Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Clint was cool about the whole complicated business. Asked why he had gone to all this trouble—the weather was terrible much of the time and some of the flights white-knucklers—he replied, “Well, it’s like this. They’re pretty nice people. And I hadn’t been to Europe for a while.” He resisted adding the obvious, that word (by Vinocur among others) of Europe’s regard for him flashed back to that portion of the American audience that had most resisted him was alone worth the trouble.

  In that respect, 1985 would turn out to be a very good year for him. In a Roper poll conducted for one of the newsmagazines, he was named the figure most admired by young Americans, finishing ahead of Mother Teresa, among others. In April of that year he would be at the White House, sitting at Nancy Reagan’s table when her husband bestowed National Medals of Art on the likes of Louise Nevelson and Leontyne Price. The following fall he would be back in Washington for the official state reception for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, even taking a turn on the dance floor with the princess.

  In between those two dates he premiered Pale Rider at the Cannes Film Festival, thus realizing an old ambition while bringing to one of its early peaks his new desire for the good opinion of the cinematically conscientious. Clint would decide his accommodations (a rented yacht snugged up to a quay) were too confining and too close to the action; he would, in future years, discover the Hôtel du Cap. But otherwise things went well. It was he who spoke the official word declaring the festival open, and for the first time he knew the heady pleasure of mounting the broad staircase leading to the Palais des Festivals, its chief venue. It offers actors the kind of entrance that made them go into the business in the first place: processional music; thousands of eyes, not to mention the television cameras of the world, fixed on you and you alone; complete isolation on a glorious red-carpeted platform; the mass intake of breath when you appear; the cheers crescendoing when you turn to wave halfway up; the sighing exhale when, with a last wave, you disappear into the building. William Goldman, who has written brilliantly about Cannes, quotes Paul Newman on this moment: “Oh, I get it, I’m an emperor now, I can deal with that.”

  Mostly Clint dined well—he referred to his party as the American eating team—and, between meals, sat on his yacht, cracking open the odd bottle of beer, sipping occasionally on a glass of white wine, entertaining a parade of notebook-toting visitors with low-key comments on life, career, forthcoming films. Asked about Burt Reynolds, he called him “my other child.” When someone mentioned the gray in his hair, he said, “It gives you a little respect.” A reporter who had interviewed him earlier in his career remarked that words seemed to come more easily to him now, and he admitted to being less measured. “Then I thought everything should be the absolute truth. Now I’m willing to take my chances with life.” At a press conference, someone asked him if, when he gunned down the villain at the end of Pale Rider, he was perhaps—how shall one say?—symbolically killing Sergio Leone, his cinematic father. He bemusedly observed that it was biologically improbable, since they were the same age (he still didn’t know that they were not). Jean-Luc Godard dedicated Detective, his ill-received entrant in the competition, to Clint—half ironically—in the spirit of his dedication of Breathless to Monogram Pictures.

  Pale Rider won no prizes—Clint hadn’t expected it to—and he left a few days before the festival ended, stopping off for an evening in Paris on the way home. There he had dinner with his old friend and supporter Bertrand Tavernier and discovered that Warner Bros., which had previously shown interest in Round Midnight, Tavernier’s story of a black jazzman living out his life in Paris, was now hesitating over his casting of a nonstar, Dexter Gordon, himself a legendary musician, in the lead role. Clint had always been enthusiastic about this project, and when he ran into Terry Semel the next night in London, he made a plea for it. At a cost of $4 million, he did not see how the studio could be hurt by the film (which was ultimately well received critically and won some Academy Award nominations). Semel agreed to restudy the proposition and shortly thereafter approved it. Subsequently Tavernier effusively credited Clint with rescuing his film.

  It was an agreeable climax to a completely satisfying trip, for he had been the big story out of Cannes. Stars of his magnitude usually do not risk playing their pictures—especially if they are westerns—in competition, and the noncritical press could not get enough of the irony they perceived in Dirty Harry hobnobbing with the European swells. Their dispatches about him and his festival-worthy western helped dress Pale Rider for success.

  The movie was the only one he had ever involved himself in before a word was placed on paper. It had begun some four years earlier in a meeting with Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, of The Gauntlet. They had always wanted to do a western, and Clint invited them to come back and bounce some ideas around. The genre might be in general disfavor, but he thought that if they could find a middle course between dull archetype and the revisionism that he had himself pioneered they might have a viable project. Or as he put it in a prerelease interview: “Basically I wanted to have contemporary concerns expressed within … the classical tradition.”

  Out of their discussions came the notion of placing some independent gold miners—“tin pans,” as they are called in the film—in mortal conflict with a land baron named LaHood (Richard Dysart), who is using hydraulic strip mining to flush the ore out of the land. Ecologically his operation is brutal, and so is the small army he employs to drive off the little community of miners whose place, on what all believe to be a potentially rich stream, he covets. These peaceful souls are presented in the film almost as a hippie commune, in obvious need of a protector, which the first-draft script provided them in the form of an itinerant preacher who also happens to be good with guns.

