Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  This may be, as critic James Bernardoni suggests, the most Hawksian of Eastwood films, but it is at pains to mute the camaraderie that develops, as it does in a Hawks film, as men pursue a large and dangerous enterprise. Bonding here is a thing not spoken of, not even suggested by ribbing and shared jokes as it usually is in Hawks’s work. Nor is there much in the way of back story or motivation. Don Simpson had argued for more of both, but all he got was a single word. One day in the prison yard English asks Morris what kind of childhood he had, and receives an unimprovable reply: “Short.”

  Indeed, what sets this movie apart from most everything else in its genre is its reluctance to curry audience favor for Morris and his coconspirators. Ultimately, we don’t care whether they are good guys or bad guys, or what their hard-luck stories may be. It is what they do, not who they are, that we are involved with. Over many months they are required to excavate escape routes from their cells using homemade tools. Tuggle and Siegel understand that the audacity, cunning and patience required by this huge, inching effort is in itself redemptive, that it renders anything else these men have done in life unimportant, that without cuing we will inevitably come to see their accomplishment as inspiring.

  Clint had never much liked prison movies—“not enough sprawl to them”—but Morris was a highly intelligent man (Clint was shown prison records reporting an IQ over 140) with very little formal education, and he could identify with someone employing native wit to master an intricate task. Alcatraz also represented authority at its most crushing, the escape from it the ultimate act of rebellion against it, and he could certainly relate to that.

  Clint was to the film what his character was to the escape attempt—the man who kept it together. Siegel reported him eagerly clambering over, into and through every nook and cranny of the disused prison on their first scouting trip, relishing every dank possibility they discovered. Once they started work, it was to him that Siegel looked to shush the tourists when they interrupted shooting, buying their silence with the promise of autographs. It was Clint, controlling his temper, who placated the park service rangers, always fussing over potential damage to a national monument (and San Francisco’s number one tourist attraction). For example, graffiti left over from the Indian occupation of the island and from various hippie infestations were regarded as historically precious, and the moviemakers were not allowed to paint it out permanently. He could not understand by what leap of the bureaucratic imagination acts of desecration were converted into memorials.

  But his good humor and Siegel’s were unwavering. An oft-repeated recollection of the shoot involves Patrick McGoohan, who had taken to fortifying himself against the cold with odd nips from the bottle and who was always anxious to leave the location on time. One day, as the clock crept toward quitting time, Siegel asked him to stay for one more shot, an insert of his hand dropping a nail clipper that Clint’s character would soon filch as a useful escape tool. McGoohan demurred, saying, “Well, it’s just a hand shot, you can get any actor to do it.” As Tuggle recalls, “Don looked over at Clint, and looked back at McGoohan and said, ‘I don’t think we can do that.’ And McGoohan said, ‘Why not?’ And Don said, ‘Because I don’t think we can get any actor in Hollywood whose hand is shaking as much as yours to match the shot.’ ” Clint was dispatched to soothe the outraged actor.

  Ever the realist, Clint did not think that Morris and his confederates actually made good their escape. He consulted his friend Jack LaLanne, the fitness expert (he had advised Maggie on diet and exercise when she was carrying Kyle), who had actually swum the waters around Alcatraz as a stunt, and he convinced Clint that no one could survive the cold and the currents without special training, which the prisoners, obviously, could not have managed. Siegel agreed. In his first cut he strongly implied that the escapees had died in the water. But that was too glum even for Clint. He insisted on a restoration of a little sequence in which the warden finds evidence (a chrysanthemum, the film’s symbol of resistance to authority) that they made it to the dry land of Angel Island. It was the right decision. True to life or not, he (and the audience) wanted this great effort to be rewarded.

