The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America 9780231850711

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Play Mystic for Me
1. Pros and Cons: The Case For/Against Clint
2. A Fistful of Movies: Rowdy Yates and the Man With No Name
3. 3 The Rising Star: Clintus, Siegelini, and Company
4. Any Which Way He Can: From Misty and Harry to High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales
5. Portrait of the Artist as a Major Player: From Pale Rider to Bird
6. Invictus: From John Huston to Jersey Boys
7. Eastwood’s Politics: ‘Leave everyone alone’
Epilogue: ‘If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me…’
Filmography as Director
Index

Citation preview

the cinema of CLINT EASTWOOD

DIRECTORS’ CUTS

Other selected titles in the Directors’ Cuts series: the cinema of J A M E S C A M E R O N : bodies in heroic motion JAMES CLARKE

the cinema of I S T VÁ N S Z A B Ó : visions of europe JOHN CUNNINGHAM

the cinema of A G N È S VA R D A : resistance and eclecticism DELPHINE BÉNÉZET

the cinema of A L E X A N D E R S O K U R O V : figures of paradox J E R E M I S Z A N I AW S K I

the cinema of M I C H A E L W I N T E R B O T T O M : borders, intimacy, terror BRUCE BENNETT

the cinema of R A Ú L R U I Z : impossible cartographies MICHAEL GODDARD

the cinema of M I C H A E L M A N N : vice and vindication J O N AT H A N R AY N E R

the cinema of A K I K A U R I S M Ä K I : authorship, bohemia, nostalgia, nation ANDREW NESTINGEN

the cinema of R I C H A R D L I N K L AT E R : walk, don’t run ROB STONE

the cinema of B É L A TA R R : the circle closes A N D R Á S B Á L I N T K O VÁ C S

the cinema of S T E V E N S O D E R B E R G H : indie sex, corporate lies, and digital videotape A N D R E W D E WA A R D & R . C O L I N TAT E

the cinema of T E R R Y G I L L I A M : it’s a mad world edited by J E F F B I R K E N S T E I N , A N N A F R O U L A & K A R E N R A N D E L L

the cinema of TA K E S H I K I TA N O : flowering blood SEAN REDMOND

the cinema of T H E D A R D E N N E B R O T H E R S : responsible realism PHILIP MOSLEY

the cinema of M I C H A E L H A N E K E : europe utopia edited by B E N M c C A N N & D A V I D S O R F A

the cinema of S A L LY P O T T E R : a politics of love S O P H I E M AY E R

the cinema of J O H N S A Y L E S : a lone star MARK BOULD

the cinema of D AV I D C R O N E N B E R G : from baron of blood to cultural hero E R N E S T M AT H I J S

the cinema of L A R S V O N T R I E R : authenticity and artifice CAROLINE BAINBRIDGE

the cinema of W E R N E R H E R Z O G : aesthetic ecstasy and truth BRAD PRAGER

the cinema of T E R R E N C E M A L I C K : poetic visions of america (second edition) edited by H A N N A H P A T T E R S O N

the cinema of A N G L E E : the other side of the screen (second edition) WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY

the cinema of S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G : empire of light NIGEL MORRIS

the cinema of T O D D H A Y N E S : all that heaven allows edited by J A M E S M O R R I S O N

the cinema of R O M A N P O L A N S K I : dark spaces of the world edited by J O H N O R R & E L Z B I E T A O S T R O W S K A

the cinema of J O H N C A R P E N T E R : the technique of terror edited by I A N C O N R I C H & D A V I D W O O D S

the cinema of M I K E L E I G H : a sense of the real G A R RY WAT S O N

the cinema of N A N N I M O R E T T I : dreams and diaries E WA M A Z I E R S K A & L A U R A R A S C A R O L I

the cinema of D AV I D LY N C H : american dreams, nightmare visions edited by E R I C A S H E E N & A N N E T T E D A V I S O N

the cinema of K R Z Y S Z T O F K I E S L O W S K I : variations on destiny and chance M A R E K H A LT O F

the cinema of G E O R G E A . R O M E R O : knight of the living dead (second edition) TONY WILLIAMS

the cinema of K AT H R Y N B I G E L O W : hollywood transgressor edited by D E B O R A H J E R M Y N & S E A N R E D M O N D

the cinema of CLINT EAST WOOD chronicles of america

David Sterritt WALLFLOWER PRESS london & new york

A Wallflower Press Book Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York . Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © David Sterritt 2014 All rights reserved Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-17200-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-17201-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85071-1 (e-book) Series design by Rob Bowden Design Cover image of Clint Eastwood courtesy of the Kobal Collection

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Play Mystic for Me 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

1

Pros and Cons: The Case For/Against Clint 7 A Fistful of Movies: Rowdy Yates and the Man With No Name 24 The Rising Star: Clintus, Siegelini, and Company 56 Any Which Way He Can: From Misty and Harry to High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales 87 Portrait of the Artist as a Major Player: From Pale Rider to Bird 140 Invictus: From John Huston to Jersey Boys 161 Eastwood’s Politics: ‘Leave everyone alone’ 219 Epilogue: ‘If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me…’ 243 Filmography as Director Index 258

246

v

For Mikita and Jeremy and Tanya and Craig and Kim with love and gratitude

acknowledgements

To name all the people who have encouraged and inspired me would take another book, so this brief note will have to stand for the much longer list that should be here. I have known for years that Yoram Allon is an outstanding editor and publisher, and now I also know that he has the patience of the proverbial saint. Abundant thanks to him and the others at Wallflower Press and Columbia University Press. Trusted friends and colleagues have made the Maryland Institute College of Art an invigorating social and intellectual haven. My friends and colleagues at Columbia University’s School of the Arts have also done more than they realize to keep me going, as have the members and associates of Columbia’s University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation, the faculty colloquium that I have had the enormous privilege of co-chairing with William G. Luhr for about a decade now. The members of the National Society of Film Critics, who have inexplicably allowed me to chair the group for the past ten years, have given me insights and information on a wide range of subjects. Those quoted in these pages include Molly Haskell, Richard Schickel, David Denby, Amy Taubin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, Richard Brody, Dave Kehr, Peter Rainer, Henry Sheehan, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Kenneth Turan, Michael Sragow, Charles Taylor, and the late Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert; and our executive director, Elisabeth Weis, has done as much for the cause of American film criticism as a dozen of us reviewers put together. Conversations with friends as wise and perceptive as Thomas Doherty, Stephen Prince, Cynthia Lucia, Lester Friedman, Krin Gabbard, Mark Dery, Saul Myers, Firmin Debrabander, Yara Cheik, Paul Jaskunas, John and Edit Barry, Deborah Rudacille, Betsy Boyd, Michael Yockel, Thomas Jones, Soheila Ghaussy, Michael Garral, Ned and Melissa Sparrow, Ed Fother-ingill, Melissa Daum and Rochelle Rives have been invaluable sources of ideas and information. Thanks also to my former Columbia grad students Charlotte Garson and Matthew Hipps for terrific research assistance. My greatest love goes, as always, to the fully grown adults whom I still call my kids – Craig, happily painting in New England nowadays, and Jeremy, making high-octane music while holding down the fort in my old Manhattan neighborhood – and to Kim Souza and Tanya Van Sant, their truly significant others. And most of all there is Mikita Brottman, my partner in crime. Without her and the late, great Grisby this modest volume could not have come into existence.

