by Marc Eliot
While the hearing moved to the next court, Clint left it to his lawyers to fight it out and finally took off for Africa, accompanied by Jane Brolin.
White Hunter Black Heart was another of Clint’s personal anti-genre films on the order of Bird. It was a thinly disguised biographical portrait of John Huston, one of the most respected directors in Hollywood. Novelist Peter Viertel had written a stunning roman à clef about Huston’s experiences on location in the Congo while filming his award-winning The African Queen (1951). The novel revealed Huston’s on-location obsession with drinking and bagging an elephant on safari.
It seemed an odd choice for Clint. Why did he make it? He said, in his own words:
A fellow by the name of Stanley Rubin, who I’d met a long time ago at the beginning of the fifties when he was a producer at Universal, was working for Ray Stark, and he asked me whether I’d be interested in reading a script that had been hanging around in Columbia’s offices for quite a while along with some others … I met Peter Viertel and found out the whole story of the novel, how he began to write it and the adventures of the pre-production period for The African Queen. It fascinated me, as obsessive behavior always does … It was a very interesting character to explore.
In White Hunter Black Heart John Wilson (Clint) is about to kill an elephant when he has a sudden change of heart that instead causes the death of his native guide, Kivu (Boy Mathias Chuma), a Gunga Din type, the only person in the film Wilson cares about. Branded by the villagers as a white hunter with a black heart, Wilson returns to his only real love, making movies, in this case to finish the film he has ostensibly come to make. Art endures over life, as in the last shot of the film, Wilson shouts, “Action!”
It was as near a statement of self-definition as the tight-lipped Clint would ever give. Huston was someone he could identify with both as a filmmaker and as a contradictory personality; his flamboyance was both extravagant and selective, generous and thrifty, kind-hearted and mean-spirited. And as both actor and director, often for the same project, Huston had made mostly genre films (like The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, both of which he had only directed) that were also personal statements, and offbeat, quirky films that were still meant to be “big” (like Freud, for which he was both director and narrator) but never attained the kind of attention or box office he felt they deserved.
With Bird and now White Hunter Black Heart, Clint was steadily moving toward films that were, in many ways, thinly veiled autobiographies: Charlie Parker, the musical genius who went against the prevalent tide, only to leave a tidal wave in his wake; Huston, the physically daunting director-actor whose films did not always fit into a commercial category but nevertheless left an afterburn in the mind. Most interestingly, Huston was given to excess and lacked self-discipline. In other words, he was the exact opposite of Clint, whose self-discipline—both in filmmaking and in personal health regimens—was well known to anyone who had ever worked with him. As an all-warts homage, the film was Clint’s way of humanizing and idolizing Huston (and himself) at the same time.
When filming was completed late in August, Clint returned to the States via London, where he met up with Maggie. Her marriage to Wynberg was on the rocks, and she wanted to see how Clint was handling the devolution of his own relationship with Locke into legal and emotional acrimony. It mattered to her if Clint was over Locke. Of all his indiscretions, she was the one whom Maggie had always blamed for the breakup of her marriage to Clint. Moreover, she and Clint were still business partners in a number of enterprises, the result of their complex divorce settlement, and the parents of two children. Maggie also told Clint that he had to try to play a stronger, more influential role in Kyle’s and Alison’s life.
And there was something else, Maggie told him. In the wake of his sensational palimony trial, she had learned along with everyone else that Clint was the father of a daughter, Kimber, who had been born to Roxanne Tunis, while Maggie and Clint were still married. Presumably Maggie had a few things to tell Clint about that. He listened to all she wanted or needed to say and did not argue or disagree.
Upon his return to L.A., Clint quietly resumed his relationship with Frances Fisher, and while the palimony case dragged on, he began postproduction work on White Hunter Black Heart. In May 1990 he took the finished version to Cannes where, inexplicably, he denied to the press that he had based his performance on John Huston. The cineast-heavy audiences and highly literate critics, well aware of the history of The African Queen, were puzzled as to what the film could otherwise possibly be about.
