Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  One inescapably imagines the adventures of Josey Wales, this Southern sympathizer, this “hard-put and desperate man” (as one character describes him in the screenplay), this outcast redeeming himself, as a wish-fulfilling fantasy on Carter’s part. One of his novel’s subtexts, a distrust of government, which first brutally betrays and then obsessively harries his hero, would seem to reflect the author’s profound suspicion of federal authority. One could speculate as well that the idea, implicit in the book, that ordinary people, left to their own devices, can work out their conflicts peaceably—a metaphoric expression of what had been a typical Southern response to federal enforcement of civil rights laws—reflects, in housebroken form, one of the author’s core beliefs.

  Knowing nothing of the author’s racist past, these notions, in the benign form the book presented them, spoke clearly to Clint—particularly to his wariness about government—though needless to say, they were not for him, as they were for Carter, a coded argument against racial integration. When he discusses this film, Clint rarely fails to mention that it was developed in the aftermath of those two great betrayals of trust by American authority, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

  For whatever reason, he was unusually angry—and open—in his contempt for statism at this time. Shortly after The Outlaw Josey Wales was released, when he was in England promoting the film, he was quoted as saying: “Today we live in a welfare-oriented society, and people expect more, more from Big Daddy government, more from Big Daddy charity. That philosophy never got you anywhere. I worked for every crust of bread I ever ate.” He was also feeling isolated, lacking, as he said “the gift it takes to enjoy fame.” When a trade-paper reporter asked him why blacks tended to be such enthusiastic supporters of his work, Clint said: “I suppose they see me as an outcast. I play a lot of outcasts.”

  Some of those feelings, more ambiguously stated, are certainly to be found in the film. But hard-put and desperate though he may be, Josey Wales retains a dry, wary, saving sense of humor. It is only in his climactic parlay with Ten Bears that his disgust with government is articulated. But the fact that officialdom speaks in “double-tongues” is a conventional, even stylized, trope in such movie encounters. We expect and accept it quite equably.

  Looking back on the film now, Clint insists that it was the other aspects of Carter’s story that provided its largest attractions. The most obvious of these was “the saga of it”—its movement across vast landscapes, the rich variety of characters and situations it encompassed. None of his other westerns had, or would have, these qualities. Nor had they heretofore offered a “total chronology”—a motivating back story with significant emotional development proceeding from it: “I’d always played the guy who appeared out of nowhere.” He also liked the way it portrayed Native Americans neither sentimentally nor as savages. It treated them with “a certain humanness that we hadn’t seen in the movies in a long time.” In particular in Chief Dan George’s marvelous performance as Lone Watie, who often functions as a kind of chorus commenting on the action, the movie grants to at least one Native American a quality almost never attributed to his race by popular culture, a wise and ironic sense of humor.

  Finally, however, it was the reconciliatory note struck by the film that constituted its most significant virtue in Clint’s eyes. Entirely aware of the parallels the film draws between the Reconstruction era and the post-Vietnam era, Clint insists that he intended, as well, a more generally pacifistic message—“It was just any war, any war you can name in history.” In this connection, he raises a familiar irony: Man, the planet’s most intelligent creature, is also the one that “can raise the most mayhem.” He adds: “At the time I felt that it was a statement that mankind has to find a better solution than just battling themselves into the ground.” If not, “there’ll be no one left, eventually; we will have gone the way of T. rex and the rest of the dinosaurs.”

  The film presents this theme with considerable indirection. Josey Wales must inflict considerable “mayhem” in pursuit of peace. But in the negotiated settlement with Ten Bears, and in his final exchange with the last of his soldierly pursuers, in which they pretend not to know one another and go their separate ways as if nothing had happened, a “better solution”—a sort of forgiving amnesia—is definitely endorsed.