vii

INTRODUCTION

Play Mystic For Me

He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. You don’t have to say Clint Eastwood – just Clint will do, since he belongs to the small handful of celebrities with first-name recognition almost everywhere American movies are seen. Eastwood has been excoriated by some critics, including the influential Pauline Kael, who famously called him ‘a tall, cold cod’.1 He has been lavishly praised by others, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, who calls him ‘one of the finest directors alive’, and Richard Schickel, one of his biographers, who deems him a ‘very serious’ actor as well as a thoughtful director with a penchant for serious themes and a ‘wonderful pianist’ to boot.2 Some observers have seen merit only in certain Eastwood films, such as critic Michael Sragow, who finds ‘the whole Clint Eastwood thing … one of the great mysteries of contemporary film criticism’, but admires the western Unforgiven (1992) all the same.3 And some have stayed on the critical fence with sceptics like Walter Metz, who writes that with late-career films like the crime drama Mystic River (2003)it can finally be said that Eastwood is making ‘significant thematic interventions into American cinema’, but also says that the alleged masterpieces of earlier years, such as Unforgiven, are ‘highly overrated in their critique of traditional genre material’.4 The public has shown little interest in such arguments, embracing Eastwood with rare enthusiasm. More precisely, audiences have embraced the pop-culture Clint who works within well-tested film genres and familiar heroic attitudes, sometimes testing their limits but rarely challenging the conventions and assumptions on which they rely. Moviegoers have been considerably less stirred by art-film Clint, who tries out new, sometimes audacious approaches to screen storytelling in genuinely personal projects. Thus one finds spectacular box-office tallies for the likes of Firefox (1982), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and comparatively dismal statistics for such efforts as Honkytonk Man (1982), Bird (1988), and White Hunter Black Heart (1990). Only in his later years has Eastwood managed to combine morec h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

1

Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play the tragic heroes of Eastwood’s classic western Unforgiven (1992)

or-less edgy material with substantial mass-audience appeal, scoring critically and commercially with Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby (2004), which garnered eight Academy Award nominations between them, four of these morphing into wins on Oscar night. This is not to say that art-film Clint – or pop-culture Clint, for that matter – has found a magic highway to success; even the seasoned, experienced Eastwood remains vulnerable to the endless vacillations of moviegoing tastes. Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the innovative World War II films released in late 2006, earned about half as much combined as the less-adventurous Space Cowboys (2000) grossed six years earlier. Nor have strategic retreats to tried-and-true genres provided a dependable safe haven; witness the speedy implosions of True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002).5 This said, even the most egregious box-office failures have contributed to Clint’s celebrity, consolidating his reputation as a versatile screen artist unafraid of artistic and commercial risks. In addition to serving his own personal and professional interests, the two-tiered reputation he has cultivated – as a savvy Hollywood hitmaker and an intrepid explorer of fresh cinematic terrain – has served the film industry’s need for larger-than-life creative figures who serve as de-facto fronts for its congenitally moneydriven operations. Measured by longevity, productivity and profits, Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. Less easily quantifiable are the artistic merits of his distinctive star persona, his internationally viewed movies and his widely known sociopolitical stances. This book aims to examine and evaluate the major elements of Eastwood’s career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but delving into other key issues along the way, including the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz and his political views as reflected and refracted by his films. My starting point is the premise that Eastwood’s most significant and influential movies (for better or for worse) originate as projects that touch a sensitive chord in his own personality and preoccupations; then they undergo various degrees of change, dictated largely by imperatives of marketing, as they work their way through the unwieldy and time-consuming mechanisms of the studio production system; and finally they resonate with the moviegoing public, often in erratic and unpredictable ways. Since this is an exercise in criticism first and historiography second, I don’t pretend to ‘objectivity’ vis-à-vis individual Eastwood films or Eastwood himself as actor, as director or as former mayor of Carmel, California, for that matter. My motive is neither 2

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

to praise Clint nor to bury him, but to think about and evaluate the dauntingly large interventions he has made in mass-media pursuits spanning more than half a century. What attracts me to this project is a sense of Eastwood’s importance as a pop-cultural force, and more specifically, his steady attraction to a pair of meta-genres that recur, in separate or overlapping form, throughout his career. One of these, which can be called the Myth-movie, takes as its business the weaving of tales that are centered on individual lives yet rooted in the collective American unconscious; this category includes biopics (Bird; White Hunter Black Heart, 1990), melodramas (Honkytonk Man, 1982; Blood Work, 2002), and comedies (Bronco Billy, 1980; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997) as well as romances (Breezy, 1973; The Bridges of Madison County, 1995) and pictures like Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby that probe contemporary moral conundrums. The other meta-genre, the History-picture, devotes its energies to telling, retelling, revising and recasting the grand narratives of America’s distant and recent past; this group comprises Clint’s westerns and war movies plus odd projects like Space Cowboys and Absolute Power (1997), which put an eccentric Eastwood spin on topical subjects like political skulduggery and the United States space program. These categories are broad and inclusive, roomy enough to cover films that differ in all kinds of ways. But together they suggest that Eastwood’s body of work has a cohesion and seriousness – or, for viewers unimpressed with them, a narrowness and repetitiveness – that need to be carefully thought about, along with the related question of whether he is a true cinematic auteur or a mere motion-picture journeyman with a photogenic face and a flair for self promotion. Eastwood as éminence grise Another issue to bear in mind is the widespread critical consensus that Eastwood’s artistic sensibility took on new depth and maturity around the time of Unforgiven, which impressed thoughtful commentators and casual audiences alike with its revisionist take on traditional western themes, including the key role played by violence in American history, culture and cinema, Eastwood’s own cinema included. Not everyone agrees that his later films are more nuanced and intelligent than his earlier works, and as already noted, quite a few see little merit in any of his pictures; for some critics even his proclivity for working within familiar Hollywood genres warrants ‘disqualification from … serious consideration as an artist’, as Kent Jones put it.6 I don’t think dismissive attitudes like this (which neither Jones nor I share) illuminate either Eastwood’s films or the American cinema, and while it is undeniable that some films in each period of his career are less than compelling in style and/or substance, his later works often manifest a seriousness and complexity that stand significantly above the general run of movies by other filmmakers, or by Eastwood himself during his first decade and a half as a director. In my view, the rise in Eastwood’s artistic maturity started not with Unforgiven in 1992 but somewhat earlier with Bird in 1988 and White Hunter Black Heart in 1990. After those remarkable films his creativity quotient oscillated up and down for a dozen years or so, then remained consistently high in Mystic River and Million Dollar c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

