Better late than never, this acute analysis of the new style in subversion. Better late than never the recognition that accrued to Clint as a “feminist filmmaker.” It was a writer named Tom Stempel who advanced this idea at a moment when, seemingly, its time had come. His piece established a line that would be followed, especially by sympathetic feature writers, many of them women, to this day. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Stempel was himself reacting to an article about strong heroines in recent films that had omitted mention of Locke and Sudden Impact. This oversight, he said, was the result of Clint’s macho image; critics just didn’t think to look in his movies for powerful female figures or were so preoccupied with him that they ignored them. He then proceeded to offer a list of such women, including, of course, Jessica Walter’s mad stalker in Misty and Tyne Daly’s female detective, but adding to it Locke’s Gauntlet and Bronco Billy characters, Kay Lenz’s Breezy and, more interestingly, the strong older women played by Ruth Gordon and Paula Trueman in, respectively, the Which Way films and Josey Wales, as well as the disparate Native American women in the latter picture and in Bronco Billy. It was an impressive, wide-ranging gathering.
Asked about the piece, Clint gave what would, with only small variants, become a practiced response: “It’s very simple. I’ve always been interested in strong women. When I was growing up the female roles were equal to the men, and the actresses were just as strong as the actors. Now, in a lot of movies, you seem to have half a cast. The guy will be a big macho star. The woman will be a wimp. Women in the audience don’t like that, and I believe men don’t either.”
He blamed this situation on his fellows. Men, he said, have the final decision in most movie casting and cast mainly for looks. “They cast an interesting man, and then for the woman they go for a model, a centerfold girl.” He went the other way, he said in later reflections on this topic, out of simple self-interest. If he had a good actress in a strongly written part it made his job as a leading man that much easier; he had someone to share the burden with.
Something more than feminist sympathy was at work here; masculine ambivalence also contributed to his attitude. The joke among the guys in the Universal talent program, when they were asked to do certain kinds of scenes, was “Time to take my Man Pills,” meaning time to go kick down a door and treat a woman rough. Clint always thought that was a stupid movie convention insisted upon by the sort of insecure, overcompensating males who, then as now, hold the front-office jobs in Hollywood. As we have long since observed, masculinity was a much more vexed topic for Clint. By the late eighties he was telling Carrie Rickey: “As far as the tormented male thing goes, maybe I’m interested in it because it’s an obsolete thing—masculinity, I mean. There’s very few things men are required for, except maybe siring. I guess I’m interested in the insecurities that keep outsiders outside.”
In 1983 he bought a script by Richard Tuggle called Tightrope, which brought together the most visibly and darkly tormented male he had yet played and an extremely strong and hugely sympathetic feminist figure, a rape counselor named Beryl Thibodeaux (very well played by Geneviève Bujold). She is obliged to engage directly and tensely with Clint’s Wes Block, a New Orleans vice-squad detective, in an investigation of a series of sex crimes that becomes, as well, a metaphoric investigation of certain dark aspects of male sexuality.
There was originality in this concept. In movies, the flaws plaguing a hero are generally old-growth, the result of some long-ago wrong or trauma. But Wes Block is dealing with a live one, and a nasty one, a sexual issue that has arisen out of recent events in his life and is driving his nighttime behavior. Divorced and bitter about it, single-parenting his two daughters and happy about that, he is keeping his sex life rigidly separated from his home life, and rigidly separated from his moral sense as well. Not so his professional life. As a vice cop he knows where all the pretty bodies are cribbed, and he knows, too, which ones will submit to bondage, to the control he needs to reassert over women since his wife has slipped, as one might put it, the bonds of matrimony.
A psychopath is sadistically killing prostitutes, and seems to know, as well, that Wes shares his kinks, albeit acting on them in a much milder manner. There is even an attempt—not long or very persuasively pursued—to make us believe that Wes might just possibly be the killer, which in at least one draft Tuggle says he tried to stress more forcefully. (Changing his voice slightly, Clint did loop some of the lines spoken by the killer before we see his face, hoping to set up a few ambiguous resonances.) What emerged instead was a plot in which the murderer is identified as a former police officer Wes once arrested, with these new depredations designed first to frame Wes, ultimately to place his loved ones in deadly peril.
These are the elements, perhaps, of a slightly better than usual policier. Two factors transform them and the film into something more memorable. The first is Clint’s willingness to play a character actually in the grips of an unsavory obsession, someone not just suspected or falsely accused of it, but actually acting on it. It is the same impulse (taken further) that permitted him to play the undone and nearly undone womanizers of The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me. It is, as well, a crucial, though generally unobserved, element setting Clint apart from his peers. As William Goldman once put it: “Here is one of the basic lessons a screenwriter must learn and live with: Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now.”
Asked at the time how he dared break this most basic rule of above-the-title life, Clint was self-dismissive: “Just too dumb, I guess.” Sure. But wouldn’t the notion of “brutal frankness” cover the case more accurately? Tightrope may represent the largest, certainly the most obvious, payoff on that habit of mind.
