He is not—and Siegel was not—a literary-political intellectual. He is not accustomed to, is in fact flummoxed by, close ideological examination of his motives and works, because quite literally he can’t see anything that grand and abstract in them. Clint obviously had no trouble understanding, believing in, accepting the consequences for, the very limited didactic aim he perceived in this movie. But that was not the only, or even the main, reason he made it.
He did it because of all the roles he had been offered up to this point in his career, this one, in his opinion, stated the frustrations of the typical American male, in relation to his work, in relation to whatever system he served, most accurately, while at the same time portraying his impotent rage, his growing sense of isolation in a rapidly changing world.
Then there were the kinetics of the matter. All movies, as Clint likes to say, are “what-if deals.” They take a real guy like Harry, thrust him into an improbably melodramatic situation and then show us what happens, and here the what-ifs, their rush and excitement—their kinetics—were terrific.
Finally, no matter what other claims their creators may make for movies like Dirty Harry, or we may make on their behalf, all action movies are finally about—yes—action. As we have occasion to observe almost every week in the theaters, movies of this type routinely subvert their own plausibility, along with such ambitions toward fine moral distinction and high moral instruction as their makers may harbor, on behalf of sustained and exciting movement. In that sense, action movies are like action painting; their primary interest is in (and on) their surfaces. A critic is, naturally, free to regard that as juvenile, as socially and culturally irresponsible, as a self-indulgent affront to cultivated taste. But it is as a rule absurd, and utterly unrealistic, to see ideological motives, let alone ideological malevolence, as their prime cause.
The Dirty Harry controversy had almost no concrete effect on Clint’s career. The film’s popular success could not have been stemmed or even slowed by a single review, especially one that appeared somewhat belatedly in a magazine with a limited, upmarket circulation. Indeed, elitist dubiety about Harry never afflicted the mass public—he was their guy, and their pleasure in his kick-ass ways was entirely untinged by guilt. The film, after all, generated four sequels, all of which turned out to be hugely profitable, as did other films that profitably cross-referred to it.
One might even argue, perversely, that Kael’s attack had a number of positive short-term consequences for Clint. Aside from granting the film a significance its makers had not expected, it furthered Clint’s emergence as an important new cultural figure. The critic’s feverish imaginings about a man who was, as we know, being portrayed in the press in those days as a rather opaque figure imparted to him a dark glamour he had not previously enjoyed. She made people wonder: Did this guarded and enigmatic character have a devious political agenda, more threatening than, say, John Wayne’s, who had at least always been forthright about his reactionary views? Was he something more than an actor who specialized in playing dangerous characters? Was he, in himself, a dangerous character? Unwittingly, Kael made him into a subject for speculation in circles where scarcely a serious thought had been spared for him previously.
The long-term effects of her piece were slightly more ambivalent. It is true that as the most fashionable voice in her field, Kael had a view of Clint (which never softened) that would exert a continuing influence on younger critics, with this piece setting the basic terms of discussion about him for at least a decade and a half. Interviewers kept asking him about it, and anyone attempting a critical overview of his career was obliged to conjure with it. Even now, when he is the beneficiary of one of the most astonishing reversals of critical fortune in movie history, a minority continues to hold with Kael.
Yet it could be as well argued that this contempt has had a goading effect on Clint. He was surely aware of protesters at the 1971 Academy Award ceremonies (at which, incidentally, The French Connection was named the year’s best picture) carrying placards reading “Dirty Harry Is a Rotten Pig.” He would have seen The New York Times article in which a Harvard student identified Harry as a “Nietzschian superman” pursuing “sado-masochistic pleasures.” Reports of characterizations like Joan Mellen’s in her book Big Bad Wolves (in which he is represented as the embodiment of “a virtually fascist endorsement of the tough cop”) have drifted his way.
Clint says he doesn’t care about any of this. About Kael’s relentless distaste for him he says he feels more sorrow than animosity: “When somebody is that dogmatic, I feel like I do about somebody who’s prejudiced against Jews or blacks or whatever.” Up to a point, one believes him, and believes as well that he would have chosen to toy with and test the limits of his screen personality and pursue his directorial ambitions no matter what anyone said, if only out of pride and restlessness. One of his most often reprinted quotations is “I’d hate to turn around twenty years from now and say, ‘Well, I did 900 cop dramas and 800 westerns, and that was it.’ ”
But still, who would not have wanted to prove the culturati wrong, show oneself to be more complex and accomplished than they imagined one to be? There are moviemakers who can live happily by their grosses alone. Then there are others who require the good opinion of serious people—the cultural arbiters, if you will—to achieve satisfaction. They want film-festival screenings, museum retrospectives, meaningful awards from prestigious critical bodies and from their peers in the industry. Clint is one of this kind, and from the midseventies onward there has been on his part and his studio’s part a quiet, conscious effort to respond to—and encourage—interest of this kind. To make his way out of the covert culture without denying his roots in it, to win the respect of, or at the very least acceptance by, a more self-consciously discerning group—these have been the unspoken subtexts of Clint Eastwood’s mature career. It has been pursued, one has to think, all the more stubbornly because of the outcry against Dirty Harry, and all the more successfully because of the clout its great box-office success bestowed on him.
