If Gritz was not exactly his kind of guy, he was certainly his kind of problem solver—impatient with talk, eager for direct action. So Clint offered him money—variously reported at thirty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars—and help rounding up other support as well. He did not approach William Shatner, who also gave the colonel ten thousand dollars in the form of an option on his life story, which he unsuccessfully tried to place with the TV networks, but Clint admits, “I did a lot of stuff for them, a lot of legwork”—mostly asking corporate CEOs to donate equipment to the would-be invaders. What he could not secure was the support of the Reagan administration, even though he called the president and got his pledge to look into the matter. The report Reagan got back from Robert McFarlane, chief deputy to the national security adviser, was that Gritz “was not somebody we ought to be involved with.”
This word was evidently passed to Clint (though Gritz would later claim that he received back-channel intelligence support from the Pentagon). By this time, Clint was beginning to have his own doubts. He visited Gritz’s training camp in northern California and was distinctly unimpressed by what he saw. When the local sheriff busted them for trespassing on somebody’s back forty, he began to think, as he understates it, “These guys were maybe not all they were written up to be.”
He did not feel, however, that he could back out honorably. So off Gritz and his little band flew to Thailand, which by this time was beginning to resemble a convention site for right-wing crazies, with about twenty groups poised there for expeditions into Laos. Gritz, accompanied by four Americans and fourteen Laotian guerrillas, pushed off on what he called Operation Lazarus in late November—“Like Laurel and Hardy or the Marx brothers go to Cambodia,” as Clint ruefully puts it. They were ambushed three days later. One Laotian was killed, and one American was taken prisoner (he was later ransomed) in this fiasco, and much of their matériel was lost. Gritz retreated and regrouped and in February 1983 launched another, smaller foray. While he was gone Thai police arrested the radio operators he had left behind, and then Gritz himself was apprehended when he strolled out of the jungle empty-handed a couple of weeks later. He spent five days in jail, teaching the local police chief karate and making himself available to Good Morning, America for an interview. By this time, one of his compatriots had sold his story to Soldier of Fortune for five thousand dollars, generating much press attention and much paranoid irritation from the colonel.
Gritz has since spun completely out of control. He is the founder of a survivalist real estate development in Idaho, which he calls Almost Heaven, where he awaits the Apocalypse and rants against the New World Order, that conspiracy of the Rothschilds, the queen of England and the world bankers that he and his ilk imagine is planning to stamp every American citizen with a bar code, the better to control their lives.
Clint, who was making contributions to groups supporting the Equal Rights Amendment around the same time he was giving money to Gritz, obviously learned a lesson in caution from this incident. Aside from his two years as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel, he has generally avoided public identification with causes and candidates, though he did admit casting a quixotic vote for Ross Perot (incidentally, another of Gritz’s suckers) in the 1992 election. His response to rumors of larger political involvements—as late as 1995 there was hopeful talk in California Republican circles of a run for governor—is to cite his unwillingness to embrace the tedium of politics or to submit his private life to the kind of scrutiny the press now devotes to candidates for major office.
In the long line of this career, both Firefox and Colonel Gritz are aberrant; nothing like them had occurred before, and nothing has since. Indeed, even as Gritz was rounding up his troops, Clint was working on a movie that was in scale and tone as far from its immediate predecessor, in spirit as far from the lunatic Southeast Asian adventure, as it is possible to get.
Honkytonk Man is based on a novel by Clancy Carlile, who also adapted it for the screen. He was represented by William Morris, and Lenny Hirshan brought the book to Clint. It recounts the last weeks in the life of a country-and-western singer named Red Stovall, a drifter and alcoholic who is terminally ill with tuberculosis. The time is the 1930s, and he appears at his married sister’s farm in Oklahoma as a dust storm wipes out her family’s crop—their last hope for survival on this land. Reprobate though he is, Red is not without hope. After a lifetime singing his songs and passing the hat in road- and cathouses, he has an invitation to audition for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. His problem is getting there intact. He has a fine Lincoln convertible, but his energy and his driving skills are, at best, erratic. His relatives are about to abandon their farm and join the Okie migration to California, so it is decided that Red’s young nephew, Whit, will be his driver and chaperone, and that they will give a lift to the boy’s grandfather (John McIntire), who is going to join other kinfolk.
