Honkytonk Man starts in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the Thirties and follows a drunk, all-but-destroyed country singer named Red Stovall on his car trip east to Nashville. He has been given an invitation to audition at the Grand Ole Opry and it is the most important event of his life. Red Stovall has very little left: ravaged good looks, a guitar, and a small voice reduced to a whisper by his consumptive cough. He’s a sour, cantankerous, mean-spirited country singer who smokes too much, drinks too much, and has brought little happiness to man or woman, a sorry hero but still a hero. He will die before he will deviate from his measure of things. So he drives over the bumpy stones of his used-up lungs to get to the audition.
On stage at the Grand Ole Opry, out front before the producers, there in the middle of singing his best, he has to cough. Worse. He is so stifled with phlegm that he must stagger off the stage. The picture is about to end in disaster. Still, he is given a reprieve. A man who makes records is also at the audition. He has liked Red’s voice and comes forward with a proposal. Red, given the treachery of his throat, can hardly perform before an audience, but maybe he can do a record session. They can lay the track between the coughs.
So he is able to sing on the last day of his life and makes one record before he dies. His whispery voice, close to extinction, clings to the heart of the film.
So I lost my woman and you lost your man
Who knows who’s right and who’s wrong?
But I’ve still got my guitar and I’ve got a plan,
Throw your arms ’round this honkytonk man.
Throw your arms ’round this honkytonk man
And we’ll get through this night the best way we can.
It is as if every economy Eastwood has picked up in acting and directing found its way into the film. Something of the steely compassion that is back of all the best country singing is in the movie, and the harsh, yearning belly of rural America is also there, used to making out with next to nothing but hard concerns and the spark of a dream that will never give up.
Honkytonk Man was the finest movie made about country plains life since The Last Picture Show, and it stood up to that comparison because of what Eastwood did with the role. A subtle man was 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. The miracle seemed to happen now and again. Once in a great while, movie stars become artists, and that was always moving. It gave a little hope. We are not supposed to get better once we are very successful.
MAILER: Those must have been incredibly tough years for you when you were scuffling as an actor.
EASTWOOD: Oh, I hated it, absolutely hated it. I tell people if you really want to do it, then you must be willing to study it and stick with it through all opposition and having to deal with some of the most no-talent people in the world passing judgment on you. They’re going to pick the worst aspects of you or of anybody else that they cast. If you can take all that and keep grinding until some part comes along that fits you and your feelings, then sometimes the odds will come up for you. But you have to have that kind of perseverance.
MAILER: How did you handle the rudeness?
EASTWOOD: I hated it. I wanted to pull people out of their seats and say, “Don’t talk to me that way.”
MAILER: I just realized that in a lot of the Dirty Harry movies, you’ve got a deep well of anger to dip into.
EASTWOOD: (laughs) Oh, yeah, it’s easy. People think I play the anger well. All you have to do is have a good memory.
It would be agreeable to end right here. Not every movie star pays his dues, takes his bad years, becomes an artist, does it his way, and leaves us with an ongoing inclination for the dry wisdom of his stuff.
Eastwood, however, has another side. If his best movies come out of a real need to comprehend his part of our American roots, there is another category of film he makes, and most skillfully, which is full of manipulation. He also knows how to press the secret buttons in his audiences.
Art is democratic. It is the hope that you may arrive at a truth with your audience. Something happens in the heart of the ticket buyer exactly because there wasn’t a calculated attempt to twitch his feelings like reflexes. Of course, art is thereby made difficult, and so it rarely works as well as manipulation.
The reviews for Honkytonk Man—the most quietly daring film Eastwood ever made—were, for the most part, cruel. Reviews usually came in bad for Eastwood films, but it did not matter. His films could bring in large box office with the most terrible reviews. Honkytonk Man, however, did not. It was a disaster critically and financially.
Eastwood once said, “I was never a discovery of the press,” and the remark is crucial. He had been discovered by the box office. He could forgo favorable reviews but not good box office.
Now, after the jolting failure of Honkytonk Man, there was pressure from all sides to do another film about Dirty Harry Callahan. Of the five movies bringing in Eastwood’s greatest profits, three had been about Dirty Harry Callahan, an outlaw cop who did things on his own. Callahan broke villains in two with his Magnum. Audiences cheered.
Eastwood had tired of making profitable movies about Dirty Harry Callahan. After filming three in the years between 1971 and 1976, he had shot none since. But now he accepted. He would act in and direct Sudden Impact.
I wasn’t intending to do any more of these characters. I never particularly wanted to. I thought I’d done all I can with it, and I might have, I don’t know. But everybody kept asking about it.
