Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Holden had been something of a Wasp beau idéal in the fifties, an actor capable of both cynicism and idealism and, in his best performances, of mixing the two qualities in a way that suggested a certain darkness beneath the veneer of American good nature. This reflected something of his own ambivalent character, for he was one of those stars haunted by the suspicion that acting was not a fit occupation for a grown-up. Pleasant and tractable on the set, Holden was given to making dismissive comments about his own talent and the motion picture business in general, from which he absented himself as frequently as possible. His largest passion was for a game preserve he had established in Kenya, where he spent a great deal of time. He was also an alcoholic, alternating periods of sobriety with days of binge drinking. He was fifty-five at this time, and partly because of his own indifference, partly because of changing times, partly because his hard living was now etched on his face, his career had dimmed.

  Breezy, however, seemed to stir something more than dutiful professionalism in the actor. Clint remembers a preproduction meeting at the end of which Holden, having risen to leave, stood in the doorway and said, “You know something? I’ve been this guy.” Clint replied, “I thought so.”

  Casting the title role was a much trickier proposition. The actress had to be young—Breezy was seventeen according to the script—capable of playing hippie waywardness while at the same time suggesting qualities that would make mutual, albeit hesitant, attraction between her and a man more than twice her age plausible. She also had to manage seminude love scenes with aplomb. Clint and Bob Daley interviewed dozens of candidates for the role, among whom was Sondra Locke—the first time she and Clint met. “She sat there in Clint’s office on the couch,” Daley remembers, “with her legs folded up underneath her, and she was just like a little waif—very strange little girl.” Clint knew her work from her debut film, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—“I thought she was a good actress”—but felt she was too old for this role (Locke was twenty-six at the time) and decided not to test her.

  In the end he had something like fifteen candidates he did want to see on film, and Holden spent three days on a stage playing a sample scene with each of them—work above and beyond the call of duty for a star of his rank. Lenz, whose father, Ted, was a well-known West Coast radio broadcaster, was included among them because Joe McKinney, the makeup artist on High Plains Drifter, had just done a television program with her and recommended her. Once Clint saw her work with Holden—“There was such chemistry between them,” as Daley puts it—he quickly decided she was right for the part.

  Clint treasures his memories of Holden. There was, he says, a particular thrill in directing an actor whose work he had enjoyed long before he had himself become an actor. More than that, “He was just a prince to work with; he was always the first guy there, ready to work.” At the time, he said, they had agreed “not to intellectualize an unintellectual art,” and Holden praised his director on every possible occasion: “I’d forgotten what it is like to make pictures this agreeably. I’ll work with Clint any time he asks.”

  Lenz, rather like the character she was playing, was full of innocent enthusiasm. “I called him Bill,” Lenz would recall many years later. “My God. And I was yelling, ‘Hey, Clint.’ I had so very little experience, I couldn’t even hit the marks, but what a kind guy William Holden was, and what a very nice man Clint was.” He granted her veto power over her nude scenes; unless she approved a shot, he would not include it in the final print. She also appreciated Holden’s gentlemanliness in their love scenes. When she was obliged to disrobe he kept his eyes riveted on hers. “I could have been wearing tinfoil and he wouldn’t have known it. I couldn’t have done it without him.” Holden, who only had to take his shirt off in the scene, quickly draped it around her when the most revealing take was completed.

  The film, though, seems willfully deaf to its most discomfiting resonances. For a work exploring a potentially explosive—and, to many minds, scandalous—sexual encounter, it is not a very sexy movie. It has its comic and melodramatic passages, but overall its tone is bemusedly realistic, as if it is just relating a curious, mildly interesting story—not much more than an anecdote, really—in an unforced, even artless, way. “Remember Frank Harmon? Ran into him the other day. Damnedest thing. He was with this kid.…”

  Frank and Breezy meet when a stray dog is hit by a car. She is beside herself. He takes it to a vet and eventually adopts it. Eventually he adopts Breezy, too, and permits her to charm him out of his shell (“Do you mind very much if I love you?”). Difficulties, of course, ensue. When they run into his ex-wife and friends from his former life, he finds himself embarrassed. They split up, but then Frank’s former lover, a woman of his own age, is involved in an accident in which her husband, to whom she has been married only a week, is killed. Visiting her in the hospital, Frank is forcefully reminded of life’s brevity, and of the need to grasp what happiness one can, however fleeting it may be. Reunited with Breezy he says, “I don’t know, if we’re lucky we might have a year,” to which she replies, “Just think of it, Frank, a whole year.”

  Her infallible optimism—“I never wake up in the morning with someone who made me sorry I was there, but I’ll bet you have”—reads perhaps more fatuously than it plays in understated context, which is no more than mildly critical of the hippie lifestyle (in its view, that’s just another kind of conformity) and portrays its heroine more as a loner than a communard, almost a young female version of the character Clint typically plays, appearing out of nowhere to unsettle the comfortably settled.