That September Clint showed it at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where it was given a less-than-spectacular reception.
White Hunter Black Heart opened in the fall of 1990, and earned less than $8 million in its initial domestic release, one of the worst-grossing films of his career.
Entering his fifth decade of moviemaking, with three film failures in a row, and mired in a very public palimony trial, he went directly into production on a straight genre policier, albeit with a slight twist. Rather than playing his trademark loner, he would try to lure more youthful audiences by sharing the screen with a much younger and extremely popular male costar, Charlie Sheen. A rookie (Sheen) comes under Officer Nick Pulovski’s (Clint’s) wing, after Pulovski’s last partner was killed by a stolen-car gang run by ruthless Latin murderers. The film, called The Rookie, had a script by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel that seemed a pale imitation—some critics thought it an out-and-out spoof—of the Dirty Harry films, minus the dirt and minus Harry. Not that the film lacked appeal. Sonia Braga, playing a sadomasochistic murderess named Liesl, handcuffs and ties Clint to a chair, rapes him rather graphically, then comes this close to killing him until he miraculously escapes. It was an explosive sequence, and the only one in the film that people talked about. As obviously provocative and exploitative as it was, ars gratia artis, the scene may also be read as conveying Clint’s feeling victimized at the hands of a beautiful but bad woman. In the scene, Liesl has him handcuffed, sexually tortured, and imprisoned and wants to kill him even as she is making love to him. And she is, in the end, killed by Clint’s big gun.
The film received mixed-to-negative reviews but did better at the box office than any of his recent films, prompting Vincent Canby in the New York Times to wonder how Clint could reach so high and fail with White Hunter Black Heart and reach so low and succeed with The Rookie. Rushed into Christmas 1990 release, it grossed $43 million in its initial domestic release. It was good enough to stop the slide, but by no means a great film or even a very good one.
Two more years would pass before Clint made another movie.
*The six Clint films were The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Bronco Billy, Any Which Way You Can, and Sudden Impact.
PART III
FROM AUTEUR TO OSCAR
NINETEEN
Clint’s long overdue double Oscar win in 1992 for Unforgiven: Best Picture and Best Director.
Unforgiven ends the trajectory begun in Fistful of Dollars. Instead of having no family, or just starting a family, this time Eastwood’s character has a family—again, with no woman in the picture, at least not a living one.
—Brett Westbrook
In April 1990 Locke’s movie, Impulse, opened to fairly decent reviews, including a coveted thumbs-up from the influential TV and print critics Siskel and Ebert, which usually helped boost a film’s box office. Nevertheless, according to Locke, “Warner barely released the film. And on opening weekend in the few theaters in Los Angeles, the ad in the newspaper didn’t even use the Siskel and Ebert review.” Even worse for Locke, a few weeks after the movie’s spring release, Lucy Fisher told her that, regrettably, Warner was dropping the other three projects she had in various stages of development with them.
As emotionally undone as Locke was during this time, and as fiercely as she pointed the finger at Clint for everything that had gone wrong in her life, she had no legitimate reason t
o believe that he had had anything to do with Warner’s decision. Perhaps Warner dumped Locke because she had violated the industry-wide dictum against washing dirty laundry in public; if so, it was presumably a business decision, pure and simple. Business in Hollywood is a constant tightrope walk, attempting to balance art and commerce. In the years between her Academy Award nomination and Impulse, Locke’s career had gone nowhere. She had not become a big star, and her films were never going to produce the kind of revenue Clint Eastwood’s films had. In other words, she was expendable.
But, according to Locke, all of it was personal and connected, and all of it was due to Clint’s furious need for vengeance. In her memoir she quotes Clint telling a friend, “Does she want to become a director or become Michelle Marvin? I’ll drag her ass through court, until there’s nothing left. I’ll never settle with her; I paid her for jobs in movies, now she wants to be paid for love too?”
