by Marc Eliot
The affair continued throughout the shooting of The Enforcer. Several times he stayed overnight at one of the several apartments he kept in San Francisco and Sausalito. So frequently was he away that his usual tight control and supervision were missing when it came time to edit the film. Two scenes simply didn’t match, no matter how cleverly Ferris Webster, who had a reputation for being able to fix anything, tried to put them together.
Fortunately for this action film, imperfect scene-matches did not matter all that much. In The Enforcer Callahan battles a group of terrorists (who were not explicitly political; in 1970s action movies a terrorist was a conveniently generic “bad guy” more interested in getting an enormous amount of money than in overthrowing a government), with a female newbie of whom he reluctantly becomes fond. She is (naturally) killed, prompting Callahan, angrier than usual, to dispose of the terrorist group with a single blast from his giant bazooka, a phallic symbol that made Callahan’s hitherto-famous Magnum seem like a cap gun.
Although the film had some good moments—Tyne Daly would use it as a springboard for her own cops-and-robbers TV series, Cagney & Lacey—critics excoriated it. Not surprisingly, Kael with heightened glee noted that “Eastwood’s holy cool seems more aberrant than ever.”
Kael may have actually picked up on the one thing that other critics had chosen to ignore: Clint had grown weary of the role and perhaps of moviemaking in general. In retrospect, passing off directorial duties to Fargo may have been less an act of insecurity than of indifference. During the filming of The Enforcer the real action for Clint was more likely with Locke than on the set. The film looks more complacent than violent, more repetitious than revelatory, more tired than tough, and poorly edited, with a story that was strictly formulaic. Clint’s performance borders on the somnambulistic.
Typical of most critics was the always-too-easily-offended-by-genre-films Rex Reed. Writing in the New York Daily News, Reed said, “The Enforcer is the third or fourth Dirty Harry movie with Clint Eastwood blowing people’s heads off and creating the kind of havoc Batman would find juvenile … it all went out of style years ago with Clint Eastwood’s mumbling … save your money, it’ll be on TV by Easter.”
None of the film’s criticism was very objective, and none of it mattered. Audiences still couldn’t get enough of Clint as Dirty Harry. The movie grossed a phenomenal $60 million in its initial domestic release and doubled that overseas, making it Clint’s biggest moneymaker to date.
At Warner’s urging, a commercially reinvigorated Clint soon began thinking about his next movie, which the studio hoped would be ready in time as its big Christmas 1977 release.* Both the studio and the star wanted a follow-up blockbuster that would capitalize on the momentum of The Enforcer and equal or surpass its box-office take. The Gauntlet was the film they chose, in which Clint is a policeman, not Callahan, charged with delivering a prisoner from Los Angeles to Arizona. The prisoner is a prostitute, and a virtual gauntlet of “bad guys” wants to kill them both: Clint because, presumably, he is, well, Clint, the ultimate enforcer who will deliver her no matter what, and the prostitute because she is the key witness to a politically charged sex scandal and her arrival will bring down the corrupt forces in the Arizona police.
Clint’s character, Ben Shockley, is actually an inverted Callahan, a shaky cop trying to get over his problems with alcohol when Phoenix police commissioner Blakelock (William Prince) assigns him to extradite the prostitute, Gus Mally (Sondra Locke). When Shockley realizes the trail of incrimination leads directly back to Phoenix, and that neither he nor his prisoner is meant to live, he becomes especially enraged and plots a spectacular revenge-fueled scheme that takes him through the final police gauntlet and results in Blakelock’s death instead of his own.
For the part of Mally, Warner had wanted Barbra Streisand, but Clint, who as always had the final say in casting, said no; his films were usually filled with lesser names than himself. He told the studio that he felt Streisand was too old to play opposite him (she was thirty-five, he was forty-seven). Instead, he insisted that Locke play the part. Casting his new girlfriend put her once more into Clint’s dark spotlight; she had already been sexually assaulted in The Outlaw Josey Wales before being rescued by Clint, and now in The Gauntlet she was to undergo a brutal near-rape, only to be rescued again by her knight in tarnished armor.