  Similarly, it is no more than mildly sympathetic with Frank’s emotional immobility. It observes his self-pity without particularly indulging it. At one point Breezy tells him that if he were an Indian his name would undoubtedly be Black Cloud. When his former lady friend tells him that she is going to get married, he apologizes: “I feel a terrible sense of loss. I just wish it could have been more.” To which she replies: “It was—I just wish you could have been there.” Been there emotionally, she means. As for his friends, tsk-tsking over his affair with this child, the film’s dismissiveness stops short of satire. It simply argues that age, social status and long-term calculation are not—or should not be—of much moment in comparison to grasping those few moments of intense happiness life occasionally offers us. It says, gently, that some lovers do flout convention and that our responses to them perhaps ought to be more generous than they usually are.

  One may like the film for its refusal to age its hero down or its heroine up, for pushing the movie convention of the much older leading man involved with the much younger leading woman about as far as it can be pushed and doing so less nervously than, say, Love in the Afternoon did, for setting its story in quotidian Encino instead of a romantic capital like Paris, where popular fiction has conditioned us to expect and accept all sorts of curious romantic happenings. But finally the film is less challenging than it might be. Aware that it is flirting with absurdity (or, at the least, laughter in the wrong places) on the one hand, erotic danger on the other, it settles for good nature, good taste and a light slathering of sentiment, supplied mainly by a title song that does not represent Michel Legrand and Marilyn and Alan Bergman at their best. Once again, Clint was too polite in his eroticism.

  The film, which did no more than recoup its very low cost, was virtually thrown away by the studio—another slight silently stored by its restive director—and treated casually, more often than not jokingly, by the reviewers. Most of them praised Holden’s work and welcomed Lenz’s freshness, and a minority thought well of the film, but few of them observed its largest significance: that it completed a very enterprising trio of movies by a new director who was signaling a desire to explore an unusually large range of material.

  By the time he finished work on Breezy, which was released in November 1973, Clint had two new scripts nearly ready to go and was committed to a June start date for one of them, Magnum Force, the first of the Dirty Harry
sequels. In the meantime, however, he endured, and survived unscathed (except in his own mind), one of his unhappiest public appearances. He agreed to appear on the Academy Awards broadcast on March 27, 1973. With High Plains Drifter scheduled for release three weeks later it couldn’t hurt. And besides, this was the first substantial acknowledgment of his rising status by establishment Hollywood.

  Clint is never entirely comfortable when he is obliged to disport himself before large audiences on formal occasions, but on the appointed evening he was more or less calmly in his place, down front in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with Maggie beside him, when a harassed Howard Koch, the show’s producer, suddenly materialized before him. Charlton Heston, one of the program’s four hosts, and the one supposed to open the program, was missing (a flat tire on the freeway), and it was now just minutes from airtime. Would Clint fill in for him? No, no, he demurred, he was not prepared, and besides, “Where’s Gregory Peck and all those guys?”—Hollywood’s designated dignitaries. Unavailable, said Koch. But what would I say? Clint asked. Just read whatever the TelePrompTer has on it, Koch pleaded. Oh, go ahead, Maggie chimed in. Oh, all right, Clint finally said, and permitted himself to be hustled backstage, seconds before the orchestra struck up the overture. A couple of minutes later he was shoved on stage.

  The desperate Koch had forgotten that the opening monologue was full of jokes tailored for Heston, mostly revolving around his screen impersonation of Moses in The Ten Commandments. Clint gamely started in on them, but soon found himself squinting unhappily at the prompter, visibly distraught. “It’s not good writing to begin with, but at least it has some relevance to Heston. With me it made no sense, and I’m drying up.” He was also hearing the hearty guffaws of his pal Burt Reynolds riding over the nervous titters of the audience. He was rescued, rather rudely, by Heston, who practically straight-armed him away from the microphone in order to launch into what was left of his dismal routine. Exiting rather shamefacedly, Clint asked someone backstage for a beer; a six-pack was produced and he recalls chugalugging most of it before slinking back into the auditorium.

  Meanwhile, the most memorably disastrous of all Academy Award broadcasts rolled on. Marlon Brando was nominated for best actor for The Godfather and favored to win—Hollywood welcoing a prodigal home. The actor, however, left his appearance in doubt, until just before airtime, when a woman calling herself Sasheen Littlefeather (her real name was Maria Cruz, and she had once been named Miss American Vampire) appeared in the lobby, announcing herself as Brando’s surrogate. Dressed in tribal regalia, she engaged Koch in a spirited negotiation about the four-hundred-word speech Brando had given her to read in case he won. It was a polemic about the condition and treatment of Native Americans, with particular reference to their portrayal in the movies. The producer said it was too long and informed her that he would cut her off after two minutes. She, of course, protested, and Koch found himself hoping against hope that one of the other nominees would upset Brando.

  No such luck. He won as predicted and “Littlefeather” made her way to the stage, where, maintaining considerable dignity amid boos and catcalls, she improvised a shortened version of his speech, concluding on a conciliatory note: “I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening, and that we will, in the future, meet with love and understanding in our hearts. Thank you for Marlon Brando.”

  There was no applause, and Michael Caine, who was one of the hosts, came on to say that if a man had a message to impart he ought to have the gumption to deliver it himself. Finally, it was Clint’s turn to present the best picture prize—as it happened, to his friend Al Ruddy, producer of The Godfather. By this time he was back to himself, and ironically suggested that perhaps it might be dedicated to “all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns over the years.”

