Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Eventually Post and company put on film—for a budget Clint says was less than that of his last Leone film—an intelligent western well within genre traditions, but not without some complexities and originality as well. Most of the latter quality was concentrated in the excellent opening sequence, where Jed Cooper, Clint’s character, is discovered driving a small herd of cattle he has recently purchased across a river, in the course of which he has to dismount and rescue a calf from the stream. Cradling it in his arms, and very much resembling Rowdy Yates in costume and innocent attitude, he emerges on the other bank to confront a group of armed riders, who accuse him of rustling the herd and killing the rancher and his wife to whom it belonged. He tells them that he is a former lawman, now trying to start a small ranch of his own, and produces a bill of sale for the cattle.

  The riders, all in the employ of a rancher called Captain Wilson (Begley), ignore the document and prepare to string him up. Clint plays his youthful terror very persuasively. Dern’s eager villainy as the most vicious of the riders is also effective. His pleas for patience and further investigation ignored, Jed is left swinging from a rope as the posse rides off. It’s a nice, dislocating moment—you don’t expect the star to be (to all appearances) killed this early in the picture. Indeed, when Clint gave the script to his old pal Bob Donner and told him to choose a small part he thought he could play, Donner read a few pages and called him up excitedly, suggesting he play the guy who gets hung in the first reel. Clint laughed and told him to read on a little further—that character was the hero.

  For Jed is saved by the fortuitous appearance of a tumbleweed wagon, under the command of that most authentic of western actors, Ben Johnson. He throws Jed in with the rest of the prisoners he has been collecting and takes him back to Fort Grant, territorial capital of what will one day be Oklahoma. There Jed’s innocence is proved to the satisfaction of Judge Fenton (Hingle), a curiously ambiguous character, who earnestly (and frequently) states his belief that law is the basis for civilization, but who also likes his work just a little too much.

  Fenton knows Jed will seek vengeance against the men who lynched him, and since he’s shorthanded—just fifteen marshals to police seventy thousand square miles—he proposes a deal: He will swear out warrants for Jed’s tormentors so that he can track them down legally while also pursuing other miscreants for the judge. It’s an offer Jed can’t refuse. The young man who was so gentle with his straying calf has overnight become a darkly brooding figure who will dress himself entirely in black (and affect a rather familiar cigar) for a film in which his close-ups often emphasize either the rope scar on his neck or the black scarf he wears to hide it. Unquestionably a large part of this character’s appeal for Clint was that he could be read as a transitional figure, blending a little bit of Rowdy Yates with a lot of the Man with No Name.

  An advocate of swift, sure punishment for crime, Jed is also, for obvious reasons, aware that the law does make mistakes, usually when it is least sure of itself. The debate over this matter is the central argument of the film, although there is, to be sure, plenty of gunfire as, one by one, Jed captures and/or kills the men whose careless malice almost cost him his life.

  Almost always these confrontations place him in interesting moral dilemmas. For example, he tracks down Bruce Dern’s character in the desert and must then conduct him, and two young confederates who have joined him in a rustling expedition, back to civilization. “You’ll never get me to Fort Grant alive—boy,” the outlaw sneers. “Then I’ll get you there dead—boy,” Jed sneers back.

  The bandit is very nearly proved correct, but his two confederates come to Jed’s aid. Despite his efforts to place this extenuating act on the record at their trial, Fenton sentences them to hang in a mass execution that is the film’s vividly staged centerpiece. Disgusted by the circus atmosphere surrounding the hangings, Jed retreats to bed with Jennifer (Arlene Golonka), a whore whom he has befriended—and finds that he is impotent. (This is not, by the way, a condition many stars have chosen to play, and at one point as the half-naked actors filmed the scene, Clint looked up and inquired in mock innocence, “Is this the way Gene Autry got his start?”)

