That matter was certainly open for inspection in this performance. His response to Evelyn’s escalating possessiveness is slow and dim precisely because that emotion is as unimaginable to him as it is to Clint (recall his repeated public insistence that his own wife was entitled to the same freedom of movement that he enjoyed). Conversely, we understand that his withholding nature, his “mystery,” is one of the things driving poor Evelyn crazy. Initially alluring—we are all inclined to believe that our true love is the key that will finally unlock a withdrawn lover’s secret heart—it ultimately maddens even people whose sanity is less delicately poised than hers.
No less than in The Beguiled, he was offering a significant commentary on two of modern masculinity’s driving forces—its fear of entrapment by, and its need for mastery over, the female—acting out, if you will, the very bill of particulars repeatedly read out against men in formal feminist writing, in informal female conversation. Both of these traits are expressions of a larger one, namely self-absorption.
The basic trick of movie stardom consists of denying this (very hard for most actors to do), while conforming to the notion that fulfillment requires transforming romantic involvement with another. But in both these movies Clint dispenses with that fiction. There is no boyish vulnerability waiting to be discovered beneath these self-reflexive surfaces, no subtle plea for sympathy, which is the signal most male movie stars send out. The passages in which Dave tries to show such needs to Tobie are, in comparison to the scenes with Evelyn, perfunctory.
The film has other flaws, notably those longueurs that are fairly typical of a first-time director. There is a long alfresco romantic passage, culminating in skinny-dipping and lovemaking between Dave and Tobie, that is both too lyrical and too languid in its pace. Driving into work one morning Clint happened to hear on the radio a recording of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack and fell in love with it. The record was out of print by that time, but he found a copy of it in a cutout bin somewhere, brought it in and insisted that it be used to underscore this sequence. Unfortunately, the piece ran something like four minutes, Pingitore could not find a way to shorten it (and was not much encouraged by the director to do so), and so the sequence was extended beyond its worth. The same thing happened with a sequence Clint shot at the Monterey Jazz Festival; he fell in love with the music and let it run on. Here, at Jennings Lang’s insistence, cuts were made, which Clint grudgingly accepted.
According to Pingitore, a certain amount of tension developed between Lang and Clint in postproduction. The picture, he recalls, was owned fifty-fifty by the studio and Malpaso, and “they were like the cattlemen and the sheepmen” disputing turf. “Someone should have had fifty-one percent,” he says. These squabbles, relatively minor and apparently creating no permanent rancor between Clint and Lang, nevertheless predicted larger disagreements with the studio.
These problems began early in 1971 as The Beguiled was being readied for release. It was obvious to Clint that it required special handling, which Universal had no capacity to provide. “If you had a couple of names and a formula, a middle-of-the-road project,” the studio was competent to handle it, he says, but “they didn’t know how to do anything with something unusual.” This was particularly frustrating to him, because Clint was in contact with two men who had much grander ideas about promoting it, Pierre Rissient and Bertrand Tavernier, French cineasts whose public relations firm in Paris specialized in promoting the work of foreign filmmakers. The former had worked as an assistant to such directors as Jean-Luc Godard; the latter had written extensively for journals like Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif and had directed some features. Their backgrounds gave them credentials with the critical press that other publicists lacked.
They particularly revered a number of older American directors whose work these influential publications had championed, and their work for them was a significant factor in extending beyond cult circles the critical recognition of auteurs like Howard Hawks, John Ford and Raoul Walsh. They were also enthusiasts for younger directors carrying on this tradition—Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel. It is not too much to say that in the period from 1965 to 1972 Rissient and Tavernier were crucial figures in sending the revisionist word on all these directors out from France to their cinematic coreligionists elsewhere, and from there into general cultural circulation.
Rissient knew Clint’s work from the Leone pictures, and sometime in the late sixties they met for the first time at the Universal commissary. Later, when Two Mules for Sister Sara opened in Paris, he helped promote it, and he recalls a lunch meeting there with Jennings Lang and Clint where, warmed by Lang’s bonhomie, Clint was apparently more outgoing than he had been on their previous meeting. Rissient found himself “very, very surprised by his sense of humor. He could be quite nice, or sarcastic, and also you could make a joke and he would be very fast, you know, to catch it.”
Rissient, a large, bald, passionate figure, who seems always to be dressed in a loud, open-necked sport shirt that he does not tuck into his pants (it was his garb at the Academy Awards ceremony at which Clint won his best director and best picture Oscars for Unforgiven), took Clint’s work, first as an actor, then as a director, to heart, and their relationship has persisted for close to a quarter century. In the time since he and Tavernier closed their office (so the latter could return to directing), Rissient has become a benign, if slightly mysterious, figure, working the international festivals and cinematheques, discovering new filmmakers, promoting his old favorites, Clint among them.
When he saw The Beguiled he thought it Siegel’s “best film,” and proposed a showing at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1971—either in or out of competition, whichever he could manage. This would cost a little money, and it would mean delaying the movie’s release date, scheduled for early April, until after the festival, but Clint loved the idea. He craved this kind of recognition, and it was just what he thought the movie needed to establish itself with reviewers.