  Still, after the show Clint told Koch, “Howard, I’m never coming back here again.” What if you get a nomination sometime? the producer asked. Well, in that case.… But Clint thought this a remote possibility. He didn’t make that kind of movie. In the years ahead he talked occasionally, with a certain asperity, about all the great figures—Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, so many others—who never won an Oscar and had to wait into old age to collect the honorary statuette traditionally presented the Academy’s refuses. He also took to imagining the time when his turn would come. “I’ll be so old they’ll have to carry me up there.… ‘Thank you all for this honorary award’ and splat, goodbye Dirty Harry.”

  Things worked out more happily than that, of course. He won his two Oscars for Unforgiven in 1993, returned the following year to present the best picture award to his friend and occasional colleague Steven Spielberg and came back again in 1995 to accept the honorary Irving Thalberg Award, all without geriatric incident. But until 1993 he continued to reject all offers to appear on its award show.

  Reincarnating Dirty Harry turned out to be less simple than it might have been. Clint remembers John Milius calling him when he was on location doing High Plains Drifter to pitch an idea for the sequel. The activities of the so-called death squads in Brazil had begun to be heavily reported in the American press, and the writer was, as Clint puts it, obsessed with the subject. These secret, extralegal bands of right-wing policemen functioned as vigilantes, executing political opponents they could not legally apprehend. They had initially regarded themselves as idealists, preposterous as that may seem, but had quickly succumbed to corruption, becoming hit men for hire to anyone with a grievance and money. What if, Milius asked Clint, Harry Callahan’s San Francisco police department found itself harboring such an organization? Clint was immediately enthusiastic. The story was novel, and it would give his character a chance to establish unequivocably his antifascist credentials. He and Milius quickly made a deal.

  The other script Clint had in hand was Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a marvelously eccentric caper-cum-buddy picture set in Montana. It was submitted to him on a Friday—Cimino was also a William Morris client—and he optioned it the following Monday. “I just liked the oddness, the crazy characters,” Clint remembers. “Michael must have written it in some hallucinative state.” It needed some polishing, Clint thought, and he also had to consider the nonnegotiable condition Cimino had attached to the script’s sale—that he be permitted to direct the film, which would be his first feature (a graduate of Michigan State with an MFA in painting from Yale, he had been a successful director of commercials in New York and had cowritten Silent Running in 1971).

  Now, however, a problem arose. Sixty pages into his screenplay for Magnum Force, Milius was offered his first opportunity to direct—his own script for Dillinger. He asked Clint to find someone else to finish the Dirty Harry project, and Clint, in turn, asked Cimino to do so. The latter set aside rewrites on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and completed Milius’s script with no apparent difficulty.

  The film’s basic situation is straightforward: All over San Francisco distasteful people—drug dealers, mobsters and so on—are being eliminated. No one much mourns their passing, but, well, murder is murder, and something must be done about it. Suspicion briefly falls on Harry Callahan, with his well-known predilection for taking the law into his own hands. But Harry, as we also know, tends to shoot from the hip (and the lip), usually when he’s angry and under pressure. These well-planned crimes are more like executions than murders—and do not fit Harry’s MO. Eventually he discovers that they are the work of a group of young policemen—neatly turned out, chillingly correct in manner and very competent.

  An old partner, Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan), and a new one, a black man named Early Smith (Felton Perry), are both murdered by the death squad, and, needless to say, this rivets Harry’s attention, which is more and more focused on Lieutenant Neil Briggs, played by Hal Holbrook (in a nice bit of off-casting) with an American-flag pin in his lapel and a deadly primness in his manner. Harry has initially underestimated him as just another one of his bureaucratic nemeses, but it soon becomes clear
that Briggs is more dangerous than he looks, that he is, in fact, the organizer and leader of this Americanized death squad.

  The movie’s tag line, which Harry keeps muttering in this situation, is “A man’s got to know his limitations,” but the arrogant and selfrighteous Briggs does not. He lures Harry into a car, ostensibly to discuss the case, then draws a gun on him and orders Harry to drive them to what is obviously intended as his execution site. This—as a hundred movies have taught us—is a mistake. It is a good idea, never recognized by villains, to shoot first and talk later.

  In this case it provides a moment for what passes in context as a philosophical exchange. It begins with Briggs expressing disappointment that Harry hasn’t joined his secret service. “I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me,” Harry says with mild and comical formality—it’s the movie’s most resonant moment, since the line is obviously addressed as much to Dirty Harry’s critics as it is to Briggs. The lieutenant responds with a historical analogy: “A hundred years ago in this city people did the same thing,” says Briggs. “History justified the vigilantes. We’re no different. Anyone who threatens the security of the people will be executed. Evil for evil, Harry. Retribution.”

  To which Harry replies: “That’s fine. But how does murder fit in? When the police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it gonna end? Pretty soon you start executing people for jaywalking, then executing them for traffic violations. Then you end up executing your neighbor because his dog pissed on your lawn.”