One cannot say how much will be retained in the finished film, but the script of Sudden Impact shows us three men fatally shot in the groin by a woman. It is in retaliation for being raped by them. Dirty Harry knocks off eight sleazos himself. There are also six flashbacks to the rape.
It is a Dirty Harry Film. But for the new emphasis on women’s rights (which moves Callahan to allow the girl to go free at the end), there are no new elements. The script gives us forty killings, rapes, fights, and other condiments. It is as full of ingredients as the first Dirty Harry.
That film bears summary. It is not just the amount of violent action, on average something new every three minutes, but the choice of items. There is something for everyone in Dirty Harry.
Right off, a girl swimming in a bikini is shot in a rooftop pool. We see the blood on her back. Soon after, a naked black is gunned down. He had to shoot the fellow, Callahan explains, because the man was chasing a girl up an alley while brandishing a butcher knife and an erection.
We hear of a thirteen-year-old girl buried alive. As proof of her existence, a detective holds up a bloodstained molar that has arrived in the mail. It was sent to her parents. Later, we will see the child removed from a manhole, nude, covered with dirt, dead, but chastely photographed.
A priest is seen in the sights of a sniper’s rifle: when the priest moves, the sniper shoots a ten-year-old black boy instead.
A man ready to jump from a high ledge is informed by Dirty Harry that he will leave a mess on the pavement if he jumps. This so horrifies the prospective suicide that he threatens to throw up. Dirty Harry requests him not to vomit on the firemen below. He replies by trying to pull Harry with him.
Now, with the aid of another detective’s binoculars, we look across into an apartment window. A naked girl opens her door to welcome a couple. They begin to make love. The sniper has them in his sights but is interrupted and guns down a cop instead. Then he shoots out a thirty-foot neon sign reading JESUS SAVES in flame-red letters.
We find the killer. His name is Scorpio, and he gets Dirty Harry—almost. Callahan has lost his guns, is down, and is having his face kicked in, but comes up with a last weapon, a long-bladed knife taped to his ankle. He throws it into the killer’s thigh—to the hilt. The killer screams, staggers off. Harry picks up his Magnum, begins to track the man, finds him later, fires, hits him
in the shin. Scorpio’s leg is now broken. Harry steps on it to make him confess.
In between these episodes are quiet vistas of Callahan walking the street or going down long halls. Full time is taken for such shots. Despite its violence, the beat of the film is laconic. The movie is almost as open in its space as a western. Maybe that is why the violence works. For the movie, when seen, is considerably less graphic than this description of it. The violence is not so much unendurable as frequent and successful—like a cruise with many ports of call. Dirty Harry looks as clean and well turned out as any young senator with a promising future. In scenes where we see him striding down the street, he could be walking from one campaign stop to another. Eastwood knows the buried buttons in his audience as well as any filmmaker around. Is it out of measure to call him the most important small-town artist in America? One of the buried secrets small-town life is about is knowing how to press other people’s buttons—that is, the ones concealed from themselves. That’s why it takes so long for things to happen in a small town. Unless you’re a genius, years can go by before you find each button.
MAILER: Does the question of moral responsibility weigh on you?
EASTWOOD: How do you mean?
MAILER: You can have arguments whether Dirty Harry reforms more criminals than he stimulates.
EASTWOOD: I never feel any moral problems with these pictures. I felt they’re fantasy.
MAILER: Come on. In Sudden Impact, three men are shot in the groin by a woman. It’s possible that some man or woman out there who never thought of doing that before, may now.
EASTWOOD: I don’t think my movies are that stimulating. People in the audience just sit there and say, “I admire the independence. I’d like to have the nerve to tell the boss off or have that control over my life.” In the society we live in, everything is kind of controlled for us. We just grow up and everything’s kind of done. A lot of people are drawn to an original like Dirty Harry. The general public interpreted it on that level, a man concerned with a victim he’d never met. Like everybody says, “Boy, if I was a victim of violent crime, I’d sure like to have someone like that on my side. I’d sure like to have someone expend that kind of effort on my behalf.” And I think a lot of people believe that there isn’t anybody who’s willing to expend that kind of effort if they were in that situation.
MAILER: There may not be.
EASTWOOD: There may not be. Right. That may be the fantasy—that there might be someone interested in my problem if I was ever in that spot. That preys on people’s minds these days with crime in America, in the world. Jesus, is there somebody there, is there anybody there?
MAILER: Do you think this is one reason why blacks like your movies so much?
EASTWOOD: Well, maybe the blacks feel that he’s an outsider like they felt they’ve been.
