more to try to direct himself.
For budgetary reasons, Universal wanted High Plains Drifter to be shot on their expansive western backlot, but Clint preferred something more original and, for him, director-friendly. He managed to convince Lang (credited as the executive producer on the film) to green-light the building of an entire western-town set, in the desert near Lake Mono in the California Sierras. It took eighteen days to build. (Film critics and historians Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter would later describe its main street as “looking more like a new condominium in Northern California than a Western town of the past.”) Clint shot the entire film in sequence, which was unusual and usually more costly due to the extra setups, but the film came in early and under budget.†
Clint played his familiar role of a Man with No Name—called the Stranger this time. His costars were featured players (but not stars) Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, and Mitch Ryan, and the film held unmistakable echoes of the Leone trilogy. (Typical of its reviews, Box Office Magazine described it as having a “dog-eared plot-line of a mysterious stranger who shoots up a town.”) What is notable about this film is the introduction of an “otherworldliness” (already seen in The Beguiled) that would reappear in several of Clint’s later films.
High Plains Drifter’s script strongly suggests that the Stranger is actually the ghost of the heriff killed by the gang that controls the town; now the Stranger kills them off, one by one, before disappearing into the sunset.* With touches of High Noon, Shane, and Leone’s trilogy, the film contained a menu of surefire story ingredients; Bruce Surtees’s unusually wide lenses intensified the brightness of the landscape and added a hellish look to the film.
This was a Clint Eastwood cowboy audiences wanted to see, the cold-blooded, infallible, noble killer—not the imperfect ex-con Joe Kidd. High Plains Drifter was a huge hit at the box office, grossing nearly $16 million in its initial domestic release. It appeared to have everything the early Eastwood westerns had had, but its success was uneasy: the film was derivative and less than authentic, and its faux mysticism was a facile substitute for the real mystery of the Man with No Name. Clint felt to some a little like post-army Elvis—he still looked and sounded like the performer who had so recently exploded onto the cultural scene, but was instantly and obviously not the same thing. There was something too safe, too slick, and too comfortable about High Plains Drifter.
While the film proved to be a cash cow, audiences were not really interested in it. This time there was no talk of awards for either the film or Clint Eastwood’s performance. It was, however, for Clint the director, a start.
On May 22, 1972, Maggie Eastwood gave birth to her second child, Alison, who weighed in at a manageable seven pounds, four ounces. In fact, she arrived fifteen days premature, just after Maggie had flown down to Los Angeles to see Clint. Barely a month later Maggie was with Clint at the opening ceremonies of the three-day Pebble Beach Celebrity Tennis Tournament, hosting such legendary participants as the John Waynes and the Charlton Hestons.
By now virtually anybody who spent time with Clint on a set or at Malpaso knew that the Eastwood marriage was, at the very least, a bit unorthodox. But no one in his circle, or hers, seemed particularly bothered by it, least of all the Eastwoods themselves. And while he was still involved with Roxanne Tunis, contributing money to help to raise their child, he and Tunis had cooled off when she turned to Eastern spiritual practices and took their daughter to Denver so she could devote herself to full-time study. Roxanne and Clint still saw each other, but not as often nor as intensely as before, and almost never anymore when he was making a movie.
In October 1972, two years after Clint’s father’s death, his mother, Ruth, quietly remarried. The Hawaii-themed ceremony was held in Pebble Beach, and the groom was John Belden Wood, a wealthy widower who had made a fortune from his Piedmont-based lumber business. Clint happily escorted his mother down the aisle, relieved that she would no longer have to be alone.
Clint then turned his attention back to directing, but this time he wanted to see if he could sell a film, both to the studio and to audiences, in which he wasn’t also acting. The project he chose must have resonated quite loudly with him: it was the Lolita-like story of a middle-aged salesman, Frank Harmon (William Holden), and his relationship with a teenage hippie type, Breezy (Kay Lenz).
In some ways Breezy signaled a shift in Clint’s focus, away from the violent and (so-called) socially relevant action picture to a small-scale love story. Romance had been missing in previous Eastwood films; even Play Misty for Me belongs solidly in the horror category. The shift was a retreat from the social clamor that had surrounded Dirty Harry, although the story of a middle-aged man in a sexual relationship with a teenager also was potentially controversial.
Partly because he wasn’t in it and partly because the subject veered too close to breaking a taboo, Universal was inclined to turn it down, despite Clint the actor’s current number one standing at the box office. They finally green-lighted it on condition Clint brought it in for under $1 million (meaning they would put up the million, and the revenues from ticket sales would reimburse the studio until breakeven, after which Malpaso would take a healthy cut of the gross).