The postdeposition litigation was going nowhere, and meanwhile, Locke was racking up huge bills. Hoping to cut through it all, she simply picked up the phone and called Clint, asking if they could meet. Clint agreed, and the next day she came over to his office. She insists that Clint then started to flirt with her. In response, she asked him to drop his lawsuit. He exploded, insisting that she had started it, that if now she was desperate or broke, she should get a job as a waitress, and that he would accept a rapprochement, in which she also accepted returning to him as his lover, only “with no strings attached.”*
Locke then wrote to Clint, hoping that the printed word would prevent his emotions from interfering with her attempt to settle. Clint’s written reply to Locke was short and impersonal: “I owe you nothing.”
Hoping to get a new start in Hollywood, Locke left the William Morris Agency and signed with agent David Gersh, who quickly got her a new deal at Orion Pictures for Oh Baby, a romantic comedy that she could easily direct.
She was all set to begin casting when she noticed a lump on her right breast. It proved malignant. That September of 1990, instead of beginning work on the new film, she entered the hospital for a double mastectomy.
In November, while she was still in the early stages of recuperation, producer Al Ruddy told her that he was willing to act as a go-between, to try to settle things between her and Clint before the start of the trial, scheduled for March 1991. Ruddy told her that Clint was willing to drop his lawsuit if she would drop hers; that Gordon could keep the house on Crescent Heights; and he would see to it that she got her development deals back at Warner. She would also receive $450,000 in cash if she gave up all future claims to Stradella Road and agreed never to sue him for anything again.
Locke was weary from her battles with Clint and her recent surgery; and her medical bills were piling up. Without thinking about why Clint would suddenly change his position and try to make peace, Locke accepted the offer.
It had taken two years to settle with Locke (and to settle another unrelated but nagging lawsuit that had erupted with a civilian over a car accident). Now Clint felt he was finally ready to make another movie, and he chose a western to do it with. It was a wise choice; westerns had always been good to him. He had, after all, begun his career with TV westerns and had made his big-screen breakthrough with westerns; now he would make his comeback in one, something called Unforgiven.
Clint had had the script under option for several years. Written by a relatively unknown screenwriter, it had stayed on the back burner until Clint could find someone other than himself who could better play the lead role (unlikely, as the part was perfectly suited for Clint), or (as he sometimes told interviewers after it opened, and which was far more likely) he felt he was old enough to credibly play the lead role. Even more revealing, perhaps, was what he told Cahiers du cinéma just before its European run:
Why a western? That seemed to be the only possible genre the story was calling for, because in fact everything grew out of the story. In any case, I’ve never thought of doing anything because it’s in fashion, on the contrary I’ve always felt a need to go against it … as for what makes this Western different from the others, it seems to me that the film deals with violence and its consequences a lot more than those I’ve done before. In the past, there were a lot of people killed gratuitously in my pictures, and what I liked about this story was that people aren’t killed, and acts of violence aren’t perpetrated, without there being certain consequences. That’s a problem I thought it was important to talk about today; it takes on proportions it didn’t have in the past, even if it’s always been present through the ages.
Unforgiven was the kind of story Clint could film in his sleep. Even before a single shot was filmed, he knew exactly how he wanted it to look.
Originally called The Cut-Whore Killings, the film’s name was later changed to The William Munny Killings. Neither title Clint especially liked. Unforgiven was the brainchild of David Webb Peoples, a Berkeley English major who upon graduation worked as an editor in TV news, then moved on to documentary films. In 1981, with his wife, Janet, and Jon Else, he wrote and edited the documentary The Day After Trinity, about the development of the atomic bomb. Directed by Else, it was good enough to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The film’s success sent Peoples searching his desk drawers for anything he had that was immediately salable. There he found the screenplay he had written five years before The Day After Trinity, The Cut-Whore Killings. At the time it had gone nowhere, but now he was able to get it optioned.