3

Eastwood’s great biopic Bird, released in 1988, stars Forest Whitaker as legendary sax player Charlie Parker

Baby as well as the World War II diptych of 2006. His two 2008 releases, Changeling and Gran Torino, strike me as less imposing than their immediate predecessors but still contain interesting ingredients. When the inspirational Invictus opened in 2009, with its audience-friendly blend of cheerleading for South Africa, suspense on the rugby field, and Morgan Freeman living his dream of playing Nelson Mandela, it seemed so dull and passionless that I decided the 79-year-old director had finally run out of steam – a conclusion I promptly reversed the following year, when Hereafter raised the condescendingly named quasi-genre of Old Man’s Movie to heights rivaling those reached by Alfred Hitchcock in Family Plot (1976) and John Huston in The Dead (1987). A year later the arrival of J. Edgar, the movie Eastwood said would be his last as a director, showed him still going strong at 81. Jones shares my view that Bird marked a turning point in the quality of Eastwood’s work, writing that the director pushed himself to a new level in the Charlie Parker biopic and pinpointing a key thematic running through Eastwood’s major films from that time on. Since the late 1980s, Jones writes, ‘Eastwood has offered the same contrast to the audience, again and again, in myriad variations: this is the way you think things are, the way you’re told they are, and this is the way things really are. Which is, of course, what the narratives of Bird, Madison County, Unforgiven, A Perfect World [1993] (great title), and Mystic River – Eastwood’s crowning achievements – are all about.7 Once again I concur, with the reservation that these pictures are not ‘all about’ that particular theme and the variations Eastwood works upon it. They are about many other things as well, and a laudable quality of his filmmaking since around the time of Bird has been his wish to cultivate an actively thinking audience rather than a passively

French journalist Marie Lelay (Cécile de France) has a near-death experience at the beginning of Eastwood’s multinarrative drama Hereafter (2010) 4

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

consuming one. ‘You don’t necessarily say what’s right or wrong,’ he told me in a lengthy interview I conducted with him when Bird was released. ‘You just give several points of view. I love the audience to work with you. Rather than be condescending or just give ‘em a story with an ending, I love ‘em to think about it.’8 I explore these and other dimensions of Eastwood’s cinema in the chapters that follow. Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

Pauline Kael, ‘Killing Time,’ in Reeling (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 251–256, cited at 252. Originally published in The New Yorker on 14 January 1974. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘New Perspectives,’ Chicago Reader (12 January 2007)

accessed 2 May 2008; and David Sterritt, Interview with Richard Schickel, 2003. Quoted in Lee Gardner, ‘Michael Sragow,’ City Paper Online, Baltimore (23 November 2005) accessed 13 May 2007. Sragow’s comment reads in full, ‘I must admit that the whole Clint Eastwood thing, to me, is one of the great mysteries of contemporary film criticism. I don’t get what his directing is supposed to be about, and I don’t get what these movies are supposed to be about. But then Unforgiven is an example of how even filmmakers I don’t like can surprise me. Of course, Unforgiven had a gifted screenwriter, David Webb Peoples.’ Walter Metz, ‘The Old Man and the C: Masculinity and Age in the Films of Clint Eastwood,’ in Leonard Engel, ed., Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), 204–217, cited at 205, 204. The years of release and lifetime theatrical grosses for these films are: Firefox, 1992, $46,708,276; Sudden Impact, 1983, $67,642,693; The Bridges of Madison County, 1995, $71, 516,617; Honkytonk Man, 1982, $4,484,991; Bird, 1988, $2,181,286; White Hunter Black Heart, 1990, $2,319,124; Unforgiven, 1992--$101,157,447; Mystic River, 2003, $90,135,191; Million Dollar Baby, 2004, $100,492,203; True Crime, 1999, $16,649,768; Blood Work, 2002, $26,235,081. Grosses for the 2006 releases were: Flags of Our Fathers, $33,602,376, and Letters from Iwo Jima, $13,619,997, for combined gross earnings of $47,222,373; the gross for Space Cowboys, 2000, was $90,464,773. These figures come from the Clint Eastwood/ Director listing at Box Office Mojo (updated 13 May 2007) accessed 13 May 2007. Kent Jones, ‘The Eastwood Variations,’ Film Comment vol. 39 no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 2003), pp. 44, 47–8, 51, cited at 48. Jones, ‘Eastwood Variations,’ p. 51. Jones’s point about a recurring Eastwood theme supports the argument that Clint is an auteur with a consistent personal style, which I discuss in the next chapter. According to critic Paul Smith, the term ‘auteur’ was first applied to Eastwood in the title of a Film Comment interc h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

5

8

6

view published in 1978. See Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter, ‘Clint Eastwood, Auteur,’ Film Comment vol. 14 no. 1 (January/February 1978), pp. 24–32; reprinted as ‘Eastwood Direction’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblenz, eds., Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 42–61. See also Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 244–245. David Sterritt, ‘Hollywood Players Who’ve Made a Difference: Cassavetes, Eastwood, Martin, Nicholson,’ in Sterritt, Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), pp. 31–49, cited at p. 38.