TEN
AUTHORITATIVE NORMALCY
Movie stars are never a throng, but at any given moment there are several dozens of them jostling for our attention. What Dirty Harry did for Clint Eastwood was to set him apart from this crowd, establishing him as a unique, unduplicable screen presence—someone like John Wayne in his way, or James Cagney and Cary Grant in theirs, actors whose key roles it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing.
These names from Hollywood’s classic era are deliberately evoked. For even now, granted the wealth and power to play the game any way he wanted, Clint continued to reject stardom’s fussy modern manner of making one high-risk, heavily anticipated and promoted movie every couple of years. It was partly a matter of temperament—his dislike of waiting around, taking meetings, suing for the favor of executives whose nervousness expands as the budget does. Partly it was a matter of calculation. The old way of being a star, exerting an inescapable presence through steady production, simply made better sense to him. Joe Hyams, the Warner Bros. executive who has supervised promotion for him for twenty years, once asked Clint why he made this choice and got this reply: “Name all of Clark Gable’s pictures, Joe.” Of course, he couldn’t—no one could. Nor, after a time, could one easily separate the good from the bad and the indifferent among them, either. But taken together they had made an indelible impression.
Moreover, in fecundity Clint saw the hope of a larger freedom. The possibility of more or less sneaking what he would never openly identify as a “personal statement” or a “personal project” into a large filmography was more of a factor for Clint than it was for stars of Gable’s generation. “I don’t recall that it was such a purposeful step, but it probably was,” he says. He would juxtapose movies that pressed only lightly, if at all, on comfortable genre limits and his own abilities, with projects that consciously challenged those limits.
The films Clint made in the three years immediately follo
wing Dirty Harry are exemplary in this regard: a totally conventional western and a remarkably unconventional one, a modest little urban romance (which he directed but did not appear in), a routine Dirty Harry sequel, an utterly unclassifiable male action film and an espionage adventure that was all too classifiable.
The first of these movies, Joe Kidd, the film he was making when word of Dirty Harry’s sensational sneak preview was relayed to him, is among the least interesting films he ever made as a star. Except for a desperately improvised but rather colorful ending, it is utterly without distinguishing characteristics.
Its beginnings were as inauspicious as its final form was uninspiring. Clint drove from Carmel to Bishop, Nevada, the location for the first few weeks of shooting, in his pickup truck, suffering from a bad case of the flu. As the first days of work on Sinola (as the picture was originally called) proceeded, some of the symptoms lingered. They didn’t prevent him from working, but he continued to feel awful. An allergy of some sort began to seem a logical explanation for his miseries. Horses came under suspicion, and reports of that theory made one or two gossip columns. It contained a nice, low irony: Mr. Impervious, the man who walked unscathed through hails of bullets, rendered sniffly and puffy like an ordinary mortal by the very creatures on which a portion of his livelihood depended.
Reporting to a local doctor for shots, wandering foggily, unhappily, through the days, Clint refused to accept this notion. He had been hanging around horses unscathed for almost two decades. Yet the mystery continued, until one day he returned early to his motel room and found it infested with cats who had taken to sneaking in after he departed in the mornings. He changed accommodations, and the sniffles abated, but the late-developing allergy continues in mild form. To this day the animal lover is unable to keep furry pets in his home (he makes do with birds).
The incident had another, perhaps more significant, consequence. A woman working on the picture, with whom he began keeping company, thought incorrectly that his illness might be psychosomatic and recommended meditation to Clint. At first the idea struck him as outlandish, but over the weeks, as she talked about its benefits, Clint became more and more intrigued. She recommended a teacher in Los Angeles, and when the production wrapped he began taking instruction, establishing a lifelong habit. Meditation is not, for him, a matter of mantras and the lotus position; it is just a few minutes most days when he clears his mind of distractions, emerging from his silence, he says, focused and energized.
Joe Kidd would have profited from some concentrated contemplation. It was a range-war western, and respectable talent was involved in it: The script was by Elmore Leonard, the director was John Sturges, the action specialist who had made Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape (but also, alas, By Love Possessed and Ice Station Zebra), and it included in its cast Robert Duvall giving a rambunctious performance as Frank Harlan, a corrupt tycoon trying to remove Hispanic ranchers from land that he covets.
Though Malpaso has a production credit on the project, it was put together by producer Sidney Beckerman (of Kelly’s Heroes), who brought it to Clint. “I liked John Sturges and they made a good pitch,” he says equably. The screenplay was incomplete when Clint signed on, but this did not particularly bother him; he had, as we know, agreed to other films when they were in similarly sketchy forms. His eponymous character, working first for Harlan, then taking up the cause of the exploited immigrants who are led by Luis Chama, played by the intelligent but not very fiery John Saxon, had the kind of mystery and ambiguity he liked. That in the end Joe’s conscience is awakened by the plight of the dispossessed also commended it to him.