  Clint did more than the usual amount of work on postproduction. Siegel was pressed by preparations for his next film—Burt Reynolds’s Rough Cut—which took him out of the country, and there were some problems with the director’s cut. Most of it was concentrated on material shot on a Paramount soundstage, where a cell block had been recreated with flyaway walls so the camera could work in tight spaces. Much insert material was made there—details of the escapees digging their way to freedom—and for once Siegel had more material than he knew what to do with. Clint asked for a dupe of this footage, reworked it with Ferris Webster and showed the results to Siegel a couple of days later. The director liked it and admitted that perhaps he had just got too close to the material. Later on, with Siegel shooting in England, Clint supervised the film’s mix.

  They were rewarded by some of the best reviews they had ever received. Vincent Canby insisted that “this is not a great film, or an especially memorable one,” then proceeded to write as if it were both, insisting “there is more evident skill and knowledge of moviemaking in any one frame of it than there is in most other American films around at the moment.” As for Clint’s performance, he still wondered, “Is it acting?” confessed he didn’t know, but called him “a towering figure” in the movie’s landscape. Most of his colleagues were less reserved, with Frank Rich in Time pretty much summarizing critical response with his praise of the film’s “elegant” cinematography, its “controlled idiosyncratic performances” and Siegel’s “lean” direction. As for Clint: “At a time when Hollywood entertainments are more overblown than ever, Eastwood proves that less really can be more.” One or two reviewers even compared it to austere Robert Bresson’s great prison picture A Man Escaped—more aptly than they perhaps knew, for the revered French director had acknowledged the influence on that film of Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11.

  The film did as well at the box office as it did with the reviewers. It took in only about half of what Every Which Way but Loose did and only about a quarter of the year’s top grosser, Superman. But it was a solid fifteenth on 1979’s list of box-office grossers, making Clint the only star with two vehicles represented there. What was particularly pleasing to him was that its grosses were virtually the same as those of Apocalypse Now, which he had turned down, and which, in its long agony of production, had cost $10 million more than Escape from Alcatraz took in at the domestic box office. “With Francis Coppola’s budget, I could have invaded a country,” he commented dryly.

  He also could have made four or five movies like Bronco Billy, one of the films of which Clint remains the most proud. It was possibly the most casually acquired of all his projects. He was having dinner one night with Sidney Beckerman at Dan Tana’s, an informal Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, much favored by movie people of his generation, when a young woman—“a little blond gal”—an acquaintance of the producer, wandered over to speak to them. Clint learned that she worked for Dennis Hackin and Neal Dobrofsky, young writer-producers getting a start in the business. The next day she called and asked if she could drop off a script Hackin had written. “It’s a thing called Bronco Billy,” she told him. “Oh, is this Bronco Billy Anderson?” he asked. No, she said, obviously never having heard of the actor who was, briefly, the silent movies’ first western star.

  He said he’d take a look at it, and later in the day found the script sitting on his secretary’s desk. He picked it up casually—“I thought I’d give it four or five pages”—but found he couldn’t put it down. “I finished the whole thing right there at the desk,” thinking, as he recalls, Goddamn, this is wild. It’s like Frank Capra—if Frank Capra were directing today, I’ll bet he’d want to direct this.

  Intrigued, but a trifle hesitant—this was, if anything, farther off his path than Every Which Way but Loose had been—“I thought about it fo
r a couple of days, and I gave it to Sondra Locke and I said, ‘Let me know what you think of this script.’ And she read it and she said, ‘I think it’s just utterly charming.’ So I went ahead and made it.”

  Just like that—in five and a half weeks, in the country around Boise, Idaho, on what Clint calls one of the most “affable” shoots of his career. The genial cast and crew obviously took a cue from this sweet tale of one Bronco Billy McCoy, honchoing his game but understaffed Wild West show along the back roads of a contemporary West increasingly indifferent to the very traditions his show celebrates.

  “There was something so beautifully naive about it all,” Clint says, “a guy who’s a shoe salesman in New Jersey goes out and has this dream of becoming a modern-day Tom Mix or something like that.” Not to mention a “dream of making this group of losers become something, become an example for young people and teach values that a lot of people think have long been lost in America. He had great virtues—though obviously his brain had snapped, and he had gone into another era.”