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

CHAPTER ONE

Pros and Cons: The Case For/Against Clint

Part 1: The Case For Clint Eastwood is quintessentially American, a pioneering spirit that goes ever forward into ‘unchartered territory’. Ric Gentry1 A theme of this book is Clint Eastwood’s perennial attraction to a pair of meta-genres that can be called the Myth-movie, which tells stories centered on individual lives yet rooted in the collective American unconscious, and the History-picture, which revises and reworks grand narratives of America’s distant and recent past. As noted in the introduction, the steadiness of Eastwood’s pictures in this regard can be cited as evidence of the seriousness and cohesion that signal the presence of an auteur, or – just as logically, for those who dislike his films on aesthetic or thematic grounds – as signs of a narrowness and repetitiveness that betray his secret identity as a Hollywood hack. I incline toward the former view, with reservations that I will discuss in the course of this book; but I also respect some contentions put forth by critics who hold that Eastwood is not an auteur or even a decent cinema craftsman, much less a lucid thinker with worthwhile things to say in his films, and shall explore them in the second part of this chapter. For now I want to look at some of the arguments supporting the idea that the overall consistency of Eastwood’s work shows him to be an authentic auteur, which I take to mean not just a purveyor of ‘personal touches’ but a deliberative artist given to exploring personally compelling subjects that maintain an underlying unity despite the shifts in subject, setting and context called for by individual stories. Kent Jones recognises Eastwood as an auteur when he says the filmmaker’s major films are variations on the recurring theme of appearance versus reality; as does Richard c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

7

Schickel when he says Eastwood is drawn to themes ‘that have to do with how the past impinges on the present’. Americans have ‘a short history’, Schickel told me, ‘and we worry a lot about it. Clint does that as well.’2 Taking the same position for somewhat different reasons, critic Dave Kehr, who has championed Eastwood strongly over the years, locates the sweeping coherence of his films in their differences as well as their similarities, noting his ‘policy of … seldom repeating a tone, a character, or a genre two films in a row’ and of alternating between ‘personal’ movies and ‘more obviously commercial’ projects; the latter practice echoes the ‘old survival technique’ of Hollywood master John Ford, who liked to make ‘one film for himself [and then] one film for his studio’. Kehr’s preferred way of categorising Eastwood’s movies is to divide them between ‘collective, community oriented films’, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Bronco Billy (1980), and ‘studies of reclusive, unfathomable figures’, such as Charlie Parker in Bird and Dirty Harry in all but the last of that character’s five pictures.3 Yet this very split becomes a unifying theme, as Kehr indicates by describing the contrast in Eastwood’s work between the ‘warm glow of community’ and the ‘fear of loneliness’ on one hand, and the ‘cool breeze of individualism’ and the ‘resentment of compromise’ on the other. As a guiding principle of Eastwood’s oeuvre, this dialectic – between ‘celebrations … of belonging’ and burdensome ‘consequences of social commitment’, in Kehr’s words – presents more evidence of the filmmaker’s auteur status.4 Looked at from a different angle, of course, such thematic steadiness can resemble the foolish consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called the hobgoblin of little minds.5 If we turn from Kehr to Pauline Kael, and apply to Eastwood an antiauteurist critique she aimed at an earlier (and greater) director, Alfred Hitchcock, we may conclude that Eastwood’s ‘uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations – the feedback he wants and gets from them – reveal not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology’.6 Like many of Kael’s pronouncements, punchy and spirited though they often are, this one is awfully vague, applied here to Hitchcock but transferable to any skilled mass-audience filmmaker (and more than a few art-movie directors) whom a critic or spectator happens to dislike; and there were none Kael disliked more than Eastwood, whose very steadiness and consistency were guaranteed to stick in her anti-auteurist craw.7 For critics who value auteurism on either normative or heuristic grounds, however, Eastwood usually passes whatever litmus tests they apply to him, and the variety of these tests has produced a variety of rationales for his place in this highly regarded critical category. Here is a sampling of opinion on this point. The trope in the title of Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood refers to a duality that author William Beard identifies across the length and breadth of Eastwood’s oeuvre.8 Eastwood directed his first film in 1971, at the start of a decade when social and cultural changes undermined moviegoers’ ability to believe in ‘a classical heroic masculinity’ of the kind that had hitherto dominated Hollywood movies. This does not mean that traditional displays of masculine power lost their popular appeal, however – they may even have grown more appealing at a time when the conventional comforts of patriarchal ideology were in a tailspin. Eastwood’s answer to this ‘schizo8

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

phrenic condition’ was twofold: to embody ‘a hero who is in some way impossible’, too heroic, authentic, powerful, prosocial and redolent of time-tested values to be believed; and also to call that persona into serious and explicit question, revealing its contradictions and impossibilities such that ‘the impossibility of the viewer’s wishes’ are disavowed and displaced into ‘the mystery and unknowableness’ of the character’s transcendent nature.9 Beard gets to the heart of early-1970s pop culture, which lay close to the heart of America in the tumultuous Vietnam era, in his first chapter: The good fight, the fight that John Wayne always won, could not be won anymore: it had been lost definitively. Whoever pretended to win such a fight was either lying or deluded, and it was a virtue of Eastwood (and Charles Bronson, and all the other, smaller incarnations of heroic contempt) that he recognized the fight was fixed and the whole stage corrupted and manipulated. […] What a smart man, a strong man, must do is not play by the rules and not be taken in by the charade of official morality. This spectacle – a skeptical and consequently ruthless hero as a figure who had seen through the tired old shibboleths of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good – appealed to audiences in the 1960s and ’70s, and was another precise symptom of the death of classicism.10 Eastwood’s response over the next few decades is embodied in movies of two kinds – those that capitalize on the impossible hero, such as the Dirty Harry films, and those that deconstruct the impossibility, such as White Hunter Black Heart and The Gauntlet (1977). He carries out his project, moreover, in such a way that each of these two movie-types carries within it the trace or shadow of the other, so that the films with transcendent heroes couch their formulas in gestures of irony and reflexivity that neutralise the quasi-realism and naïveté that make postmodern viewers squirm, while the deconstructive movies offer the gratifications of heroism in stylised, flattened forms that postmodern viewers can accept. In sum, Eastwood built his career by exploiting post-1960s scepticism toward transcendent heroes even as he catered to nostalgia for them, and when ‘traditional values’ made a comeback in the Reagan era, he even more ingeniously revived the heroic traits he had been suppressing and reinvented himself as ‘a reborn classical hero’. The upshot of these processes is the astoundingly supple Eastwood persona, ‘more ironized and impossible than a classical hero of masculinity like John Wayne, more substantial and authoritative than a postmodern one like Arnold Schwarzenegger … both flat and not-flat; mythically enlarged and two-dimensional; but with a suggestion of hidden depths and primordial authenticity’.11 So consistently and methodically has Eastwood realised the career-long project outlined here that it is no surprise to read the conclusions Beard has drawn. ‘Eastwood’s films are magnetic to any auteur-oriented approach’, he writes near the beginning of his book, ‘because they combine a relentless restaging and repetition of persona-characteristics, narrative forms, and individual tropes with a constant juggling and reconfiguring of these same elements to see them c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