He took the idea to Lew Wasserman and was turned down. “Absolutely not,” he remembers Wasserman saying. “I won’t put any money in that. I won’t get involved in that.” The mogul had something of the old studio arrogance about him; he and his executives always knew best: Their collective wisdom always had to take precedence over the whims of mere “talent.” “I didn’t know how to overcome that,” Clint says, “the infighting and so on.” But it surely shadowed his hope of making inexpensive, somewhat offbeat movies requiring hand-tailored marketing and distribution.
The way The Beguiled was handled justified this anxiety: “They did no promotion, they just let it escape.” Escape, as it were, under false pretenses—such campaign as the studio mounted suggested that the film was some kind of Civil War military drama. In Universal’s defense it might be argued that, quirky as the picture was, it is hard to imagine what sort of campaign might have worked for it.
This was a point Vincent Canby stressed in his New York Times review. It had, he wrote, no natural audience: It was not for action fans, not for horror cultists, since it lacked any element of the uncanny, not for general audiences, since it was so grisly. Its “very fancy, outrageous fantasizing” (he particularly mentioned a three-way sexual encounter Miss Farnsworth imagines between herself, McBurney and Edwina), he guessed, would “strike horror in the hearts of those Siegel fans who’ve made a cult of his objectivity,” while “people who consider themselves discriminating moviegoers, but who are uncommitted to Mr. Siegel, will be hard put to accept” what he thought were improbable twists of plot and characterization. The upper-crust movie audience tended to tolerate odd blends of terror and erotica only when they carried a certain European cachet, as, for example, Repulsion had. (Canby also said Clint “simply by reacting well has become an important actor of movies.”)
Some of the other reviewers were more enthusiastic. Time’s Jay Cocks offered a brief, sophisticated appreciation of Siegel’s style and called it
“the most scarifying film since Rosemary birthed her satanic baby.” In Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of the Times said that the “fortuitous collaboration” between Siegel and Eastwood “reached fulfillment” in a film that was “a triumph of style, totally engrossing and utterly convincing.” These were representative of the best overall set of notices an Eastwood picture had yet received.
It’s doubtful that a Cannes showing would have improved The Beguiled’s reviews or its box-office takings. But it would have improved Clint’s relationship with the studio, which was now, on his part, a wary one, and soon to deteriorate further. For the release of Play Misty for Me in the fall of 1971 was also uninspired. “They had a brilliant preview of it in San Jose,” he recalls. “People were just screaming out of their seats,” but this response meant nothing to the marketing department. They “still didn’t handle it—they just kind of let it out.” At the time Clint was retaining Warren Cowan, the legendary Hollywood publicist, to help him compensate for the studio’s inattention, and he asked Cowan what he should do. “I said, ‘Let me add two words to the title,’ ” the press agent later recalled. “He said, ‘What words?’ and I said, ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s.…’ ”
“A good little scare show,” Jay Cocks called it, and that was about as good as it got for Play Misty for Me. Newsweek’s Paul Zimmerman criticized Clint for an inability to “discriminate between the really good stuff and the draggy scenes that kill the suspense.” Roger Greenspun was particularly harsh. Clint, he said, had made “too many easy decisions about events, about the management of atmosphere, about the treatment of performance—including the rather inexpressive one of Clint Eastwood … who is asked to bear more witness to a quality of inwardness than his better directors have yet had the temerity to ask of him.”
That he was actually not trying to play inwardness, but rather self-absorption (quite a different matter), did not occur to this reviewer. Like his colleagues, the film put him somewhat at a loss. If you could not fairly compare Play Misty for Me to a Hitchcock film—though it certainly did invoke one of Hitchcock’s major themes, the intrusion of violently irrational disorder on a serenely untroubled universe—what could you compare it to? We can now see, to films as yet unmade. For some of the major elements of future Eastwood movies—their directness of address, their plainspoken psychological realism—are present in this movie’s best passages.
Obviously, no one could see that at the time, any more than they could see Fatal Attraction sixteen years in the future. Yet when that mighty, trashy hit appeared in 1987, critics eagerly pointed out its debt to Misty; interestingly, it was the only source they could cite. This, in turn, suggests what should have been obvious at the time: that this was a highly original movie, one that in its central role reversal duplicated no previous film and proved itself to be unduplicable without risking suggestions of plagiarism.
This the public seemed to acknowledge. For despite Universal’s lackluster distribution and the general critical dimness about it, Play Misty for Me did quite decent business. This was both a vindication and a disappointment; it did better than the studio brass had predicted, not nearly as well as its star and director thought it could. Clint remembers getting a call from the manager of the cavernous Cineramadome in Hollywood, where the picture was succeeding despite its inappropriate venue, begging him to intercede with the studio. It was insisting on pulling the movie in favor of a good, but ill-fated, family movie. “Can you do something about that?” the man asked. “The audience just keeps coming.” Clint got a similar report from the owner of a large chain of California theaters. He, too, was under pressure to replace Misty with newer products and wanted to keep the film on his screens. In both cases Clint says his pleas were contemptuously dismissed.