  Among his losers he numbered Lasso Leonard James (Sam Bottoms), who does rope tricks and is a Vietnam draft dodger; Chief Big Eagle (Dan Vadis), a snake handler who refuses to use nonpoisonous snakes in his act or to remove the venom from his rattlers (“He’s a proud Indian,” Billy says, unperturbed, when he is once again bitten); his wife, Lorraine Running Water (Sierra Pecheur), who does “authentic” tribal dances and whose pregnancy adds to the perils of the little company; Lefty LeBow (Bill McKinney), who has lost a hand in a gun accident (“I told you that shotgun act wouldn’t work”), and Doc Lynch (Scatman Crothers), the ringmaster, keeping a bemused but sympathetic eye on this odd lot, none of whom is odder than their leader.

  Billy is actually pretty good at what he does—trick riding, fancy shooting and knife throwing, though in the latter activity he’s occasionally a bit shaky. His routine consists of placing a large wheel, bedecked with balloons and with a pretty assistant strapped to it, in whirling motion, then, blindfolded, launching his blades at the balloons. Occasionally, he misses them and comes perilously close to his assistant. Loses more girls that way.

  Which is where Locke’s runaway heiress, Antoinette Lily, comes in. In order to claim her inheritance, she has been obliged to marry, choosing dopily scheming John Arlington (Geoffrey Lewis), who, unable to abide her temper, leaves her penniless, but still snooty, at a gas station. It’s there that she meets Bronco Billy, who is looking for a new target and offers her the job. They instantly learn to despise one another—he because she continues in her uppity ways, she because he’s such a hopeless square.

  Billy’s lifestyle is based on three inviolable principles: reverence for children, fanatical loyalty to one’s friends and a belief that in America one can be anything one sets one’s mind to becoming. Billy’s manner as he states, and acts out, these beliefs is grave and courtly, his language formal in the style of bygone dime-novel (and B-movie) western heroes. We soon come to understand that something more than naïveté is operating here. Bronco Billy has achieved an almost-saintly state of grace in his simple faith. It is not his problem that, like a religious fundamentalist, his creed is, to most of us, laughably primitive. It is our problem—or, more specifically, Miss Lily’s, who besides being the movie’s love interest is also the voice of our skepticism, a voice that exists to be awed into silence by this gently cracked true believer.

  Not that the movie makes much of this conversion. It is as objective in its way as Escape from Alcatraz is in that it takes no position—indignant or indulgent—about its protagonist. We laugh at Billy and his ways, but there is no superiority or cynicism in our laughter; the movie simply won’t countenance it.

  Consider a typical encounter between Billy and his “little pardners,” as he habitually calls the kids who are his last reliable audience. A bunch of them are standing around admiring his car, an antique Pontiac with a steer-horn hood ornament and revolvers for door handles. He impresses them with a fast draw and then offers a little homily: “I don’t take kindly to kids playing hookey from school. I think every kid in America ought to go to school, at least up to the eighth grade.” “But we don’t go to school today, Bronco Billy. It’s Saturday.” “Oh. Well, I’ve been riding late last night. A man and his brain get kind of fuzzy when he’s been on the range.”

  His fanatical sense of loyalty is demonstrated with similar directness. Its most comical expression comes when he confesses to Miss Lily that he did seven years in jail for attempted homicide. Seems he caught his wife in bed with his best friend. “What did you do to him?” she asks. “I shot her.” A man doesn’t turn against a friend—especially a best friend—that easily.

  A sterner test arises when a sheriff comes around looking for Lasso Leonard. The only way to prevent him from being arrested for draft evasion is for Bronco Billy to permit himself to be bullied and humiliated by the lawman. It’s a nice moral dilemma. Like Clint himself, Billy is highly ambivalent about the war, but he is, of course, a patriot and no fan of radical dissent. Still, this is his friend. He has no choice but to defend him.