9

in a different light. It is strange and fascinating, too, to see films and a persona which are simultaneously so prominent in ideology and dominant commodity-culture and yet so persistent in a project of self-definition and self-deconstruction. […] Eastwood emerges as … an artistic presence second to none in the American cinema of the past three decades.’12 A more ringing testimony for the defense is hard to imagine. In his book Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films Analyzed, film scholar Laurence F. Knapp sets forth a new term for the authorial status of important directors (Eastwood, Charles Chaplin, William S. Hart) who star in their own films – starteur, combining ‘auteur’ with the ‘star’ quality they accrue when their creativity intersects with the cultural contexts in which their works are made and seen.13 Ascribing much importance to Eastwood’s skillful and loyal crew at Malpaso (his own production company), which has worked with him long and consistently enough to achieve an intuitive grasp of his distinctive style and the best ways to realise it on screen, Knapp cites nine cinematic markers as evidence of that style: t
FYQSFTTJWF
VTFT
PG
MPXLFZ
CBDLMJHIUJOH t
VTF
PG
EFHSFF
ASFWFSTF
NBTUFS
TFRVFODFT
JO
XIJDI
UIF
EJSFDUPS
ADSFBUFT
the illusion of a composite 360-degree space by crossing the action axis and alternating between two shot and reverse shots that share a 180-degree axis’, thereby creating ‘a compound sense of place and mood’ by splintering space while preserving the flow of time; t
B
QSFGFSFODF
GPS
DPPM
NVUFE
UPOFT
HSFFO
CSPXO
PWFS
QSJNBSZ
DPMPST t
FYUFOTJWF
TIPPUJOH
PO
MPDBUJPO
DPVQMFE
XJUI
B
DPOWJDUJPO
UIBU
MBOETDBQF
TIPVME
be filmed so as ‘to create a mood and atmosphere’ rather than mere ‘scenic’ visual impact; t
NPOUBHF
UIBU
CBMBODFT
GPSNBM
TIPUT
PG
OFBSFRVBM
MFOHUI
BOE
JOWJTJCMF
DVUUJOH
on action for an impression of seamless continuity) modes with accelerated (abrupt, jagged assemblages) and elliptical (condensing, extending or distorting time) modes; t
mise-en-scène that combines fixed and fluid elements, keeping space and perspective ‘linear, but also fluid and elliptical’ so as to place the viewer ‘in the midst of a scene without being too intrusive or remote’; t
DJSDVMBS
OBSSBUJWF
DPOTUSVDUJPOT
UIBU
BMMPX
&BTUXPPE
UP
ATVTUBJO
B
CBMBODFE
narrative without sacrificing his love of phenomenology and character’; t
B
AMBUFOU
DBTVBMZFUQSFDJTF
BDUJOH
TUZMF
UIBU
NBLFT
IJN
ANPSF
PG
B
SFBDUPS
UIBO
an actor’; t
BOE
B
TDSFFO
QFSTPOB
AUIF
TFBM
UIBU
NBSLT
&BTUXPPET
XPSL
BT
IJT
PXO
UIBU
comprises two primary archetypes – one mythic (The Man With No Name) and one modern (Dirty Harry) – as well as non-legendary figures (e.g., Bronco Billy, John Wilson in White Hunter Black Heart, and Robert Kincaid in The Bridges of Madison County) who emerge in his most personal films.14 Knapp categorises Eastwood’s films into five chronological groups named in the chapter headings: 10

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

t
GPSNBUJWF
ZFBST
GSPN
&BTUXPPET
CJSUI
FSSPOFPVTMZ
QMBDFE
JO

B
ZFBS
FBSMZ
through The Beguiled (1971); t
ëSTU
QIBTF
FYQFSJNFOUT
XJUI
GPSN
GSPN
Play Misty for Me (1971) through The Eiger Sanction (1975); t
TFDPOE
QIBTF
SFEFNQUJPO
PG
UIF
&BTUXPPE
QFSTPOB
GSPN
The Outlaw Josey Wales, through Pale Rider (1985); t
UIJSE
QIBTF
UIF
UIFNF
PG
SFUJSFNFOU
GSPN
Heartbreak Ridge (1985) through A Perfect World; t
GPVSUI
QIBTF
UIF
DJOFNB
PG
QIFOPNFOPMPHZ
BOE
IVNBO
FYQFSJFODF
VQ
UP
The Bridges of Madison County, the last Eastwood film in release when Knapp finished his book in 1996.15 For those who accept Knapp’s taxonomy, the logic and order of its categorisations attest to the logic and order of Eastwood’s oeuvre. Hence his clear legitimacy as an auteur, or a ‘starteur’ – take your pick. Eastwood has developed a directorial style that is ‘coolly classical and yet adamantly personal’, according to Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, whose edited collection of Eastwood interviews was published in 1999. They add that although Eastwood is certainly a Hollywood insider, ‘he retains an outsider’s perspective through his refusal to heed cultural and aesthetic trends in film production’.16 The latter claim is problematic, and less laudatory to Eastwood than the writers apparently intend. Perhaps they simply mean that the overall look, tone and import of a characteristic Eastwood film derives from its own organic development rather than dominant fashions ‘in film production’ at that moment; but as Beard painstakingly shows, he has been very adept at heeding the cultural and aesthetic demands of popular audiences – including demands that are unconscious and disavowed – ever since his directorial debut. This point aside, Kapsis and Coblentz use evidence collected in their book to portray Eastwood as a ‘benevolent chief ’ who exercises ‘ultimate control over his projects … in a cooperative spirit’, getting what he wants by ‘choosing collaborators he can trust to work freely within the parameters of his vision’ and ‘keeping his ideas about a film supple enough to incorporate creative suggestions from all the participants’.17 This recalls Robert Altman’s idea that an auteur is less a dominating author than a sort of discriminating filter whose role is both to originate ideas and accept or decline ideas proposed by others.18 Although the fact of editing an eponymous compendium of interviews suggests that Kapsis and Coblentz consider Eastwood an auteur by one definition or another, they join Knapp and other critics in citing Malpaso as a key tool in his creative armamentarium, calling it ‘a small and orderly operation, optimally suited to turning out the reasonably priced and efficiently produced features [that] are best suited to his spontaneous and instinctual approach to cinematic storytelling’. They add that the company’s modest scale ‘tends to make it possible for the control of the entire operation to rest conveniently in one man’s hands’, and that ‘even in his “commercial” vehicles it is not difficult to locate his personal themes and stylistic markers’.19 Since such themes and markers are essential signs of auteur creativity, these critics affirm Eastwood’s auteur status even as they qualify the term’s meaning by emphasising c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