I let it go. He was making a film, and I did not know that I had the right to argue with a fellow artist when he was at work. Professionalism, in the absence of other certainties, becomes your guide.
Besides, I was not sure how I felt. Violence in films might have no more impact on future deeds than violence in dreams. Who could separate the safety valve from the trigger spring?
I let it go. I liked Clint Eastwood. Kin to him, I trusted my instincts. What if several hundred bodies were strewn across the thirty films he had made? It did not matter. In his movie gun-fights, those bodies flew around like bowling pins. The violence happened so quickly that an audience was more likely to feel the kinetic satisfactions of a good strike in a bowling alley than savor the blood. Besides, nobody of virtue was ever killed by Eastwood. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it was fantasy. How else account for the confident sense of duty in his person, his character, and his deeds?
What an American was Clint Eastwood! Maybe there was no one more American than he. What an interesting artist. He portrayed psychopaths who acted with all the silence, certainty, and gravity of saints. Or would it be closer to say that he played saints who killed like psychopaths? Not all questions have quick answers. Sometimes, it is worth more to dwell with the enigma. In the interim, he is living proof of the maxim that the best way to get through life is cool.
Huckleberry Finn, Alive at One Hundred
(1984)
IS THERE A SWEETER TONIC for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In nineteenth-century Russia, Anna Karenina was received with the following: “Vronsky’s passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna” … “Sentimental rubbish” … “Show me one page,” says The Odessa Courier, “that contains an idea.” Moby-Dick was incinerated: “Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before in marine literature” … “Sheer moonstruck lunacy” … “Sad stuff. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.”
By this measure, Huckleberry Finn (published a hundred years ago this week in London and two months later in America) gets off lightly. The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse than “a gross trifling with every fine feeling.… Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,” and the public library in Concord, Mass., was confident enough to ban it: “the veriest trash.” The Boston Transcript reported that “other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
All the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded. There were no large critical hurrahs but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. A good tale, went the consensus. There was no sense that a great American novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway’s encomiums fifty years later. In the preface to an English edition, Eliot would speak of “a master piece.… Twain’s genius is completely realized,” and Ernest went further. In “Green Hills of Africa,” after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’… It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect vin du pays for an ineluctable afternoon, was nonetheless more like other novelists in one dire respect: he was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments. Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author’s rule of thumb: If I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously, Huckleberry Finn has passed the test.
A suspicion immediately arises. Mark Twain is doing the kind of writing only Hemingway can do better. Evidently, we must take a look. May I say it helps to have read Huckleberry Finn so long ago that it feels brand-new on picking it up again. Perhaps I was eleven when I saw it last, maybe thirteen, but now I only remember that I came to it after Tom Sawyer and was disappointed. I couldn’t really follow The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The character of Tom Sawyer whom I had liked so much in the first book was altered, and did not seem nice any more. Huckleberry Finn was altogether beyond me. Later, I recollect being surprised by the high regard nearly everyone who taught American Lit. lavished upon the text, but that didn’t bring me back to it. Obviously, I was waiting for an assignment from The New York Times.
Let me offer assurances. It may have been worth the wait. I suppose I am the ten millionth reader to say that Huckleberry Finn is an extraordinary work. Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel. Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor)—all the same, what a book we have here! I had the most curious sense of excitement. After a while, I understood my peculiar frame of attention. The book was so up-to-date! I was not reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of tho
se rare letters which says, “We won’t make this claim often but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out.” So it was like reading From Here to Eternity in galleys, back in 1950, or Lie Down in Darkness, Catch-22, or The World According to Garp (which reads like a fabulous first novel). You kept being alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical, and finally excited. A new writer had moved onto the block. He could be a potential friend or enemy but he most certainly was talented.
That was how it felt to read Huckleberry Finn a second time. I kept resisting the context until I finally surrendered. One always does surrender sooner or later to a book with a strong magnetic field. I felt as if I held the work of a young writer about thirty or thirty-five, a prodigiously talented fellow from the Midwest, from Missouri probably, who had had the audacity to write a historical novel about the Mississippi as it might have been a century and a half ago, and this young writer had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities. In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author’s confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America. Jailhouse drunks like Huck Finn’s father take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the smell of clothing. Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and “sand,” and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men—what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author’s riverbanks.
It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were not so much in the historical facts—those seemed accurate enough—but the point of view was too contemporary. The scenes might succeed—say it again, this young writer was talented!—but he kept betraying his literary influences. The author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in Augie March, still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized The Catcher in the Rye, and he probably dipped into Deliverance and Why Are We in Vietnam? He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on small-town life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn’t be more commercial.
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