  So far, so good: Shane with an ecological spin—cattle baron and homesteaders replaced by big miners and small ones—and an antiorganization one, too. “I think the bureaucratic workings of nations and corporations have encouraged people to form counter-societies,” Clint said. “It seems like the growing complications of our lives have made us wonder if there isn’t some way to cut out all of that.”

  With the classic references in place and updated, the problem now was to add some reflexiveness. Perhaps, Clint suggested, the stranger should have some unfinished business with someone in the enemy camp—like, say, Marshall Stockburn (John Russell), LaHood’s chief enforcer—to motivate him. Perhaps, he also thought, this stranger might be “a supernatural being or an emissary from a higher plane.” He was, with these notions and his basic costume, a frock coat, admittedly harking back to the High Plains Drifter theme—“I guess maybe I felt I hadn’t explored it enough.”

  Explored what? The possibility that the retribution may, indeed, be divine on occasion? The hope of immortality that dares not speak its name to a secularist? Or the notion that a spook is the ultimate nihilist, a figure no man can collar or question? The last of these seems most likely.

  There was another relationship between Drifter and Rider. The latter would also rather casually avail himself of a good woman, Sarah Wheeler (Carrie Snodgrass), and with less justification, since she is living with a decent and inoffensive man, Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty), the stranger’s most welcoming friend in this community. A trope from another Eastwood movie, The Beguiled, was also revived here. This was his character’s relationship with a very young girl, fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny). As in the earlier film, it is she who sees him first. As she completes reading the passage from the Bible that suggested the film’s title—“and I looked and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him”—Clint’s preacher (“quite the drollest of Clint Eastwood’s mythic disguises,” as Richard Jameson wrote) appears outside her window. And like Amy in the older film, she openly adores him, even, unlike the younger child, discreetly offers herself to him. She is, of course, gently rebuffed.

  Was realism of this kind intended as a kind of bala
nce to the eeriness of the stranger’s character? Was it, like the ecological and communitarian themes, an attempt to give it a more modernist edge? Or was it just another quite innocent spin on Shane, with a smitten girl standing in for that film’s hero-worshiping boy?

  These passages discomfited several reviewers though not as much as the film’s insufficiently disguised debt to the George Stevens film did. Critic after critic cited the 1953 movie as a source for this one. Others, like Richard Corliss, chastised Clint for playing God—or, anyway, a close associate—with too much relish and authority. On the other hand, some reviewers welcomed the picture very warmly, with Vincent Canby graciously acknowledging that it had taken him too many years to recognize Clint’s “very consistent grace and wit as a filmmaker.” Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times shined the most interesting light on Pale Rider, writing that the film’s tableaux seemed both “contemporary and remembered, vivid and fervently elegiac.” He concluded that “novelty isn’t always a sign of talent. Sometimes it’s the way the filmmaker brings new inflections … to old stories that reveal his highest qualities. By remaking Shane … Eastwood takes a fond backward glance at a slice of the past worth treasuring. And he proves that his own acting and directing are among the treasures of the present.”

  His last point is his best one. Bearded, wearing a tall semistovepipe hat with his tightly buttoned frock coat, Clint has at first glance a marvelously forbidding air and at second glance just a slight sense of humbug. As he settles in with the miners one begins to sense something just slightly off-key in his pieties—“There’s plain few problems can’t be solved with a little sweat and some hard work.” They seem studied and a little forced, something like the gaseous humanism of Ivy League Episcopalians working slum parishes today. It’s good, sly stuff, Eastwoodian humor at its driest. And it is extended to his physical confrontations with the forces of evil. There is, for example, some flashy business with an ax handle and four bullies that is a very conscious, very humorous homage to Kurosawa’s magically adept samurai.

  Clint’s direction is as assured as his playing. He made the film on his standard five-week schedule in the early fall of 1984, mainly on location in the Sawtooth Range in Idaho (convenient to his Sun Valley home) in a manner that consciously reversed Shane’s. The older picture was uncannily neat and tidy. Stevens wanted to leave no doubt that the Old West was an American Eden. He also wanted to imply what Pale Rider would say more literally, that his eponymous hero was touched by supernatural powers. Blond and pallid in his white buckskins, Alan Ladd sometimes seems to give off a near-angelic glow. Clint, of course, went the other way, toward autumnally lit scruffiness.

  He also created two outstanding action pieces. One was the opening raid on the miners’ settlement by LaHood’s hoods—shadowy riders in the dappled woods, faster and faster cutting as they sweep down on victims, the harsh rhythms of panic and brutality when unfair combat is joined. This is virtuoso action staging, stressing the casual pleasure evil takes in its own depredations, the stunned disbelief of its victims. And it all happens so quickly.

  The concluding confrontation between the stranger, the marshal and his deputies is still more remarkable. By this time we have seen the stigmata Clint’s character carries. We know he has been shot repeatedly in the back by someone. We know from the marshal’s puzzlement over this distantly glimpsed figure—it must be, it can’t be—that it is he who victimized him. We do not know, and never find out, what the issue was between them; the silence on this point is Leonesque. But the shoot-out in the mean, muddy streets of a little western town, the lone avenger against a half-dozen opponents, consciously cross-refer to the conclusion of High Noon. One difference here is Clint’s ability to appear and disappear at will; another is that he wants to make sure, in their final face-off, that the marshal has no doubt about whom he is confronting. So the distance that is usually maintained in these sequences is radically shortened. Instead of being a block apart when they draw, they are feet, then inches, apart. And by rubbing our noses into the squalor and chaos of violent death, the filmmaking here brilliantly reverses classicism’s more abstract take on the subject.