  The theme of reconciliation is presented in similarly indirect fashion. Josey is, on the face of it, one of Clint’s classic, wounded loners—“A reticent-type person, he doesn’t want relationships.” But as Clint also puts it, “The more he doesn’t want them, the more they keep imposing themselves upon him.” Working on, manipulating, that shred of good nature that is still present in him, until at last, without his ever overtly acknowledging it, “this little commune” heals and restores him to the human family. It was the first time his radically isolated screen character had come to such a comfortable end, the first time a film did not leave him as it found him—alone with his self-sufficiency.

  All of these ideas, together with a great deal of its dialogue, were transferred more or less intact from book to first-draft adaptation by Sonia Chernus. Dean Riesner then did some work on it, but Clint still felt the screenplay needed more suspense and hired Philip Kaufman for the final polish, thinking he might also be a good choice to direct the film.

  Quiet and somewhat intellectual in manner, Kaufman was a graduate of the University of Chicago with a degree in history who had briefly studied law, drifted around Europe and tried writing fiction before becoming enamored of film, particularly postwar European film. After some low-budget apprentice work he had written and directed The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, an antiromantic variant on the Jesse James legend, which Jennings Lang had produced at Universal and Bruce Surtees had photographed. He followed that with The White Dawn, a rather glum and claustrophobic tale of nineteenth-century whalers shipwrecked in the Arctic and falling into brutal conflict with their Eskimo rescuers. Clint particularly responded to the film’s unblinking realism.

  Kaufman discovered what Clint thought was the key to unlocking the full dramatic power of The Outlaw Josey Wales. In the book and in the first draft the protagonist’s old enemies, the Redlegs, had simply faded out in the last half of the story; in Kaufman’s revision they were kept alive, hunting him, haunting him, for the length of the movie, keeping tension alive. Clint thought this invention important enough to earn Kaufman the right to direct the film.

  Jim Fargo, however, quickly began to have doubts. Scouting locations with Kaufman, the AD thought he was somewhat indecisive and began to fear trouble with the always impatient Clint. They did, however, finally settle on a variety of sites in Arizona, Nevada and northern California, with the first major sequence on the production schedule the rapacious assault on Laura Lee’s wagon by the Comancheros, set for the desolate country outside Page, Arizona. It was there, during the first few days of principal photography, that things began to fall apart for Kaufman. He began the sequence before Clint arrived on location, and he was disappointed in the dailies that were forwarded to him. So was Bob Daley; “milquetoast,” he called them; “there was just no power whatever in the thing.”

  Matters did not improve when Clint began working with Kaufman. As Fargo put it, “Phil was the kind of director who comes out there prepared, but likes to sit there and look and say, ‘Now what if we did this? And what if we did that?’ And Clint’s just going up a tree.” This, to him, was self-indulgence.

  Kaufman’s story is otherwise. Years later, he told a reporter that “the original novel … was kind of grim and right-wingish, and I thought it would be a good idea to take a slightly different approach, maybe inject some humor into it. Eastwood didn’t think so.”

  The description of the book is not entirely inaccurate, but it is obvious that Clint raised no objection to the lightening of the movie. The finished film is full of humor; it is one of its salient qualities. Kaufman also put it about that Clint resisted his efforts to probe more profoundly into the material. David Thomson
has written: “Philip Kaufman asked for more takes. ‘Why?’ asked Clint. ‘What do you want me to do different?’ And Kaufman said he wasn’t sure, but he felt repetition would take them deeper. For Clint, repetition sounded like indecision, wasted time and going over budget.”

  The crisis came with what Clint now refers to as “a Captain Queeg incident.” The conclusion of the Comanchero sequence begins with the near-magical appearance of Josey Wales, backlit, riding over the crest of a sand dune, with the sun behind him, partially blinding the superior force he was about to attack. The shot was planned for magic hour, late in the afternoon when the sun is low and glowing, the shadows particularly long and photogenic. One day a small party, consisting of Clint, Kaufman, Fargo, Surtees and Fritz Manes, Clint’s high-school buddy who had just joined Malpaso, set out to grab it.