  He will also, reluctantly, contemplate breaking the law himself. Desperate for money, he decides to lead his troupe in an old-fashioned train robbery. As they wait at a crossing, mounted and armed, he justifies this desperate defense of his dying dream to Miss Lily: “I was raised in a one-room tenement in New Jersey. I was a shoe salesman until I was thirty-one years old. Deep down in my heart I always wanted to be a cowboy. One day I laid down my shoehorn and swore I’d never live in the city again. You only live once. You’ve got to give it your best shot.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “I’m who I want to be” comes the firm reply. Which is not much of a lawbreaker. This may be an old-fashioned robbery, but this is a newfangled train—a speeding behemoth that hurtles heedlessly by the little band galloping futilely beside it, pistols impotently waving.

  Eventually, Bronco Billy and friends come to crisis. A fire destroys their tent, and Miss Lily deserts them (she discovers her husband is claiming she’s dead and as her presumptive widower has launched a wild scheme to abscond with her inheritance). It is Billy’s faithfulness to principle that saves the show. Every year on their rounds his troupe has given a free performance at an insane asylum, whose inmates sew American flags for therapy and income. Because of his kindness they stitch together a tent, made entirely of stars and stripes, for them to play under. And Miss Lily, contrasting the empty vanity of the New York life to which she briefly returns with the sweet simplicity of tent-show life, comes back to Bronco Billy in time for the triumphant performance (to a packed house) that concludes the film.

  Clint was not immune to the symbolism of this sequence. This was, if you will, the big tent—the big, visibly American tent politicians are always wistfully talking about. “I wanted to say something about everybody being able to participate,” Clint told reporter John Vinocur. “America is the maddest idea in the world, put together by madmen. So here comes this tent” with its “collage of crazies” gathered happily beneath it. The reconciling message is not so very different, come to think of it, from that of The Outlaw Josey Wales. Here, however, a new generation is being recruited for the community, though in his dimness Billy never finds the metaphors appropriate to his great, self-appointed task.

  “I’ve got a special message for you little pardners out there,” Billy says in his curtain speech. “I want you to finish your oatmeal at breakfast and do as your ma and pa tell you, because they know best. Don’t ever tell a lie and say your prayers at night before you go to bed.” The looks on the little pardners’ faces are variously rapt, restless and uncomprehending, as Billy presses serenely on to his utterly banal conclusion. “And so, as our friends south of the border say, ‘Adios, Amigos.’ ”

  It is sublime—a perfect parody of low-business pieties and clichés, but for once felt and meant as a sober summary of a man’s character and philosophy. It is also wonderfully played by Clint�
�how the man loves playing dumb—and beamishly reacted to by the rest of the cast, with Scatman Crothers’s nods of encouragement and endorsement particularly well timed.

  There may be things that are not quite right about this movie. One does wonder how a company this small, this lacking in a capacity for spectacle, attracts any audiences at all. One wonders how a shoe salesman and ex-con ever got together the capital to purchase even an outfit as modest as this. And, yes, as many critics observed at the time, there is something shrill in Locke’s performance. She isn’t quite to this manner born, doesn’t have the saving ironic glint in her eye that, for example, Claudette Colbert flashed as the ur–runaway heiress of It Happened One Night.

  But these flaws are modest in comparison to what’s right with the film. Its light (the cinematographer was a newcomer, David Worth) is warmer, more dreamy and glowing, than it usually is in an Eastwood production, and its people are Capraesque in that economic affliction is not allowed to sour their eccentric kindliness. We also see in it some of Clint’s best directorial qualities, his easy pace and the confidence with which he digresses from his main line, his ability to sustain a chosen pitch without strain. He knows the values this movie defends have a quaint air about them—they are funny looking and funny sounding—and that you have to play them very straight. To satirize them is superfluous; it’s been done. To celebrate them too enthusiastically is self-defeating; you begin to sound like a right-wing crazy high on his own loopy rhetoric. Bronco Billy simply asks us to contemplate certain core values—kindness to the weak and tolerance for the eccentric, loyalty to the jointly striving group, above all a belief in the redemptive and reinventive possibilities of a free country—and after we’re done chuckling at the way its protagonist states them, ask ourselves if they are really so quaint, so irrelevant, after all.