  At that juncture, Captain Wilson stages an assassination attempt on him, the shooting timed to the moment when the execution crowd’s noise is at its height. Grievously wounded, Jed is nursed back by Rachel, the rather mysterious figure played by Stevens. We have met her earlier, peering into the tumbleweed wagon, studying its haul, visiting the jail to spy on new arrivals. When Jed regains some strength they visit a deserted ranch for a picnic. There she tells him that she seeks three men who surprised her and her husband in this very place, killing him and repeatedly raping her. She turns aside Jed’s gentle advances, but then a storm blows up, and they take refuge in the ranch house where, eventually, they consummate their affair.

  This passage is Clint’s first movie love scene, and even Joan Mellen, in Big Bad Wolves, a study of masculinity in American movies, which is highly critical of the unyielding nature of his image, concedes that he shows himself to be a “gentle and tender lover” here. In fact, it is one of the few conventional romantic sequences Clint would play until The Bridges of Madison County, almost three decades later. In the films in between there would often be no love interest, or only a very casual one. When more complex and fully drawn female figures are present they sometimes actively threaten Clint’s character (The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me), or they have powerful agendas of their own (The Enforcer, Bronco Billy, Sudden Impact, Heartbreak Ridge). These make for testy romantic transactions, and on Clint’s part, often enough, a certain befuddlement, offering little in the way of soft, mutual enchantment.

  In fact, the promising Hang ’em High romance goes nowhere. Sometime later, when Jed is fully recovered, and is riding out of town to resume his quest, Rachel stops him, and this dialogue ensues:

  “You asked me once if I could ever stop looking. I think now I can. Can you?”

  “Well, Rachel, there’s a difference. I’m not looking for ghosts. The end of my trail’s at Red Creek [Wilson’s ranch].”

  “Maybe not. What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The film’s final confrontation takes place at night and has the air of a haunted-house sequence. It concludes with Jed killing two men, Wilson committing suicide and Jed finding one old man hiding in a back room. He pleads for his life, reminding Jed that he was the only one in the lynch party who argued against hanging him. When Jed tells him he must escort him back to Fort Grant for trial, he adds, “I just want you to know, I don’t hold you to blame—for what that’s worth.” “It’s worth something,” his captive says quietly—his manly acceptance of fate impressing his captor.

  Now, once again, Jed pleads with Fenton for a life, finally flinging his badge down and telling him he will no longer be party to legalized lynching. At which point, the judge relents—for once. The last we see of Jed he is riding out of town, passing Rachel with no more than a silent nod. Two members of the captain’s crew are still at large, and Jed must bring them to justice before he can rest.

  What is best about this movie is its unswerving quality; it does not impose improbable changes of heart or mind on its leading figures. Cooper and Fenton remain bound to the destinies their natures impose on them, and the film remains bound in ambivalence toward both of them. Though Jed forces Fenton to his single merciful act, it is clear that this does not signal permanent reformation on his part. Though Jed is capable of other, similar acts, it is also obvious that he will not forget the injustice done him, will permit it to go on driving him even after he has brought down the last of its perpetrators. There are, after all, plenty more like them. (It is interesting to note that a second love scene between Jed and Rachel, one that would have implied a romantic return to her once his final obligations to his past were discharged, did not make it to the film’s final cut.)

  Against this virtue one must set certain obvious defects. Hang ’em High
is, by the standards of the genre, a heavily plotted film—and an extraordinarily talkative one. There is also something just a little too tidy about the way it looks. Fort Grant is a familiar, back-lot sort of western town, very finished and built up, lacking the dusty disreputability it needs to support the judge’s insistence on the rawness and lawlessness of his domain. In the end, one cannot escape the conclusion that the film’s ruling sensibility—no matter whether it was Post’s or Freeman’s—was a television sensibility. About that we cannot be entirely certain since the two quarreled their way through postproduction, too, with Freeman making his own cut of the film even as the director’s cut was being made. Clint tried to arbitrate, though he was mostly on Post’s side.