11

Richard Tuggle was the director, Eastwood was the auteur of the dark thriller Tightrope (1984)

his openness to collaboration and reliance on the Malpaso crew in bringing his ideas to fruition. They acknowledge that Eastwood dislikes being called an auteur and often asserts that he is ‘part of an ensemble’ of which he is no more than ‘the leading force’ or the ‘lieutenant to the platoon’, and they point out that Malpaso’s name consistently appears in his films’ opening credits before his own.20 Yet ultimately, they suggest, an Eastwood movie does indeed spring from the Eastwood imagination, as Eastwood’s own words attest. ‘You have to have the picture there in your mind before you make it’, he said in 1980. And again almost twenty years later: ‘I believe that when you’re making a film, you’ve got everything in mind, in an almost subliminal way, and that all you have to do is make all that reality on screen.’21 This attitude is partly responsible for what Kapsis and Coblentz, following French critic Pascal Mérigeau, call the Eastwood touch. Not all arguments in favor of Eastwood’s auteur status make large or impressive claims. What might be called the bare-bones case is stated by Christine Holmlund, who deems Eastwood to be the auteur of the 1984 crime drama Tightrope even though Richard Tuggle is clearly listed as the film’s writer and director. Eastwood qualifies because his position as the biggest male box-office star guarantees a certain continuity in audience perceptions of his films. He also frequently produces or directs his films, and generally works with the same people, including members of his own family. Tightrope is a case in point. Eastwood is both star and producer, and writer/director Richard Tuggles [sic] as well as cinematographer Bruce Surtees have been associated with earlier Eastwood vehicles (Tuggles with Escape from Alcatraz [Don Siegel, 1979]; Surtees with Play Misty for Me, Dirty Harry [Don Siegel, 1971], Joe Kidd [John Sturges, 1972], High Plains Drifter [Clint Eastwood, 1973], The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Escape from Alcatraz). Finally, Eastwood’s daughter Alison plays his older screen daughter in Tightrope.22 Size and continuity matter to Ric Gentry, who asserted in 1989 that ‘a look at Eastwood’s 35 major films in 24 years reveals a dramatically diverse but thematically consistent body of work’ and that ‘there is an undeniable seriousness and passion to someone who makes films so prolifically’.23 Other critics have praised Eastwood with 12

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

regard to particular subject areas. Within the sphere of gender issues, for example, American Studies scholar Gail Jardine finds in his work a ‘career-long interrogation of American culture, providing an accurate historical expression of women’s lives and raising questions about the disturbingly oppositional construction of gender’, thus compelling his audience ‘to consider new human possibilities not fettered by traditional gender boundaries’.24 Writing about Eastwood’s westerns, Edward Buscombe avers that ‘what is most striking, beyond the deepening of the actor’s and director’s craft that has marked his progression, is the extent to which he has been alert to the shifts of tone and perspective which have been forced upon the genre over the past third of a century, as the result of changes both within the cinema and without’.25 One of the most articulate statements on Eastwood’s behalf appears in the portion of Schickel’s biography devoted to reclaiming Dirty Harry from the onslaughts of Pauline Kael and a large array of other critics who found the film’s sociopolitical notions to be simplistic, dishonest, immoral or all three. I will return to Schickel’s labyrinthine defense of Harry Callahan’s exploits, but this is a good place to cite his comment on Eastwood’s longstanding commitment to a genre that is held in suspicion (often with good reason) by some art-minded critics – the action picture, which subsumes a number of more specific categories such as the western, the crime thriller, the military drama and so on. Taking the genre’s alleged defects to be venial sins if they are sins at all, Schickel contends that ‘movies of this type routinely subvert their own plausibility, along with such ambitions toward fine moral distinction and high moral instruction as their makers may harbor’ – not that Eastwood has such ambitions, in Schickel’s opinion – ‘on behalf of sustained and exciting movement. In that sense, action movies are like action painting; their primary interest is in (and on) their surfaces.’26 It is an intriguing line of argument: Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel as the Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline of the screen. If their pictures didn’t have stories and characters, one might indeed be able to turn off the forebrain and luxuriate in purely visceral thrills. Or one might not; in their most rewarding forms, both action painting and action cinema are about depths and struggles as well as externalities and impulses. In any case, no commercial movie traffics exclusively in movement – where there is a story and a cast of characters, there is inevitably a worldview and an ideology, however half-heartedly or inadvertently they may be embedded in those kinetic surfaces. Schickel himself quotes critic Jay Cocks’s idea that both cop and killer in Dirty Harry are ‘renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world’ within a film charged with ‘desperate awareness that … the only end of movement is pain’.27 A film that communicates thoughts and feelings as powerful as these, whether to a mass audience or a scattered few, is not, pace Schickel, a film of surfaces alone. Part 2: The Case Against Clint No actor in the history of the medium has attained the kind of status Clint now enjoys in the face of such large critical contempt exercised for so long a period. Richard Schickel28 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