Finally, despite its travails, Play Misty for Me returned something over $5 million in domestic rentals, and counting its overseas, television and home video sales, at least doubled that amount eventually, which meant that Malpaso’s back-end percentage probably exceeded what Clint’s normal salary might have been. In other words, he had won his gamble. And, in a sense, Universal lost it.
In Lenny Hirshan’s view, the studio simply did not understand how deep Clint’s commitment to his films runs. “Do you have the right theaters? Is your ad campaign right? Are you spending enough on television? Are you supporting the picture—all that kind of stuff” interests him profoundly. He was not yet ready for a full-scale mutiny over these matters, but he was restless. And, at this moment, a project he had been tracking for some time, one that had eluded him twice before, suddenly presented itself again under the auspices of an old and highly trusted friend now working for a rival studio. He accepted it immediately. If it did not completely change his life, it unquestionably altered forever his status in his profession, and in the larger world beyond it.
NINE
SHADY HABITS, ARCHAIC RESPONSES
It was Jennings Lang who first brought Dirty Harry to Clint’s attention, at least two years before it went into production. At the time Universal controlled the original screenplay by the husband-and-wife writing team of Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink and had, Lang said, offered it to Paul Newman, who turned it down on political grounds. “Well, I don’t have any political affiliations,” Clint said, “so send it over.”
He quickly saw what Newman was talking about, which was what everyone would be talking about once the movie was released: the attitude the script took toward the constitutional rights of accused criminals. At this time, a few years after the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Escobedo and Miranda cases, this was one of the issues by which Americans were defining themselves politically. Clint saw problems of narrative and characterization in the script as well. But he also saw in this story of a big-city police detective engaged in a deadly duel with a psychopathic serial killer the potential for a riveting movie. And he saw in that cop, Dirty Harry Callahan, a character who was uncannily right for him. He says he would have wanted to play him if he had been a Fourth Amendment absolutist.
Harry was not, in this early draft, quite the man he would become, but he was cool in crisis, hot in his anger at the vicious criminal he pursues—and in his contempt for the clueless municipal bureaucracy that frequently muddles that pursuit. Clearly a working-class guy, there was much class resentment in the rage Harry directed at his deskbound superiors, interested primarily in covering their asses while preventing him from doing his duty. To put it mildly, these were feelings Clint knew well but had never explored in a role. Moreover, he discerned “a sadness about him, about his personal life,” that he had not touched in his work either.
But somehow the script slipped away from Universal—going first to ABC’s film unit, then to Warner Bros., which is when Clint heard about it again. That studio, in decline throughout the sixties, was acquired in 1969 by Steve Ross’s Kinney National Service Company, a conglomerate soon renamed Warner Communications. This signified Ross’s commitment to reviving what was for him the most glamorous of his holdings. So did his appointment of a new management team headed by Ted Ashley, a powerful agent, with able, eccentric John Calley as head of production, and Frank Wells, who had been Clint’s close friend and attorney for many years, as head of business affairs (and, ultimately, studio president). It was Wells who called Clint, just as he was beginning work on Play Misty for Me, to ask him if he was still interested in Dirty Harry.
He was, but could not commit to it until he had finished Misty. Wells said he couldn’t wait. When it took over the studio, the Ashley regime had written down some $60 million worth of the previous management’s projects and even now, two years later, remained desperate for product. Besides, cop pictures—especially ones featuring roguish protagonists—were hot just then, and Warner Bros. was eager to partake of the heat. Siegel’s Madigan (which has several points of comparison with Dirty Harry), Coogan’s Bluff, The Detective and Bullitt had all been successful, and The French Connection, destined to be the biggest of them all, was going into produc
tion. This interest doubtless had something to do with the “law-and-order” furor of the Nixon years but it also had to do with filling a gap. For two great traditional (and psychologically related) pop figures, the westerner and the private eye, had all but disappeared from the screen—the former at best the subject of elegies, the latter largely ignored. There was a need to find a contemporary place for hard loners—traditional males, if you will—to live plausibly. And the most readily available wilderness, the concrete wilderness, suddenly seemed more interesting and dangerous than ever—“crime in the streets” being the operative catch phrase in this respect.
Thus it was that the trades announced, in the fall of 1970, that Frank Sinatra, who had been one of Ted Ashley’s agency clients and the star of The Detective, had been signed for the film. It was now retitled Dead Right, and Irvin Kershner was set to produce and direct it. In November, however, Sinatra withdrew from the picture; it was said he had hurt his hand in an accident and could not start the picture on schedule.
By this time, Clint was available. But when Wells called to re-offer him the project, he had to admit that the script had changed several times since his former client had last seen it. Clint asked Wells to send over whatever he had, and shortly thereafter “a whole mess of scripts” arrived at his office, “first drafts of this and that.” He didn’t like any of them, but sought second opinions from Robert Daley and Don Siegel, who felt the Finks’ script offered the only worthwhile possibilities. Clint remembers advising Wells to “just keep those other scripts and do them under other titles,” so remote were they from the story he wanted to tell.
Clint Eastwood Page 36