Clint took to the story because it offered him the opportunity to recreate the back roads of his boyhood, and, indeed, he doubled for Oklahoma one of the areas he knew from those days, the flat farmlands around Sacramento. It also gave him another opportunity to sing, which he did in a way that was right for the role, but, as it turned out, wrong for the reviewers. Finally, the part of Whit, Red’s nephew, called for a fourteen-year-old boy, and he just happened to have one of those handy—his son, Kyle, who would bring something more than a persuasive genetic match to the role.
The project had some hidden attractions as well. One of these, curiously, had its roots in the weekend rodeoing of Clint’s Rawhide days. He and his cohorts had often shared the bill with country-and-western groups, and these musicians, going nowhere in what was in those days a closed world, offering no hope of the crossovers some of its performers made later, fascinated him. So did the self-destructive ends of the legendary figures of this world, the likes of Hank Williams and Red Foley. “You wondered,” he says, “why so many of them died on the highway.”
Honkytonk Man did not propose a firm answer to that question, only a chance to explore it. In the self-made men of show business one often notices this intense interest in willed failure, perhaps because it is a trade in which the means of self-destruction come so readily to hand, perhaps because the luck that raised them up from lazy, hazy boyhood is so inexplicable, so easy to imagine never happening. In any case Clint’s interest in this topic extends far beyond country pickers (Bird, for instance). Indeed, discussing this movie, Clint has more than once invoked the curious fate of Richard Nixon, painfully achieving his life’s goal and then painfully trashing it.
Verna Bloom, who played Red’s sister, puts it simply: “If Clint were a failure, he’d be Red.” It’s an interesting thought. If life had dealt differently with him, one can imagine Red’s weary hardness and charm, a desperate effort not to explode—or more likely implode—in Clint.
Not that the movie openly adverts to such thoughts. We are pretty sure from the start that Red is a foredoomed figure, but the structure of the film is almost childishly linear, its tone, until the end, loose, light and unforced. The road Red, Whit and Grandpa share might be described as the road untaken—untaken by Red, that is, at any previous time precisely because it is a shared road.
If it is too late for Red to change his ways or his route, it is not too late for him to enjoy a few sunny days before the shadows close in around him. The ferociously inward man of the film’s first passages, drunken and cynical, becomes almost boyish and unguarded in this company. Indeed, there is something prankish about the film’s incidents. An angry bull is encountered and evaded; some chickens are stolen. Young Whit is introduced to sex in a bordello, and old Red is introduced to jail, from which his nephew cleverly springs him. Red does a little singing to help ends meet and, with some help from Whit, composes a new and rather good song (“Throw your arms around this honkytonk man / And we’ll get through the night the best way we can”). Grandpa, who participated in the Oklahoma land rush, offers a lovely reminiscence about it
, a reminder of the freshness of the American morning. In time, the old fellow departs and is replaced by Marlene (Alexa Kenin), who can’t carry a tune, but can’t abandon her dream of singing stardom. She sleeps once with Red, but without loss of her essential innocence.
The picture does not darken until Nashville is attained. Then with his audition going wonderfully—he’s singing the song he and Whit composed—Red succumbs to a terrible coughing fit. The TB is now hard upon him, and the implication is that though he will probably die soon enough anyway, he will certainly die sooner if he goes on singing. But he has, at last, a recording offer—twenty dollars a song—and a last chance at a sliver of immortality. He comes to his final crisis in the studio (where, in tribute to Clint’s youth, the backup band is supposed to be Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys). At the end of the film Whit and Marlene are seen walking away from Red’s grave, and we hear a disc jockey introduce a new hit, “Honkytonk Man.”