  When Hang ’em High was released in the summer of 1968, a few of the critics were convinced, against the evidence before their eyes, that it was a spaghetti western in disguise—“Only because I was in it,” Clint snorts. Time, for example, called it “the year’s grisliest movie.” Given its release immediately after the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, and the riots at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the magazine’s reviewer thought to lead off by quoting, approvingly, a rhetorical question of Lyndon B. Johnson’s: “Are the seeds of violence nurtured through the screens of our theaters?” Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times agreed that “in these exacerbated times … it is increasingly difficult to stomach displays of one man’s inhumanity to another even when that is the very thing the filmmaker is supposedly deploring.”

  One or two critical contrarians actually mourned the demise of the Man with No Name, preferring his nihilism to the troubled conscience of Jed Cooper. Most reviewers, however, welcomed the moral earnestness of the film. “Hang ’em High has its moments,” wrote Howard Thompson in The New York Times. “It even has a point, unlike those previous sado-masochistic exercises on foreign prairies.…” Life praised it for saying “some interesting things about the complex nature of justice,” and called it the best western of the summer. Implicit in many of the reviews was a sense of relief that the movie did not challenge genre or moral conventions.

  In a sense, then, the weaknesses of Hang ’em High served Clint as well if not better than its strengths did, By bringing him back to native ground in a role that did not overtax the natives’ patience or traditional belief system, it proved to be exactly the right career move for him. And it fared well at the box office, doing slightly better in North American release than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly had done, much better than the earlier Leone films. Indeed, when the year’s figures were totaled up, Hang ’em High was its twentieth-highest-grossing film, and Clint made the first of his eighteen consecutive appearances on the annual Quigley Publications poll of exhibitors, in which they are asked to name the year’s top box-office stars. The serious bets Hollywood had begun placing on him between the making of Hang ’em High and its release were now odds-on.

  In that period Hirshan and Clint were able at last to establish their two-tier policy for the latter’s career. The agent made a three-picture deal (later extended) at Universal, where, in effect, Clint would do his basic bread-and-butter movies—some of which turned out to be his most interesting work—over the next seven years. At the same time Hirshan began signing him for the big-budget, star-ensemble projects deemed necessary to establish a larger respectability for him.

  It was a phone call to the agent from Jennings Lang that set this train of events in motion. Lang had been a powerful agent at MCA, beginning his career there in 1938, and had become an executive in television production at Universal after the agency merged with Decca records (which by this time owned the studio) in 1959. He had, unfortunately, gained his largest fame for his role in one of Hollywood’s more memorable scandals: In 1951 he had been shot (in the groin, appropriately enough) by producer Walter Wanger, who believed (correctly) that Lang was having an affair with his wife, Joan Bennett, who was also Lang’s client.

  Blunt, hearty and sometimes rather crudely manipulative—with a widely admired skill at mixing the perfect martini—Lang was a tough and ambitious executive. By this time he had grown restive with television, and he came right to the point in a meeting with Hirshan: “I want to be in the picture business, and I would like to be in the Eastwood business.” This was fine with the agent. Lang was a major player in Hollywood, and a man who got things done. The agent asked if Lang had anything ready for Clint to do immediately.

  Lang opened a desk drawer, pulled out a script and tossed it to Hirshan. It was called Coogan’s Bluff, and when he read it, Hirshan liked the basic story—about an Arizona sheriff who comes to New York in order to extradite an escaped murderer, James Ringerman, and escort him back to his jurisdiction for trial—and so reported to Lang at their next meeting. “Jeez, it’s terrific,” he remembers saying. “And Clint I’m sure would like it; I’d like to give it to him.” Whereupon Lang excused himself and trotted down the hall to one of his associates’ office. Hirshan heard him tell the man to stop thinking of Coogan’s Bluff as a two-hour television movie: “We’re gonna do it as a feature with Clint Eastwood.”

  This was late summer 1967, and Lang wanted to go into production that fall. For that matter, so did Clint and Hirshan, who by this time had another deal in the works, which would require Clint’s services in Europe beginning around the first of the year. There were problems, though. The script Hirshan passed on to Clint was the latest of three versions, each by a different writer, all judged to be in some way wanting by Lang and others at the studio. Clint himself saw only potential in the draft that he read, not a shootable script.