Warner, to say the least, was not thrilled. The studio had earmarked $5 million for production, making it a very expensive project, and it wanted a double-barreled, name-above-the-title star to decorate marquees across the country. It had already paid $200,000 for the script by Dennis Shryack and Michael Butler—they were very hot due to their much-buzzed-about script for Elliot Silverstein’s as-yet-unreleased The Car. And it had paid fifteen points of the net and another $100,000 for the future novelization rights (something that was then a very popular source of ancillary income). When Clint was informed of the terms Warner had agreed to get Shryack and Butler, he was not happy.* Clint, who through Malpaso was a partner in the deal, never paid much for scripts and never offered points as an inducement. Besides, he was always more interested in story than in dialogue, preferring to formulate a movie off a general plot idea and filling it in with as few words as possible.
Feeling perhaps that he had made enough of a concession by approving the writers, he stood firm on his decision to cast Locke instead of Streisand. Once Warner caved, principal shooting began in April 1977 on location in Nevada and Arizona.
The plot of The Gauntlet was leaner and more singular than usual. Neither Shryack nor Butler conceived its thundering, explosive violence—Clint had inserted it, and Warner happily encouraged it. As far as the studio was concerned, a Clint Eastwood movie could never have enough violence, sexual abuse of women, or raw brutality.
The resulting film was Coogan’s Bluff meets Magnum Force, minus the West Coast/East Coast trickery and the character of Dirty Harry. Ben Shockley’s frailty makes the story even more compelling, at least in theory, as he is sent, without knowing it, on a suicide mission. The set-piece of the film is the physical gauntlet that Shockley and Mally must pass through while driving a bus, attended by the entire Phoenix police force. At this point the film turns surreal but gains no potentially redemptive transcendence. The attack on the bus loses all sense of drama once it becomes obvious that shooting out its tires would stop it dead in its tracks. And the ending is even more absurd; once Shockley has delivered his prisoner and killed all his attackers, no one wants her or knows what to do with her. Presumably the two of them take another bus out of town and live happily ever after.
Despite its ridiculous plot and cartoonish denouement, Clint’s genre-driven star power was enough to make the film a bona fide box-office hit. As always, the negative criticism did not matter. Judith Crist, writing in the New York Post, summed up her opinion in five words: “The Gauntlet is the pits.” Vincent Canby, in the Times, didn’t like it either but at least acknowledged the film’s “Eastwood” touch.
Clint Eastwood … plays a character role. 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. A movie without a single thought in its head, but the action scenes are so ferociously staged that it’s impossible not to pay attention most of the time. Mr. Eastwood’s talent is in his style—unhurried and self-assured.
The Gauntlet grossed more than $54 million in its initial domestic Christmastime release and would top the $100 million mark by the time it finished its worldwide theatrical run.
As if to somehow compensate for all the private time he was spending with Locke, Clint made his home life with Maggie unusually public. For the first time in years he invited reporters to Carmel to witness for themselves how happy he was, what a normal married man he was, away from Hollywood.
Every magazine jumped at the chance to interview the elusive Clint, but if they were looking for anything candid or spontaneous
, they didn’t get it. Then in the midst of all this publicity-spinning, the February 13, 1978, issue of People magazine “scooped” everyone with a cover shot of Clint and—Sondra Locke. No one missed it, including Maggie, who was rightly infuriated.
Maggie had tolerated a lot during their long marriage. She had looked the other way during all of Clint’s extramarital affairs. She had even strained her neck looking to the opposite side of the room when Locke showed up at several parties that the Eastwoods had recently attended. But the cover of People was too much, even for her. Public flaunting was the one thing Clint had never before done, allowing Maggie to maintain her public dignity. The week the cover story appeared in People, Maggie hired a lawyer and sought a legal separation. After much discussion, Clint persuaded her to take a Hawaiian vacation with him to see if there was any way they could save their marriage.