  There was more than the usual interest in Pale Rider during the runup to its release, more than the customary concern in tracking its box-office returns in the period after it opened. So many westerns of the sixties and seventies had taken the closing of the frontier as their theme that people wondered if a movie could again live comfortably in an earlier western era. To many it seemed that Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, offering more empty grandiosity than epic grandeur, had, perhaps, put a period to the genre; no significant westerns had been made since its release in 1980. But now Lawrence Kasdan was set to bring out his star-encrusted Silverado almost simultaneously with Pale Rider, and the press, ever eager to make a trend out of coincidence, wondered volubly if this represented a renaissance or a last gasp for the form. The decision was that it still had viability if Clint was the star. For Pale Rider was the nation’s top-grossing film—about $9 million—during its first week of release and eventually took in close to $50 million at the domestic box office alone.

  Still, Pale Rider remains the most problematic of the westerns Clint directed. It is an altogether smoother picture than High Plains Drifter, the work of a mature artisan in full and tasteful command of an inherently improbable tale. But one misses the rough outrageousness of the previous film. Nor can one quite make the kind of emotional connections with this visible shade that one made with Josey Wales, struggling with his less visible demons. Finally, the film lacks the realistic intensity—and the moral urgency—of Unforgiven, which turns on a kind of rebirth, too, but a much more riveting one.

  As Pale Rider went into the theaters, Clint was completing the first (and only) film he ever directed for television and the last in which he would direct Sondra Locke. This was “Vanessa in the Garden,” an episode for the Amazing Stories series Steven Spielberg was producing for NBC. A prestigious, heavily publicized effort to revive the spooky spirit of the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone anthologies, the network was financing these half-hour programs generously, and Spielberg was recruiting feature-film actors and directors to work on them (Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir and Brian De Palma were among the latter). According to Clint, Spielberg hailed him on the main street of the Warners lot one day, and told him he had a script that he had himself written for the series that he thought would be ideal for Clint to direct.

  At first glance it is difficult to see why. It is a variant on the Portrait of Jennie theme and a period piece, set more or less in Edith Wharton—or maybe one should say Merchant Ivory—country. In it, Vanessa, the wife and principal model of a painter named Byron Sullivan (a miscast Harvey Keitel), is killed in a riding accident on the eve of his first important show. In his bereavement he destroys most of his work and turns to drink. When he tries to burn a picture called Vanessa in the Garden, however, a wind blows out his match, and when he awakes the next morning he hears Vanessa’s voice, singing sweetly. Returning to the painting he finds her image vanished from it and then glimpses her wandering in the setting he had used for its background. Later he finds her sitting in a large wicker chair, posed as she was for another painting. He imagines that if he creates more such scenes she will return and inhabit them. He’s right, and he becomes a man obsessed. Sullivan’s gallery manager and best friend (Beau Bridges), in turn, makes him a rich and famous one—which means nothing to him in comparison to the happiness he has found in (quite literally) immortalizing his beloved.

  Spielberg had the right man for this job. “Vanessa in the Garden” was yet another “exploration” of the possibilities of life after death, with Clint making a sunny, formal, gently romantic chamber piece out of it. With Locke more playful than ethereal in her work, there is an unexpectedly cheerful air about this little anecdote.

  Off-screen, however, Clint’s relationship with Sondra was drifting toward more uncomfortable territory. If their arr
angement was in its more visible aspects unconventional, considering her continuing legal—and emotional—commitment to Gordon Anderson, it was in some respects quite traditional. She urged Clint to sell (to Fritz Manes, as it happens) the little house on the wrong side of Mulholland Drive that he and Maggie had shared so long ago, and that had remained his Los Angeles pied-à-terre. She helped him find something more suitable in Bel-Air, a dark but airy Spanish-style structure, the decorating of which, also Spanish accented, she supervised.

  Locke has described herself as “very much the obliging girl-woman” in these years, “just head over heels in love with this incredibly dominant man. I thought he hung the moon.” According to a lengthy article on their breakup by Rachel Abromowitz, he “took to calling himself Daddy, as in ‘Daddy is going to take care of this.’ ” He does not deny his paternalism. He always felt “protective” toward her.

  “Indulgent” might be an equally good word. His constant use of her in his films is the most obvious evidence of that. Locke was, at best, a character lead, not a star, yet he employed her as such when few others had or would. More to the point, he bought her the house that she shared with Gordon when she was not with Clint.

  This was, to say the least, a remarkably tolerant arrangement. When, in 1989, she brought her palimony action against Clint, lawyers commenting on the case observed that it is not uncommon for people to settle into new relationships, and maintain them for years, without finalizing their divorces. This is clearly true; it is what Clint had done earlier. But very few of them continue to live part-time with their legal mates.