  As it happened, Fargo and Kaufman had scouted these dunes, and the director had placed a discarded container of some sort along the road to mark the place where he planned to place his camera. Over the intervening weeks the ever-shifting sands covered his marker, but he was determined to find it, and he ridiculously kept halting the little expedition to search it out.

  It was absurd. There were dozens of heights suitable for the shot, and time pressure was mounting; magic hour does not last forever. Finally, at one stop, which appeared entirely appropriate for their purposes, Clint proposed setting up. The director demurred. So Clint told him to take one of the vehicles and a driver to continue his search while the rest of the party waited. As Kaufman prepared to depart, Clint turned to Fargo and asked where he’d put the camera.

  Fargo was standing in a declivity with a nice up-angle on a nearby ridge. “Right here,” he said, pointing at his feet. “Get the camera.” “God, I can’t. That’s the director over there.” “Get the camera,” Clint repeated. “Let’s shoot it.” The minute Kaufman decamped they did, then packed up, leaving Manes with a car to await Kaufman’s return. The director, according to Manes, saw that his authority was now fatally compromised, and proposed a confrontation with the star, from which Manes says he dissuaded him.

  It would have been too late in any case. That night Clint placed a call to his lawyer to discuss the ramifications of firing the director and taking over himself. “If I kept him,” Clint says, “I knew I couldn’t keep my promise to the studio as far as schedule and budget went. And since I’d put my own money up to buy the story, I thought I had that right.”

  There is more to the decision than that, of course. Even if Kaufman suddenly became a model of efficiency, Clint could see that the temperamental differences between them would make a good working relationship impossible. Kaufman continued to shoot for the remainder of the week. But when Daley arrived on location at the end of work on Saturday Clint drew him aside and told him he was going to let Kaufman go. He was, Daley reports, anguished about it, but rejected the producer’s offer to accompany him to the final confrontation. What passed between them no one but Clint and Kaufman know. All the former says is, “It’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life.” For a man whose own memories of the cruelties and insecurities of the movie business are always lively it surely was, and there were consequences for both of them. It was three years before Kaufman directed another movie, and Clint’s action caused the Directors Guild to promulgate a rule forbidding one of its members from being replaced by anyone working in any capacity on the picture from which he or she has been removed.

  Genuine as the issues between him and Clint were, Kaufman was to a degree the victim of Clint’s growing confidence in his own abilities. The polite young actor, eager to learn, the aspiring director, acquiring the rudiments of that craft by observation and by relatively modest doing, were—perhaps somewhat to his own surprise—creatures of the past. His power was unquestionable now, and he had all the skills required to handle any kind of picture. There was no longer any need for him to tolerate styles and methods antithetical to his own. From this point onward he would either direct himself or he would employ people he knew would defer to him.

  As for Josey Wales, Jim Fargo says “it became a labor of love,” with even the weather contributing to the sense of well-being that now settled over the production. Clint has spoken most volubly on the pleasures of working with Chief Dan George. “He just had a great charisma. In fact, the first time I saw him he came in in an all-white suit—white tie, white shirt, white coat—and he looked like some Indian god, and he had this great big Swedish gal who was a little bit taller than he was, and she was his ‘nurse’—at least that’s the way it was presented to me.” Once or twice he appeared on set a trifle worn by evenings spent dancing or otherwise partying with his companion, but he was always ready to work. And Clint kept giving him more to do, so effective was his presence in the film. At his age (an estimated seventy-seven) the chief, who had given a similar, and similarly touching, performance in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man—a much angrier use of the western form as a Vietnam metaphor—five years earlier, did have some trouble remembering his lines. “When the camera was rolling,” Clint remembers, “I’d say to him, ‘Chief, just forget about all those lines, just forget all that dialogue and everything you’ve been rehearsing, and just sit here for a minute.’ So we’d sit there and the cameras would roll, and then I’d say, ‘Now tell me that story, you know, about the Indian that came over the hill.’ ” Quickly the chief would find himself taken up by whatever tale he was telling, recounting it in his own words, but coming close enough to the script and, in his immediacy, vastly improving on it. “I’d find myself mesmerized,” Clint would later recall. So much so that on one occasion, when Josey and Lone Watie are saying what they both imagine is a final farewell, he brought Clint to tears, and Clint thought for a moment he was going to lose it completely. “I thought, God, how am I going to keep my composure if he’s going to tug me like this?”