13

Notwithstanding the critical encomiums and box-office profits that have come his way over the years, Eastwood has not been universally popular. Grievances voiced by three assertive nay-sayers appear at the beginning of Michael Carlson’s otherwise admiring book about him. Pauline Kael: ‘He’s controlled in such an uninteresting way; it’s not an actor’s control, which enables one to release something – it’s the kind of control that keeps one from releasing anything.’ Richard Eder: ‘He seems to be thinking and feeling nothing, and is therefore almost invisible to the camera.’ Judith Crist: [High Plains Drifter, 1973] is a Middle-American R-rated substitute for Deep Throat [Gerard Damiano, 1972].’29 Leaving aside Crist’s cryptic passage, which appears to be calling the expressionistic western a kind of exploitation film, the remarks by Kael and Eder both focus on what they consider a lack of affect and absence of charisma in Eastwood’s performances. One might wonder how Eastwood became one of the world’s most successful movie stars if he is almost invisible; still, the theme of Eastwood’s walled-off unresponsiveness – the tall-cold-cod effect, to cite a Kael comment mentioned earlier – arises often in reviews and articles. I deal at length with Eastwood’s acting in later chapters, with attention to favorable as well as unfavorable perspectives, but negative assessments of his performing style must be mentioned here because the issue is important for advocates of the anti-Clint cause. While many critics feel that his acting significantly improved over the long haul of his career, unflattering evaluations can be found in every period; they range from temperate to insulting, as these specimens indicate:30 1969 – Aljean Harmetz in the New York Times on Eastwood: ‘It is difficult to guess what will happen to Eastwood’s appeal when he is prodded into acting. So far his films have simply required him to be the monolithic center of an environment.’ 1979 – David Denby in New York on Escape from Alcatraz: ‘In the past, Eastwood has played killers, and his lack of emotion was eerie. … He’s more appealing now, but he’s still far from a complete man because he gives so little of himself. Who is this convict? What are his feelings? What’s the source of his strength? Eastwood is too tight to be even an interesting enigma.’ 1986 – Paul Attanasio in the Washington Post on Heartbreak Ridge: ‘So what do I think of Clint Eastwood? Well, I could tell you about his inflated reputation. I could tell you that he’s a movie star, in the sense that movie stars do one thing extremely well.’ 1993 – Michael Sragow in the New Yorker on White Hunter Black Heart: ‘Clint Eastwood is calamitous as the John Huston-inspired [protagonist]… In a vain attempt to grasp Huston’s hellbent expansiveness, Eastwood clumsily apes the man’s outsize gestures and vocal mannerisms. … It’s the most agonizing sort of acting: you can see what Eastwood’s driving at, and how unequipped he is to get there.’ 1997 – Charles Taylor in Salon on Absolute Power: ‘Seismologists studying the shifting of tectonic plates along fault lines would get bored waiting for Eastwood to change expression. … His facial scowls and lines and sinews have approached the stylization of Kabuki. … His mighty squint as he watches the victim being 14

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

beaten, nearly raped and then murdered doesn’t register much more than perturbed inconvenience.’ 2000 – Peter Rainer in New York on Space Cowboys: ‘Eastwood, in his recent movies, has been pushing [an] aarp [sic] worldview, and I suppose it’s a more genial solution to the problem of being an aging action-movie star than having Arnold Schwarzenegger obliviously muscle his way through yet another splatter epic, or having Sylvester Stallone … go all pot-bellied and Methody. But Eastwood buys off too much for too little.’ 2008 – David Edelstein in New York on Gran Torino: ‘He ought to have let someone else direct him … his acting is all over the map. At his finest, he delivers lines with the subtle but insistent quaver of a great jazz musician … but most of his readings would be too broad for even the movies he made with farting orangutans.’ These remarks are strikingly consistent; like those of many other reviewers and commentators, they point repeatedly to a lack of fundamental acting craft that reduces the typical Eastwood performance to a matter of simply existing on the screen while the story, the setting, the costumes, the cinematography, and more skillful efforts by others in the cast do the actual work of bringing his character alive, if it ever comes alive at all. Subtract the rhetorical filler, the purely impressionistic terms (‘inflated reputation’, ‘calamitous’) and the guilt by association (his appearances with flatulent apes) and you have a litany of remarkably focused invective – he is monolithic, he doesn’t act, he gives little of himself, he has a limited range and a boring expression, he speaks his lines in ways that simians would reject. Although this is only one side of the story and many critics feel otherwise, it is clear that a significant proportion of Eastwood observers find his performances to be definitively below par. Eastwood the director has fared better with critics than Eastwood the actor, and more than one factor may be at work here. One is the obvious fact that acting and directing are very different jobs, and Eastwood might genuinely be more talented and communicative – or at least more attuned to critical tastes – when he is behind the camera than when he is in front of it. Another is that critics often see acting experience as a major asset for a director, even when the acting itself is deemed less praiseworthy, and are therefore predisposed to sympathetic responses when an actor makes a goodfaith effort to direct. I examine Eastwood’s directorial style in chapters to come, but a few negative reports are in order here to show that the case against him extends to this area as well:31 1971 – Roger Greenspun in the New York Times on Play Misty for Me: ‘Play Misty for Me begins to fail with its opening title sequence. … The failure is never redeemed … I think the fault lies with Clint Eastwood the director, who has made too many easy decisions about events, about the management of atmosphere, about the treatment of performances – including the rather inexpressive one of Clint Eastwood the actor.’ 1975 – Judith Crist in New York on The Eiger Sanction: ‘A total travesty of the James Bond books, stilted, self-conscious, belaboured, and boring, its only novelty a c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

15

Eastwood’s character in The Eiger Sanction (1975) is an art thief, professional killer, and world-class mountaineer

mountain-climbing sequence that, for all its slips, slides and thrills on actual Monument Valley and Swiss Alps locations, left me as cold as the icy slopes.’ 1983 – Vincent Canby in the New York Times on Sudden Impact: ‘The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood’s direction of it primitive … Among other things, the movie never gets a firm hold on its own continuity. Sometimes scenes of simultaneous action appear to take place weeks or maybe months apart. Not that this makes much difference.’ 1999 – Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times on True Crime: ‘Eastwood … has put True Crime together in a languid, leisurely manner that tends to emphasize character moments over tension. It results in some strong scenes, but overall what’s on the screen ends up caught between two stools, not involving enough emotionally to make up for its lack of overriding tension.’ 2003 – David Walsh in World Socialist Web Site on Mystic River: ‘Eastwood directs his scenes of urban working-class life with all the freshness of having lived for the past 30 years in the privileged enclave of Carmel, California.’ Added together, the frequent put-downs of Eastwood the actor and the intermittent disparagements of Eastwood the director portray an active and prolific filmmaker whose work, as a whole and in many of its parts, is far from unanimously acclaimed. More interesting to examine, because they go beyond the vagaries of critical taste and relate to cultural issues more substantial than the worthiness of individual movies, are the attacks Eastwood has drawn on account of the sociopolitical views, actual or alleged, that observers have detected in his pictures and public activities. Whatever one’s position on this matter, one must agree that Clint has been a moving target, chastised by the right for his violent Man With No Name roles, then by the left for his Cop With No Rulebook movies, and again by the right for such late-career pictures as Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. Christopher Orr summarised the trajectory when he wrote in 2005: Eastwood is the rare artist who has gone from being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the left to being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the right. The former charge was leveled in 1971, when the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael described Dirty Harry as ‘fascist medievalism’; the latter … when Ted Baehr, the head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, declared Million Dollar Baby to be a ‘neo-Nazi movie.’ The particulars of the accusations have little in common: Kael was objecting to Dirty Harry’s enthusiasm for vigi16