To play the part of the older man, Clint chose William Holden, a handsome, soft-spoken actor who was equally at home in westerns, love stories, and war pictures. Always manly, he was in many ways a 1950s version of Clint Eastwood. But he also represented the repressed American male lover, constricted by social mores from getting down and dirty with costars such as straitlaced and demure Grace Kelly in Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), in George Seaton’s The Country Girl (1954), and with Jennifer Jones in Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). With all three films a kiss is the only physical contact (we see) between proper lovers. Such repression, in a way, helps explain Holden’s misplaced passions in such rage-fests as Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), with its prisoner-of-war setting, and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in which noble sacrifice redeems Holden’s unbridled passions.
Clint did not have to operate under Holden’s characters’ social and sexual restrictions, but he nonetheless shared a manly resistance to portraying lust in his own movies. And he had yet to show a simple, open, happy, loving side to any of his male characters, without the woman being a murderer, witch, prostitute, deceiver, or helpless victim.
The part of the young girl Breezy was much harder to cast. Among the many hopefuls he saw was a cute, southern born and bred, twenty-five-year-old blond actress by the name of Sondra Locke. Locke had gained some notice in Hollywood for her Oscar-nominated performance in Robert Ellis Miller’s 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but afterward her career had experienced a slight stall. Jo Heims, the screenwriter for Breezy, suggested her to Clint, saying she thought Locke was exactly right for the role. Locke never made it to a screen test, however, because after looking at some eight-by-tens and a few minutes of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Clint felt she was too old for the role. In his film he wanted to emphasize the age difference between the two lead charact
ers. He eventually chose the very young and coquettish Kay Lenz, who looked exactly right to him but had almost no film experience.
Production began in November 1972, and almost immediately it was apparent to everyone on set that Clint had a very special attraction to her. Clint, interestingly, was pulling back from his screen image as a law-and-order warrior while drawing closer to his real-life character as an aging Lothario. This was heady stuff, doubling the intensity of Clint’s relationship to Breezy as a director and as an authority figure to a younger woman.
But whatever electricity flowed between Lenz and Clint off-screen, it failed to ignite between her and Holden on-screen. Audiences turned away from this May-December romance. Holden just looked too tired and too old for audiences to believe he could be attractive to Breezy. The movie had no romantic chemistry. It was an out-and-out failure at the box office, not just for its unbelievability but because, simply put, no one was particularly interested in seeing a so-called Clint Eastwood film that did not star Clint Eastwood. Several reviewers sharpened their pencils and had a critical field day. Judith Crist’s reaction was typical: writing in New York magazine, she chuckled condescendingly that Breezy was “so perfectly awful that it’s almost good enough for laughs.” Only auteurist critics like Molly Haskell, writing in the Village Voice, took the film seriously: “Clint Eastwood’s most accomplished directorial job so far … a love story in which almost everything works.” A then-fringe auteurist critic like Haskell, however, had neither the readership nor the clout to make a commercial difference, while Crist had a huge following, especially in box-office-rich New York City.
By and large, critics like Crist got it right, but an oversensitive Clint was quick to blame Universal’s promotion, rather than his own direction, for Breezy’s failure to float: “This was a small film—it was just the story of the rejuvenation of a cynic. I thought that was an interesting subject, especially nowadays in the era of cynicism … it was a disaster at the box office, very poorly distributed and very poorly advertised … that’s Universal. They have a terrible advertising department, they’re not smart. I tried to keep an eye on it but [at Universal] it was a harder thing to do.”
The abject failure of Breezy drove Clint back into the warm and waiting (and wealthy) arms of Warner, which was eager to green-light a sequel to Dirty Harry. Enough with the silly romances, they both agreed. Let’s get back to good old blood-guts-and-gore.
Clint would not make another romantic “love story” for twenty-two years.
One thing Clint agreed to was the subtle softening, if not exactly mellowing, of Harry Callahan. It was not wholly Clint’s choice; rather, a combination of talented writers working in collaboration with him and Robert Daley, all of whom believed the character and therefore the film would be much more appealing if Callahan were more accessible to and easier on women, as a way to boost the date-movie weekend audience. Of course, Callahan couldn’t become a pussycat, but they felt that a slight declawing wouldn’t hurt the franchise.
The inspiration for the story—whose working title was Vigilance, later changed to Magnum Force, named after Callahan’s weapon of choice and the elite enforcement squad of the San Francisco police force—came from screenwriter John Milius, who had done some uncredited partial revisions on the original Dirty Harry and had since written the screenplays for Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) and was on track to write and direct Dillinger later that year. This time, however, nothing came out of Milius’s rewrites before he opted out of the project to work on Dillinger.
Clint then turned to a talented young newcomer offered to him by the William Morris Agency. Michael Cimino was charged with developing Milius’s main contribution to the picture—the eventual showdown between Callahan and the secret and deadly Magnum Force unit rather than some crazed killer. This plot element was key. While it kept Callahan as violently antiauthoritarian as before, it also put his maverick behavior more clearly on the side of law and order, making him a hero while maintaining his rebel status. Cimino (who would go on to write and direct the phenomenally successful The Deer Hunter and win the Best Director Oscar for it,* then self-destruct with his 1980 remake of Shane, Heaven’s Gate) prior to Magnum Force, had partially written only one screenplay. It was a collaborative effort with Deric Washburn of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1971), not a big winner at the box office but good enough for William Morris to put him up for Clint’s film.