  But tug at him the old man was supposed to do, and Clint’s delicate—and generous—relationship with the chief particularly impressed Sondra Locke. She spoke of it several times in subsequent interviews. She also spoke of Clint’s insistence on realism, with a special emphasis on deglamorization, in his work with her. In her account, he kept shooing the makeup man away from her and registered dismay when she went to her trailer to make repairs on her own. One time, when her eyebrows were singed by fire and she asked him what to do about it, he replied, “Oh, the stumps look fine.”

  He had cast her for her vulnerability and because, as he put it, “She didn’t look like she came out of some Hollywood casting session.” What he discovered working with her was an eccentric intelligence that intrigued him.

  Locke is a fragile-looking woman, five feet, four inches, in height, weighing scarcely more than one hundred pounds, with luminous blue eyes. Born and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee, she was, as she frequently told interviewers, a shy and dreamy child, somewhat disaffected from her parents and drawn early and deeply into the fantasy world of the movies. When she was eleven a young man named Gordon Anderson, four years her elder, and equally detached from mundane reality, moved to Shelbyville. They quickly became inseparable (“the weird two, the town dreamers,” as she put it later), memorizing movie scenes and playing them with one another. Sometimes he would hold a mirror up to her face so she could get an idea of what she would look like in a close-up. Eventually, because their school did not have a drama teacher, he directed her in a production of the hoary thriller The Monkey’s Paw, which they took to a statewide competition and against the odds won—he as best director, she as best actress.

  Thereafter, she attended junior college in Nashville, where she also did some acting and continued to think about performing professionally. Anderson, meanwhile, moved to New York to pursue an acting career. There he heard about a talent search concentrated in the Southern states in which an unknown was to be sought for the role of Mick Kelly, a fourteen-year-old tomboy, in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

  Like most of her
work, it was a story about outcasts and their inappropriate affections, here a deaf-mute living in a small southern town. Anderson thought Locke, who was now twenty years old, would be perfect as the adolescent who befriends him. He came home to prepare her for one of the open calls scheduled to take place in several large cities. He had her bind her bosom with an elastic bandage and buy some sack dresses to further disguise her mature figure. He also thinned and braided her hair, painted freckles on her nose and even wrapped another bandage, slightly bloodstained, around her knee, suggesting that she had perhaps skinned it falling out of a tree. In this getup, she later reported, she felt transformed, knowing how her character “would act, feel and think.”

  Off they went to a tryout in Birmingham, where they found hundreds of young women, most of them sponsored by local theatrical organizations, gathered to compete for the role. Marion Dougherty, the casting agent who later worked on a number of Clint’s movies, told him that Locke’s audition was the last of the day, and that her associates told her that, since she had no sponsorship, she was not obliged to read her. But knowing how far she had come, Dougherty decided to hear her out. She was electrified by the performance. Locke was asked to come to New Orleans for another audition, repeated her success there and was then flown to New York, where after lightening the deep Southern accent she had been affecting, she was given the role.

  She had insisted all along that she was only seventeen, and that fiction was maintained—in fact, heavily stressed—in publicity about the film, though by this time Warner Bros. knew her true age, since she had been free to sign her own contract, without parental approval. But no one could resist the story of the “shy office worker” catapulted to “overnight stardom” at a tender age. As it happened, she was very effective in the film, winning an Academy Award nomination (along with her costar Alan Arkin).