  The basic story, he thought, offered an opportunity to expand his screen character, bring his westerner out of the past and off the plains and into the contemporary urban jungle. Just as important to him, Walt Coogan also offered him some comic opportunities. He was a shrewd rube, hiding his smarts under a countrified manner, enduring the patronization of his big-city counterparts until finally, satisfyingly, he proves to be their equal. The film also adumbrated the antibureaucratic theme that would, in time, be addressed much more forcefully in Dirty Harry.

  Before the script’s shortcomings could be rectified, Coogan’s Bluff lost its director. Alex Segal, well-regarded for his stage and television work, had committed to the project, but either had a falling-out with the studio or encountered unspecified personal problems and withdrew. As a result, Coogan’s Bluff was granted its largest significance in the Clint Eastwood filmography, for Lang proposed replacing Alex Segal with Don Siegel. This was largely a matter of convenience—Siegel was under contract to the studio and at the moment had no assignment—but he was also right for the job. He was a seasoned action director whom Lang sensed was Clint’s kind of guy, a decisive filmmaker who didn’t waste time, words or film on the set, mostly because he was about as well grounded in his craft as it is possible to be. Having begun his career at Warner Bros. in 1934 shooting inserts, he had progressed to directing second units and supervising montage sequences, moved on first to the shorts department (where two of the films he oversaw—Star in the Night and Hitler Lives?—won Academy Awards in 1945), and then to features, most of them low budget, at least two of them, Riot in Cell Block 11 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, genre classics.

  By this time his credentials should have brought him to bigger budgets, more prestigious projects. But, as Clint would later say, “you get into a rut in this town,” and the director was now carrying himself with what Andrew Sarris called a certain “jocular fatalism,” which sometimes lost its jocularity. Siegel once told an interviewer about his frustration after the success of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “I didn’t get a job offer from anybody, nor did I hear anybody in the industry say, ‘My God! This kid’s really got it.’ ” Even after he directed Elvis Presley in what was surely his best movie, a tense little western called Flaming Star, Hollywood kept him in his unexalted place, though he was beginning to attract some critical attention abroad and in the small
American film journals.

  What he needed was a rising star to pull him out of his “rut.” What the rising star Clint Eastwood needed was a first-rate action director who could also help him find some charm in a screen character who had up to now been an essentially antisocial figure. Before meeting, Siegel and Clint were dubious about one another, mostly because each was unfamiliar with the other’s work, and so when someone proposed Mark Rydell, a sometime actor and a prolific television director, to Clint, he sent him Coogan’s Bluff. The director, who had just finished his first feature, The Fox, gave him a mixed response: He liked the script well enough, but felt he needed more than a few weeks to prepare it. Clint then asked him, “What about Don Siegel? The studio keeps talking about Don Siegel.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, Rydell responded enthusiastically. “He’s great. I worked with him as an actor [in Crime in the Streets in 1956], and he’s the only director I know who’d be ready to go in a month.”

  Impressed by Rydell’s recommendation and appreciative of his generosity, Clint decided to run three of Siegel’s pictures, liked what he saw and agreed to meet with him. The director, hearing that Clint had studied some of his work, reciprocated by running Clint’s Leone films, which, in turn, impressed him. Clint remembers their first encounter taking place in Siegel’s Universal office. Siegel recalls that he flew to Carmel in a private plane piloted by Universal’s casting director, had a couple of drinks with Clint in his “surprisingly modest” cabin, “discussed dames, golf, dames, the glorious weather, etc.” and was about to repair to a golf course with him, and perhaps stay overnight so they could have a more extensive conversation, when Lang phoned to summon Siegel back to the studio. The director and the actor had not yet exchanged more than a few substantive words about Coogan’s Bluff, but that was not really the point of the meeting. They had sized each other up, liked what they saw and silently decided that they could probably work together.