To direct, Clint surprised everybody by going with Ted Post over Don Siegel, feeling either that his creative teaming with Siegel had run its course or that Siegel was not going to be able to ease up on the intensity of the Callahan character.
That may not have been the only problem. Clint, by now, had begun to feel restricted by Siegel, as much by his methods as by his style. Clint liked to move quickly, especially as Malpaso was now producing most of the films he worked on. Siegel was deliberate and liked to shoot scenes over and over again—which rove Clint to the brink of his patience. Finally, the aging Siegel’s on-screen bluntness was losing some of its edge, where Clint was looking to go younger and sharper. He believed that speed and instinct were the ways to do it, and he wanted a director who was less committed to a set style of directing, less deliberate, and more willing to go with the moment.
Clint felt grateful to Post for the success of Hang ‘Em High, and the studio liked him as well. Not long afterward the trades announced that Siegel was “unavailable,” due to a prior commitment to direct a project in Europe tentatively called Drazzle, starring Michael Caine. (It was never made.)
However, things did not go as smoothly as Clint had hoped. On set Post, who had known Clint since Rawhide, wanted to expand on the notion of Harry as a dirty cop, while Clint wanted less, to bring more couples into the theaters. Most of all, he wanted to keep the movie in the entertainment sections and out of the general news pages of the newspapers. (He did allow a Japanese TV crew to follow him around for an episode of the popular Japanese series Leading World Figures, which had previously profiled Pope Paul VI, Pablo Picasso, Aristotle Onassis, Princess Margaret, Chou En-lai, Indira Gandhi, Princess Grace, and Henry Kissinger.)
One adjustment to the original Dirty Harry was the addition of a partner for Callahan called Early Smith, who was played by Felton Perry. The fact that Perry was black was a conscious attempt by Warner to ameliorate the outrage that the punk in the “‘Do I feel lucky?’” scene had been black. Everyone, it seemed, had been upset that the figure cowering on the other side of Dirty Harry’s gun was African-American, just when militant groups such as the Black Panthers were denouncing lethal police violence inflicted on Fred Hampton and George Jackson. (In 1987 the “buddy” teaming of a “crazed” white cop and his more sensible black partner would be reprised by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, respectively, in Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, a hugely popular film that would enjoy three sequels, all of which owed some measure of debt to Dirty Harry.)*
During preproduction, Clint was asked to present the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards eremony on March 27, 1973. Although it was and still is considered an honor to present the most important award of the evening, Clint initially turned down the job, but because of pressure from the studio and from Maggie, he decided to accept the assignment. As long as his appearance was short and sweet, with one or two lines, he would be fine.
That night he showed up for the ceremony with Maggie and took his assigned place in the audience, smiling and waving to friends scattered about the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The telecast show was to have multiple hosts, as it had for the past several years. (Clint had previously presented the Best Foreign Language Film award, alongside Claudia Cardinale, to Costa-Gavras’s Z in 1970.)
And then the roof fell in. One of the show’s four “hosts,” Charlton Heston, was scheduled to kick off the proceedings, but had not shown up for his half-hour call and was nowhere to be found.* His introduction, explaining the v
oting rules and regulations, had been tailored to Heston, as a parody of the gravitas he was known for from his biblical hero films.
Howard Koch, the show’s producer, nervously signaled for Clint and Maggie to hurry backstage. They went, not knowing what was going on, and Koch asked Clint to fill in for Heston. He refused. That wasn’t his thing, he told Koch. He wasn’t prepared, and he just couldn’t do it. Koch continued to plead as the audience began to murmur about the delayed start. Finally Maggie stepped in and told Clint he ought to help out. With nowhere to go and stuck between a begging producer and an urging wife, he silently nodded and walked out onto the stage. There he was greeted by thunderous applause and the occasional shrieks caused by his unexpected appearance.
In his gut, he felt a sense of panic. The teleprompter was filled with Heston-related movie jokes, written by screenwriter-novelist William Goldman. Clint stopped in the middle, looked out at the audience with a tight smile on his face, and said, “This was supposed to be Charlton Heston’s part of the show, but somehow he hasn’t shown up. So who did they pick? They pick the guy who has said but three lines in twelve movies to substitute for him.”
Only mild laughter came back at him—the audience was as confused as he was—so he read the rompter as best he could, making jokes about The Ten Commandments that nobody could possibly have found funny, especially coming from him. After several torturous minutes, sprinkled with the nervous laughter of an audience of nominees already on edge, Heston arrived backstage out of breath, claiming to have been the victim of a flat tire. Koch grabbed him and literally threw him onto the set. Now, the audience roared.