It is obviously a very simple film. And it was accomplished simply, too—on a five-week schedule for a budget of little more than $3 million, with the redemptive ending the studio urged on Clint carefully avoided. Clint treasures his memories of working with John McIntire, an actor much beloved in the business. He had offered this role first to James Stewart, but though he was only a year younger than the seventy-five-year-old McIntire, he told Clint he didn’t want to play a grandfather just yet.
Verna Bloom, whose infant son was in the film, thought the work was hardest on Kyle: “It was a burden, that part—he had a lot to carry in the picture.” Clint worried about that, too. But he “looks like a kid of the thirties,” as he told a reporter at the time, and he was showing a real interest in his dad’s line of work. Most important to Clint, he was not a professional. “I’m not crazy about kid actors,” he said. “You can almost see their parents off camera, encouraging them to be cute.” He asked Sondra Locke to handle the coaching, and working with his boy on camera he was, Bloom recalls, sterner than usual. He wanted a very straight performance, and he got it—that cautious alertness, that slight air of tension, that anyone might show if he was trying to please his dad was exactly right for a boy trying to take care of an explosive character like Red Stovall.
Critically, the film was radically undervalued. A number of reviewers made rather stupid Camille jokes at Clint’s expense. “Well intentioned” and variants on the phrase were also much employed. There was, too, considerable criticism of Clint’s singing, though simple resort to say “Barroom Buddies” would have demonstrated that he deliberately clouded his usually clear, light baritone in order to suggest the strangling effects of TB on Red’s voice. The film’s tone, its blend of muted humor and tragedy, its unmelodramatic way of insisting that life just kind of happens—which is its greatest success—seemed like a failure, a carelessness, to most observers. It got only one positive notice in a major publication. In Time this writer called it “a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people … but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.”
In France, however, some critics compared Honkytonk Man to The Grapes of Wrath. “My God,” said Clint when a newspaperman reported this reaction to him. He must have had a similar reaction when he read Norman Mailer’s profile the next year. The novelist saw in it “the steely compassion that is back of all the best country singing … and the harsh, yearning belly of rural America … making out with next to nothing but hard concerns and the spark of a dream that will never give up.” In Red he saw “a subtle man … brought to life with minimal strokes, a complex protagonist full of memories of old cunning deeds and weary sham. It was one of the saddest movies seen in a long time, yet, on reflection, terrific. One felt a tenderness for America while looking at it.”
And, perhaps, a certain tenderness for Clint Eastwood, who returned for his next two films to his most basic genre, the detective story. As someone once said, “A man’s gotta know his limitations”—or anyway his audience’s limitations. These policiers are, in different ways, among his most successful films. The first of them, Sudden Impact, was another Dirty Harry picture. But it grossed something over $70 million in the United States alone—his most substantial hit between Any Which Way You Can and Unforgiven—and got reviews that were more interested and engaged than Honkytonk Man’s had been. In an unexpected way, it even did Clint’s image some good.
It also gave him, of course, his signature moment, the line of dialogue with which he will forever be identified. One reason he says he kept returning to Dirty Harry is that he always got the good lines, and this one he recognized on the first reading of Joseph C. Stinson’s script as “the punch line of the picture.” Moreover, he liked the way it was contextualized. Preoccupied by yet another bawling out from his boss, Harry repairs to his favorite lunch counter for a cup of coffee and (unnoticed by most viewers) a study of a newspaper’s help-wanted ads. Focusing on them, he doesn’t notice that gunmen have the place under siege until his waitress, trying to send a silent signal, pours excessive amounts of sugar, which he doesn’t take, into his cup. He finally gets the message, exits, returns through a back door, gets the drop on the criminals and starts referring to himself in the plural. We? Who’s we? “Smith and Wesson and me,” he replies tightly. Much shooting, screaming and property destruction ensue, with Harry finally holding a gun on the gang’s leader while he, in turn, holds a gun to a hostage’s head, threatening to pull the trigger if he is not allowed to escape. It is then that the great moment occurs: “Go ahead, make my day.”