But the script remained in a state of flux. Leonard would write some new pages and show them to the producer, who would then scratch them out and substitute dialogue of his own. After which, says Leonard, “I’d take the script back and before our meeting with Eastwood I’d cross out everything he wrote and put my own dialogue back in. The producer never said a thing—I think he just liked to cross things out.”
What no one got around to putting in was a dynamic climax, that burst of resolving action that all pictures of this kind require. Its absence worried Clint: “I’d never done this before, start a picture and not have an ending.” But he accepted all the veteran professionals’ assurances that one would be found before they needed it.
James Fargo, beginning a decade-long involvement with Clint as an assistant director and, ultimately, the director of two of his features, says the relationship between Clint and Sturges was good. “Clint doesn’t like indecision,” he says, repeating a familiar theme. “He wants people to arrive on the set ready to go. This is what we’re gonna do—boom, boom, boom, boom. A-B-C-D.” This was Sturges’s preferred style, too.
Pressed by the daily demands of production the director was unable to focus for long on the ending, but he did notice that the narrow-gauge railroad that ran through Old Tucson stopped just yards away from its saloon. What if …? he began to wonder. He had always wanted to do a train wreck, he confided to Bob Daley. The idea kept gnawing at him, and one day he proposed that they fire up the engine and, with Clint at the controls, run it right off the track, through some outbuildings and into the bar where the subsidiary bad guys were gathered. It would, he said, make a very photogenic mess. “Jesus,” Clint remembers saying, “anything at this point; let’s end it.” So it was done, and in its way, it worked. It made no sense, but it put an exclamation point of sorts on the picture.
The film was greeted with sleepy indifference when it went into release in June 1972. The reviewers gave the impression of idlers tipped back in their chairs on the porch of the general store whittling, spitting, languidly yupping and noping. “Business as usual,” said one. “A concise, solidly crafted western,” said another. “Tacky” and “aimless,” said a third. The only interesting comment came from Roger Greenspun, who found a nice, summarizing phrase for Clint’s screen presence; praising his control of his effects and mannerisms, he detected “a kind of authoritative normalcy” in his playing.
Maybe that phrase applies equally to the actor’s life in this period. He says it was only after the success of Dirty Harry that he finally felt secure in his career. In 1972 he actually managed a six-month hiatus between films, the longest he had taken since he had begun starring in American films. Before Joe Kidd went into release, he became a father again—almost missing this birth, too. The Eastwoods were in Carmel in early May 1972, then decided to return to Los Angeles to await the birth of the child, due a couple of weeks later. In her delicate condition Maggie decided not to drive down with Clint and Kyle, but to fly in ahead of them. While they were still on the road, however, labor pains began, and she called Bob Daley at the Malpaso office, telling him she was about to check in to Santa Monica hospital. He and Sonia Chernus rushed to meet her there. Attending to the paperwork, Daley found himself mistaken for the expectant father. “They kept calling me Mr. Eastwood, and I kept saying, ‘Don’t you people ever to go to the movies?’ ” Clint arrived before Alison did on May 22.
Maggie, typically, was up and doing, back on the tennis courts by late June, practicing for the celebrity tournament she and Clint hosted every summer in those days at Pebble Beach. Then, in August, Richard Nixon appointed Clint to the National Council on the Arts, the first official acknowledgment of his arrival at star status, and given the controversy over Dirty Harry, a typically Nixonian gesture of contempt for liberal opinion. Clint had not put himself forward for the appointment and, startled by it, called Charlton Heston, that somewhat unlikely but devoted champion of federal arts funding, who said, “Do it—you’ll love it.”
He did. He developed a large respect for the late Nancy Hanks, the spirited, charming and very able director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he became, as he puts it, “a voice for the smaller American arts,” especially, of course, jazz. It is not, he says, that he had anything against opera or symphonic music or regional theater, but they had str
onger backing from corporations and from their well-connected, well-to-do boards, making it easier for them to win large matching grants from the NEA. Populist that he was, he felt that “man in the street, woman in the street” projects, work that didn’t attract much upscale interest, needed encouragement.
Finally, completing a year of domestic tranquillity, in October 1972 Clint’s mother remarried. Her new husband was John Belden Wood, whom she had met on a Hawaiian vacation earlier that year. Clint escorted his mother down the aisle and even little Alison attended, cradled in the arms of her nurse.
One gets an impression of Clint riding easily, even proprietarily, through high-celebrity country during these days, sure of his own power, confident that he could now pause to investigate whatever byways he encountered along the trail—as, for example, the curiously memorable picture he put into production in the late summer of 1972.
High Plains Drifter was a western from an unexpected source, Ernest Tidyman, who had written the Shaft novels and the films based on them—the latter offering the movies’ first black private detective—as well as the screenplay for The French Connection. It had come to Clint as a very brief treatment—somewhere between three and ten pages, depending on whose memory one consults—and was developed by Tidyman into a full-scale script, then put into final form by the faithful Dean Riesner, who, much to Clint’s annoyance, was denied on-screen credit in a Writers Guild arbitration.
Clint Eastwood Page 40