Clint insisted on changing the story’s locale from the scripted San Francisco to New Orleans, in part to avoid confusion with the Dirty Harry films, in part because he liked the latter’s funkiness. They shot in real New Orleans brothels, baths, sex shops and so on, in one of which, he recalls, the crew was afraid to touch the walls and furnishings for fear of contracting disease. The talk in this movie is as real as the settings, with a solid ring of quotidian truth about it. It is, for example, a film that acknowledges the propensity of children to ask astonishing, embarrassing questions. “Daddy, what’s a hard-on?” one of Wes’s kids pipes up, out of nowhere, as they are riding innocently along in a car one day. It is also a film in which, chided for turning down the offer of a male prostitute—“How do you know if you haven’t tried it?”—the hero replies, “Maybe I have,” and you don’t entirely dismiss the possibility.
These contrasting exchanges mark the far ends of the psychological tightrope Wes teeters upon. It is Beryl’s function to help him clamber down from this wire where he has strung himself out, and it is in their well-written and -acted exchanges, in the edginess with which they come closer to one another, that the movie finds much of its distinction. They meet professionally, and he uses the excuse of wanting to get her insights into the mind of the killer to pursue her. One day, he visits a self-defense class she conducts for women, watching quietly, unobserved by her, as she demonstrates against a dummy various karate moves they might apply to an assailant, climaxing with a sharp kick to the testicles. The manikin’s eyes light up, its tongue lolls out of its mouth, and the tennis balls representing its genitals go bouncing across the floor toward Wes. He picks one up, holds it out to her and with his sweetest little-boy smile says, “Hi.”
Soon enough they engage in a sharply testing exchange on a river steamer where one sunny, windy day they are sharing clams, beer and the beginnings of intimacy. He begins by wondering if she is unattached, which she says she is.
“What else were you wondering?” she asks.
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“What it would be like to lick the sweat off your body.”
Confused laughter. “Do you … do you always say exactly what’s on your mind?”
“Could be a little more subtle.”
“What I said?”
“No, the way you said it.”
“How would you like me to say it.”
“As if you’re not saying it to somebody every night.”
“What else would you like?”
“I’d like to know what’s underneath the front you put on.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t like what’s there.”
“Maybe you’re afraid I would.”
The scene is solidly on pitch—romantic comedy as it might be played by people who are neither as romantic nor as comedic as they might like to be.
In time they will talk about what his work has done to him. The first inspiration for Tuggle’s screenplay was a manhunt for a serial rapist in the Bay Area who was never caught. In the course of his research he asked a vice cop how dealing constantly with the seamiest side of sex affected his private life. The man thought for a moment and replied, “It makes me treat my wife more tenderly in bed.” He gave a variant on that line to Wes, and has Beryl ask, “How did she respond?” “She said she wasn’t interested in tenderness,” he replies.
Slowly his wariness dissipates. He introduces her to his daughters. They take a liking to her. He and Beryl begin to edge toward the bedroom. Once there, she picks up his handcuffs and asks him why the killer always uses them on his victims.
“Control,” he says.
“Do you use them often?”
“Well, that depends.”
“On what?”
“The situation.”
“When you feel threatened?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“With these, no one could get to you.”
“They’ll stop just about anyone.”
At this point she snaps the cuffs on herself, and reaches out to touch his face. He flinches. But she is signaling trust; even though she knows the worst about him she is saying she does not fear submission to him. When he unlocks her handcuffs he also unlocks his emotions.
The film is in itself a kind of tightrope, dangerous if too slack, dangerous if too tightly strung, and the understated tension with which this scene is played is emblematic of the smart, believable middle way that it finds. As it happens, that was more difficult to achieve than anyone not present at its creation can possibly know.
Tuggle had sold his script on condition that he be allowed to direct. Clint, harking back to the passion with which Michael Cimino had animated his writerly vision, thought that was a good idea. But the two men are very different personalities. Cimino is a willful and decisive character. Tuggle, on the other hand, is a man who tends to see a dozen equally interesting alternatives in any situation and is not averse to exploring them all. Moreover, he did not have the experience that Cimino had gained making commercials, did not, therefore, know how to command a set. This last, perhaps, was his largest failing, for this was an Eastwood crew, used to moving quickly and ready to glance in his direction when a director faltered.
It seems Tuggle lasted no more than a day in full control of the location. One witness remembers him hesitating overlong on the placement of a picture in the background of a shot. Another recalls him choosing a camera placement that ensured a door that had to be opened in the scene would block the actors from view. And these were comparatively simple shots, “He didn’t know how to function in a decision-making deal” is the way Clint puts it. He also suggests, and it is the only criticism of Tuggle that he offers, that the would-be director should have spent some time on other sets, observing how the job was done. It was too late now. There was much complicated work still to be done involving crowds, high-voltage action and sophisticated coverage, and Clint simply did not feel Tuggle would be able to handle it.