During the vacation Clint admitted to Maggie that he was in love with Sondra.
When they returned, Maggie filed for the separation.
Sondra too was upset. Certainly Clint’s marriage looked like it was going to end, but for her the notion of Clint being a single man was a bit too complicated.
Because she too was married and had no intention of getting a divorce.
Locke had married Gordon Anderson, her childhood sweetheart from Shelbyville, Tennessee, where they had spent their days imagining what the rest of the world must be like. Locke’s family disapproved of Anderson and what they claimed was his impure “hold” on her. The night following their high school graduation they eloped. Anderson moved to New York City to pursue a career in acting, while Locke stayed behind, picking up the occasional local job modeling and acting in commercials. Then Anderson read about a nationwide talent hunt for a teenage girl to play the lead in an upcoming movie of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
He immediately returned to Tennessee, picked up Locke, and took her to Nashville, where the preliminary interviews were taking place. Anderson worked on her to prepare her, spending a lot of time detailing her face and appearance. He scruffed her up, redid her hair, taped down her ample breasts to make them less prominent, and clothed her in the style of the novel. They agreed to lie about her age—she was twenty-one, but the part called for a teenager. After her successful interview, they drove to Birmingham, Alabama, for the first major eliminations. A thousand young girls auditioned, and about a hundred passed, including Locke. The next stop was New Orleans, where the finalists were to meet with the film’s director, Robert Ellis Miller.
A week after meeting Miller, the girls were called to Warner Bros.’ New York offices, all expenses paid, for the last round of auditions. Fine-tuned by Anderson, Locke was confident as she went before the producers and director and won the role. In 1968, the same year Clint appeared in his seventeenth feature, Coogan’s Bluff, in her first, Locke was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.*
Even before the film was released, Locke and Anderson had moved to Hollywood—or rather to West Hollywood, the predominantly gay neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Hollywood proper, where Anderson set them up in a spacious town house. He wanted to live in West Hollywood for a reason—he was gay. He had been in the closet most of his life; Locke first found out before the marriage, but she said it didn’t bother her. He was who he was, and she loved him. They were friends first, and lovers without physical sex, which did not prove a problem because they were both able to get what they wanted elsewhere. West Hollywood gave Anderson the chance to come out, and he did so with a vengeance. By the time Locke met Clint and appeared with him in The Outlaw Josey Wales, Anderson was seriously involved in a relationship with another man.
The fact that Locke was married had not bothered Clint at all; in fact, it initially held great appeal. Married translated into safe, as in his own marriage. Now, the more he got to know Locke and found out about her unorthodox marriage to Anderson, the more he recognized in her a kindred soul, a talented loner with a marriage that was convenient and even advantageous, but unsatisfying.
Amonth before Clint and Locke appeared on the cover of People, he had appeared with Burt Reynolds on the January 9 cover of Time magazine. Inside the eight-page spread covered a lot about Clint’s official (i.e., studio-sanctioned public) life but said relatively little, comparing him to his old friend Reynolds, who was still a bankable star after his impressive performance in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). That performance had had Oscar written all over it—until Reynolds self-destructed by posing as the seminude centerfold for Cosmopolitan magazine. The gesture relieved his career of any remaining pretense of seriousness. The movies he made after Deliverance failed to ignite the public, until he returned to southern-redneck form in Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit (1977), which was a huge box-office success but which the Academy universally avoided. The Time piece, written by Richard Schickel, lauded Clint and Reynolds as the only two actors in sync with the popular tastes of moviegoing America, audaciously awarding them the mantle of Everyman once held by James Stewart and Henry Fonda and favorably comparing them to such tough-guy screen stalwarts as John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman (while all but ignoring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro). He concluded, “In today’s climate it may actually take more courage and more imagination to become an Eastwood or a Reynolds than it does to be a Nicholson or a Redford.” Lurking just behind them, given the separate “box” treatment, was, according to Schickel, the “third great action star” of his generation, Charles Bronson.