Each time the film’s option ran out, it got passed around for renewal. Eventually, via Megan Rose, it came to Clint, who read the script, liked it, and when it became available, bought it outright, and then put it in his drawer, waiting until the time felt right to make it.
It might very well have gotten made in 1985, as his elegiac summation and farewell to the genre that had launched his career, but then Pale Rider had come along and became that movie. Now, in search of something to push back the ever-louder industry rumors that he was washed up, Clint once more reached for his most dependable genre, the western, and produced, directed, and starred in Unforgiven. To ensure that the film was a big enough hit to return him to glory, he pulled out all the stops (or as many as he could bear without sending the budget skyrocketing).
In typical Clint fashion, the film was shot quickly and inexpensively, with very little done to the original script. According to Clint, “I started rewriting it and talked to David about it. I said I would like to do this, do that, write a couple of scenes … but the more I started fiddling with it, [the more I] realized I was disassembling a lot of blocks that were holding it together. I finally called him up one night and said, ‘Forget about all those rewrites I was talking about. I like it just the way it is.’”
Set in fictitious Big Whiskey, Wyoming, the film was shot in Calgary, Alberta, using the best talent in the business to bring the town and the movie to life. At the head of this list was Henry Bumstead, who had last worked for Clint twenty years earlier on High Plains Drifter and who was still one of Hollywood’s most sought-after production designers and art directors. Bumstead was probably best known to the public for his work on Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), for which he won an Oscar,* and on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1957).†
Mood was essential to Unforgiven, and Bumstead’s work proved a key ingredient to help visualize the feeling that the vengeful living walk among the living dead, waiting for their turn at mythic immortality. It took Bumstead only a month and a day to build the entire set, on which Clint wanted every scene filmed, including interiors, to give the film a stylistic cohesion no ordinary soundstage could match.
Also for Unforgiven, Clint chose to work with other big-name stars, something he rarely did on Malpaso films. Morgan Freeman played Ned Logan, Munny’s (Clint’s) former partner in crime who joins him one last time to collect the reward money posted by the town prostitutes, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances F
isher, another real-life girlfriend of Clint’s cast as a prostitute) for the capture of the men responsible for mutilation and murder of one of their own (Delilah, played by Anna Thomson), after Big Whiskey’s corrupt and bullying sheriff, the fascistic Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), let them go free. Several bounty-hunters are drawn to Big Whiskey hoping to collect the reward, including English Bob (Richard Harris) and his “biographer,” W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). The only lesser-known principal member of this cast besides Fisher was Jaimz Woolvett, who plays the Schofield Kid, a young gunslinger wannabe who longs to become the legend that Munny once was.
Several unexpected plot reversals give the film more irony and depth than any previous Clint Eastwood movie, while referencing many of them. Munny is a gunslinger of legendary proportions, who has renounced his murderous past and tried to make amends by going straight, marrying, having children, and raising pigs on a farm. Much of Munny’s character and action has been developed and performed before the film begins (not unlike Shane, the cinematic model for Pale Rider’s Preacher). Munny sets out to collect the reward with the same sense of mission that was suggested in the Leone trilogy. In Unforgiven it is as if the Man with No Name has returned to gunfighting, older, weary, and repentant, because he needs the money to raise his children after his wife has died, but also because that’s who he is, a gunfighter, a man whose destiny must be fulfilled. In that sense, the inevitable violent and horrific climax of Unforgiven, during which Munny avenges not just the murdered prostitute but also Ned Logan, killed by Daggett, is an elegant evocation of Heraclitus’ well-known dictum about character and fate being one and the same. It is Munny’s fate to kill Daggett because that is his character (much as it is Daggett’s fate to be killed because that is his). In Unforgiven, as in several of the Dirty Harry movies (perhaps most vividly Magnum Force), justice may be evil but evil may be just.