Here it was again, the near-endemic problem of trying to direct a star who was not only the film’s de facto producer, but also his own best director (at least until someone proves otherwise to him)—vastly complicated in this case by the fact that Tuggle was manifestly “such a good guy,” as Clint describes him. Even if the Directors Gudd’s Eastwood rule had not prevented Clint from taking over, he really didn’t want to.
So a compromise was worked out. The writer would stay on, contribute what he could in a collaborative way and receive directorial credit, while Clint, literally, called most of the shots. Tuggle insists he made substantial contributions to his script’s realization in this role, and Clint does not deny them. But our eyes tell us this is very much an Eastwood movie—his stylistic tracks are all over it—and the anecdotal evidence supports this reading.
The most unmistakable example of his imprimatur is the sequences involving the children. This was not troubling to Tuggle. He could see that Alison and Clint would be more comfortable working without third-party interference. Though they were playing roles close to real life—a father and daughter negotiating the shoals of divorce—Clint thought that was to their advantage. That “little parallel,” he says, “made it easier for a ten-year-old to understand.” Besides, when she had visited his sets she had always loved “being in front of the camera and hamming it up,” and I said, ‘You know, I should just get her in the right part and it will be all right.’ ”
So it was. She is excellent in a scene in which she is supposed to gently comfort her father when he comes home from work distraught and tipsy and falls woozily onto the living room couch. There his daughter finds him and wants to offer him some comfort. Clint had noticed Alison’s fondness for the cat who lived in the house they had rented for use as the Block family home, quiedy stroking and cuddling it between takes. When it came time to do this scene his instruction was simple: “Just think of your dad as this lost, stray cat. Just kind of relate to your dad like that.”
What she did was remove his wedding picture from his hand, try to pat a comforter around him and then snuggle down on top of him, “warming with her tomgirl body the man her mother has rejected,” as Kathleen Murphy nicely describes it. This proved to be a discomfiting moment to some reviewers, but it is also, in its straightforward behavioral honesty, a breathtaking one, not unlike the opening kiss in The Beguiled, one of those rare moments that breaks through the movieness of movies, transcending the conventions by which reality is generally represented in them, referring us to something less mediated, less calculated.
This movie is throughout touched with something of that spirit. For the “little parallel” Clint proposes is part of a larger parallel between his life and the life of the man he plays. As we have observed, Wes Block is a man trying to keep the compartments of his life sealed, desperately attempting to prevent the lives each contains to flow out into the others. Clint, obviously in less melodramatic circumstances, obviously with greater success, has always tried to do the same thing. Private man and public man, Carmel man and movie man, man’s man, lady’s man and family man—he keeps the overlap between them to a minimum. It has been his way of asserting control over a complicated life.
There is, of course, a significant difference between Wes Block and Clint Eastwood: There is an authentic monster invading Wes’s professional life. And this monster will invade Wes’s home, murder a babysitter and deposit his daughter, bound and gagged, in her father’s bed, with the threat of further violation avoided by a hair’s breadth. (“You motherfucker,” the raging Wes cries; he is looking at his own image in a mirror when he does so.) Later, the killer invades Beryl’s home—another, if newer, sacred place for Wes—and again catastrophe is narrowly avoided.
One does not want to make too much of these parallels between fiction and fact. But one does not want to make too little of them, either. For it is obvious that Clint’s eagerness to involve his children in his work betokened self-awareness, his sense that compartmentalization cannot be carried to rigid extremes. It is equally clear that, in the age of the free-floating psychopath, public figures are subject to terrors of precisely the kind Wes Block confronts. Clint has been stalked (and for a tim
e carried a licensed weapon for protection). His daughter would later be threatened in the same way. And that says nothing about the rapacious invasions of the gossip press on public lives (to which Clint’s response has been a string of successful lawsuits). Simply put, Tightrope is, among other things, a dramatic projection of feelings (and situations) its star and unacknowledged director had known and imagined in reality.
It derives some of its power from that simple, unspoken fact. Unfortunately, Tuggle suffered for that. This was a project that engaged Clint passionately, one he could not surrender to someone whose lack of professional experience seemed certain to undermine its force. What Clint did, in effect, was make Tuggle the film’s dramaturge, a role he handled gracefully and effectively. “We really did see eye to eye on the script,” Tuggle says. “It was shot word for word almost. I think we both wanted to make the same movie, and I was real happy with the movie.” Tuggle, though, cannot completely bury all of his resentments at being pushed aside. Assured that Clint still makes no large claims to the film’s authorship, and that he speaks with great warmth about him, Tuggle replies, with quiet bitterness: “No, there’s no reason to criticize me. You only criticize someone if you’ve lost a war or an argument. If you have won, you have no criticism.”
It is too bad he can’t content himself with an incontestable credit, that of writing one of the most interesting films to which Clint Eastwood ever applied his talents. Of his many explorations of maleness and its meanings, none came closer to the heart of the matter—what we might call “control anxiety” (especially as it is expressed in love relationships)—and none, excepting Unforgiven, more effectively used simple and powerful melodramatic devices to create ambiguous social and psychological resonances.
Clint Eastwood Page 55