The Eastwood-Bronson comparison was a common one; publications like the Hollywood Studio magazine said,
In a modern society bristling with violence and pervaded by an ever increasing air of helplessness, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson fulfill a burning psychological need on the part of filmgoers the world over by exemplifying western heroes capable of overpowering hostile forces and proving that one individual can make a difference in a restless and turbulent world … these two images from the western culture surface when referring to the laconic loner syndrome.
Both Reynolds and Bronson bought into the idea that they were iconic, but Clint ran from it. If Reynolds allowed himself to be stroked by Schickel’s overblown Time piece, Clint kept his distance from it.
Instead, he turned to Locke for his creative validation. Of all the women he had dated, she stood out in one crucial aspect. She was young, blond, largely inexperienced (he believed), and perhaps even a bit malleable, but she gave off an air of cool, of hip understanding that belied her rural southern roots. She dripped “artist” from every pore, and as critics were, for the most part, still trying to figure out Clint Eastwood and the meaning of his personal appeal, hitting 180 degrees wide of the mark, the only one who really “got” him was Locke.
If some wanted to anoint Clint as the reincarnation of the Great American Hero (the original having been lost in the country’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam), Clint was more than happy to let them, leaving the glorification of his screen heroics to self-appointed critical know-it-alls like Schickel. Clint was too busy trying to balance his private life between what he thought he needed (a home, a wife like Maggie, kids, a big house in Carmel) and what he thought he wanted: a woman like Locke who could run with him, who understood him, and who could take him where no other woman had. For the first time since he had gotten married, he didn’t hit hard and then run home to his wife.
It was she, according to Locke, who convinced Clint to follow The Gauntlet with a complete turnaround, the off-the-wall Every Which Way but Loose. To her (and then to Clint), it was the perfect response to all those who insisted he was the primal American cinematic hero. One thing that she pointed out to him was that he had thus far (excepting the occasional paychecks like Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes, and The Eiger Sanction) created essentially two iconic characters that reappeared again and again in his movies. The Man with No Name had appeared in the three Leone spaghetti westerns and was echoed in one way or another in most of the later westerns including Hang Em H
igh, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Joe Kidd, High Plains Drifter, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. All these characters, including the original Man with No Name, were Vietnam-era antiheroes, men who went against the establishment mostly because the establishment was itself controlled by outlaws, thereby making the outsiders heroes. Clint’s other great screen persona was Dirty Harry, in some ways a modern-dress version of the Man with No Name. These characters (and their other variations) are not knights in tarnished armor, they are just tarnished, and that’s what made them unique. Doing Every Which Way but Loose, Locke suggested, would expand Clint’s realm and suit the shift in the postwar cultural zeitgeist.
She was right on the money, and he knew it. Pushing ever closer to fifty, he was more than ready to trade in his John Wayne mantle for a little bit of what Burt Reynolds had going for him. (Since 1972 Reynolds had ranked higher in the popularity polls than even the Duke and was now threatening to pass even Clint.)*
The outsize success of Reynolds’s Smokey and the Bandit the year before told him two things: first, he didn’t have to knock himself out with big, brawling action films; and second, the public might be shifting toward (or back to) working-class, southern-based humor, something he felt he could play in a walk. In an interview he gave around this time, the influence of Locke on his thinking comes through: the sudden eferences to Capra and Sturges, the rejection of his established image, and his abilities as a filmmaker, particularly in terms of story, even if the allusions here are a bit of a stretch:
The script [for Every Which Way but Loose] had been around for a long time, rejected by everyone. The script itself was dog-eared and food-stained. Most sane men were skeptical about it; there were conflicts about it in my own group. They said it was dangerous. They said it’s not you. I said, it is me … Here was a guy who was a loser but who wouldn’t acknowledge it and who was a holdout against cynicism. It wasn’t old-fashioned but in a way it was. The guy was fun to play because he had to be stripped bare of all his dignity … I didn’t have to prove my commercial value at this point in my career. I didn’t play off the bad sheriff. I suppose a “normal” Clint Eastwood picture might have.