Strong as it was, Clint says, “I didn’t realize it would ricochet around the world quite like it did.” Neither did the reviewers. Only Time’s Richard Corliss took significant notice of it. But it became a vernacular catch phrase in a matter of weeks, and then the president of the United States took it up. In March 1983, when Congress looked as if it might raise taxes, Ronald Reagan announced that he would happily veto the attempt and borrowed both the line and Clint’s hissed delivery of it to suggest his resolve.
That was fine with Clint—the picture was still in release. What is not so fine is the way it goes on haunting him. Autograph hunters use it when they thrust pen and paper at him. Emcees use it to introduce him. When he takes questions from the floor after appearances even at august forums like the British Film Institute people ask him to repeat it. A woman interested in carnal knowledge of the star once hired an airplane to tow a banner displaying the phrase over a golf course where he was playing.
Clint was more than usually ambivalent about Sudden Impact, perhaps because its impetus was a marketing survey, about which he is habitually contemptuous. This one, however, was more than usually objective. Someone was testing the possibility of Sean Connery returning as James Bond and asked respondents how they would feel about other stars reprising their most famous roles. Clint coming back as Dirty Harry turned out to be their favorite idea. “So they [Warner Bros.] came to me and said I had to make another one,” says Clint. “They were ready to start that Friday.”
It took a few Fridays to come up with a story he liked—a story that, as it happened, had a very potent gimmick. But still … Dirty Harry again. Talking to Mailer on the set he said, “I thought I’d done all I can with it, and I might have. I don’t know. But everybody kept asking about it.” Years later he added, “It was a time in my life when I’d try the other things,” he says, “and the public didn’t flock to them.”
“Some stiff’s got himself a .38 caliber vasectomy,” a cop informs Harry Callahan as he arrives at Sudden Impact’s first crime scene, and, indeed, the corpse has two wounds—one in the genitals, the other in the brain. There will be others like him, but we soon understand that the killer is fragile, chilly Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), painter of haunted pictures and victim along with her sister of a gang rape many years ago. The sister has been rendered catatonic by the experience; Jennifer, as we can see, psychopathic—a “Dirty Harriet” as many reviewers could not r
esist calling her. Such suspense as the film has to offer lies not in Harry’s discovering the killer’s identity, but in his determining whether or not to arrest her. Since he is in love with her, it is not hard to guess his decision.
This character—a woman bent on masculine-style vengeance, and accomplishing it—had a certain originality. There had been nothing quite like her on the screen before (and rarely enough since), and the novelty of the idea, as much as Clint’s return to his signature role, accounts for Sudden Impact’s stunning popular success. Unfortunately, having determined to make this gesture, the film does not execute it as crisply as it might have. There is, as David Ansen wrote, “the makings of a fascinating multi-level melodrama” here, but it doesn’t happen, perhaps, he speculated, because of mixed motives on Clint’s part: “Eastwood doesn’t want to let down his Dirty Harry fans, but at the same time he wants to take this character into deeper and murkier waters. The result is curious, a disquisition on the justice of revenge written with a spray can.” In particular, one feels, the conventional jocularities of the series mix very uneasily with the intensity of Locke’s character and the terrible nature of the wrong done her and her sister, which is quite unblinkingly recounted in flashbacks.
Yet because the film was rather interestingly shot—Clint’s camera glides very coolly here, almost hypnotically—a certain tolerance for it was displayed in some critical quarters. David Denby in New York made the most salient point. Reviewing Sudden Impact in tandem with Uncommon Valor (a movie about a mission to rescue Vietnam MIAs that succeeds) he called both of them “surprisingly well-made” and identified the secret not just of their success (Ted Kotcheff’s film was the unpredicted hit of the season), but of all such works: “They make contact with a stratum of pessimism that runs very deep in this country—a sort of lumpen despair that goes beyond, or beneath, politics. In these movies, America is a failure, a disgrace—a country run on the basis of expediency and profit, a country that has betrayed its ideals. The attack is directed not merely at liberals or ‘permissiveness’ but at something more fundamental—the modern bureaucratic state and capitalism itself.”
Clint Eastwood Page 54