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

lante justice, Baehr to Million Dollar Baby’s perceived support of euthanasia. But the two critiques are illustrative of the journey Eastwood has taken over the last 34 years, from conservative icon disparaged by much of the critical establishment to Hollywood statesman (and Academy favorite) widely vilified on the right.32 Vilification is the right word for some of the more colorful assaults. ‘Tokyo Rose would be more of an American patriot than Clint Eastwood in his new propaganda flick’, said Michael Savage, a conservative talk-radio host, about Letters from Iwo Jima. Talk-radio bloviator Rush Limbaugh found Million Dollar Baby to be ‘liberal propaganda’, while Michael Medved, a right-wing columnist and former movie reviewer, called it ‘insufferable’ and ‘manipulative’.33 As discussed in chapter six, I debated Million Dollar Baby with Medved on the Fox News Channel’s show The O’Reilly Factor shortly after the film’s premiere, and found myself in the startling position of having Bill O’Reilly agree with me – a rare case of O’Reilly and Medved parting ideological company. (Interestingly, the latter backed off a bit in the former’s presence, although he recovered his chutzpah in time for the Academy Award race in early 2005, calling the picture ‘absurdly over-praised’ and a ‘sad, undeserving film’.34) Over on the left at roughly the same time, African-American filmmaker Spike Lee spoke out against Eastwood’s war movies of 2008 while at the Cannes International Film Festival promoting Miracle at St. Anna, his own World War II picture, which deals with the American army’s 92nd Buffalo Division, an all-black unit that fought in the Italian theatre. This, too, is discussed in chapter seven. Another major component of the case against Clint is the critique directed at the prominence of violence in his films. Kael’s charge of ‘fascist medievalism’ in Dirty Harry exemplifies the most unsparing form of this critique, but commentators with more nuanced approaches have also found cause for concern. Dennis Bingham writes that High Plains Drifter and other post-Leone westerns ‘assault … the community values of the traditional western [in] really dangerous’ ways.35 The individualist ideology of Every Which Way But Loose (1978), according to Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, is ‘marked by a defensive, bellicose, and resentful spirit’.36 The rhetoric of Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973) and its ilk posits, in Paul Smith’s view, ‘the right of the chief of the horde to exceed or ignore established laws and rights … and to employ ruthless force whenever he thinks it appropriate’.37 Turning to later films, Christina Banks and Michael Bliss pair Pale Rider with another 1985 release, George P. Cosmatos’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, asserting that both ‘celebrate violence as the answer to political and economic abuses’, and that ‘there is no pragmatic difference’ between the actions of their protagonists ‘and those of the terrorists38 that were perpetrating murder (also in the name of righting wrongs) during the mid-1980s’.39 Armond White chastises Eastwood for sentimentalising the working-class characters of Mystic River, stating that his ‘ease with the racism and violence of these ethnic types is itself a problem’.40 Not even the widely praised Unforgiven has escaped criticism in this regard. Jim Kitses writes that in the culminating massacre its ‘critique of the western as a genre sustained by masculine codes of violence is itself all too satisfyingly sustained by that c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

17

Eastwood and Clyde (played by Manis, the orangutan) starred in Every Which Way But Loose (1978), the first of the actor’s two ‘monkey movies’

same violence’.41 ‘The transcendental Eastwood westerner’, William Beard argues, ‘is distinguished by ruthlessness rather than pity; vindictiveness rather than generosity; cold-blooded and indiscriminate rather than reluctant and selective violence; demonic rather than redemptive overtones.’42 Despite its thoughtful dissolution of ‘easy moral distinctions between hero and outlaw [and between] just retribution and self-serving violence’, Carl Plantinga concludes, the film’s climactic shootout ‘encourages the narcissistic fantasy of regeneration through violence toward others’, holding forth bloodthirsty filmic pleasures that ‘conflict with and perhaps override’ the desire for the protagonist’s redemption that the movie also encourages its audience to feel. ‘In a sense’, Plantinga writes, ‘this “naive” response [to Unforgiven] is more alarming than it might be [vis-à-vis] a traditional western [that] gives the audience unambiguous moral justification for the carnage at film’s end’, since the violence in Unforgiven gives an opening for ‘a pure celebration of the ascendance of the romanticized Self over the vilified Other.’ Hence, claims that Unforgiven is ‘unambiguously moral in its treatment of violence or that it short-circuits unsavory audience desires for progressive ends underestimate the fantasy of regenerative violence still manifestly at work’.43 Like most film critics, I have my own take on movie violence and its effects (if any) on the wellbeing of modern society. To begin with the latter issue, attacks on specific films or on cinema in general for causing or encouraging real-world violence generally reflect lazy thinking. When mayhem erupts and grabs the headlines, a common response can be summarized thus: violence happened, what can we blame?, um, let’s blame the movies, that’s what we usually do, and it’s easier than digging into root causes like rotten families, ineffectual mental-health systems, et cetera. Movies are a favorite target because when you attack a huge-profile enterprise like Hollywood you get some celebrity by proxy. (This is a major reason why the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings went after Hollywood in the Red Scare years; going after famous, 18

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

important people makes you seem famous and important, too.) And while gun control may not be the answer to everything, there should obviously be some way to make purchasing enormous amounts of weaponry difficult for psychotics. As for the alleged decadence of modern cinema at large, I wish the movies could be de-vulgarised in all sorts of ways – for starters, how about less exuberant violence along with less stupid sex and less brain-dead dialogue? But what is really going on with violent entertainment is deeply embedded in the American psyche. In some respects the United States is a pretty nasty place – look at the amount of gun violence, the grotesque influence of the National Rifle Association on government and public opinion, the amount of violence by other means, the world-beating number of people in jail and prison, the number of people put to death each year, the proliferation of domestic poverty, the unraveling social safety net, the impunity with which wealthy interests shape policy by buying off political figures and institutions, the accelerating decline of the middle and lower classes as the rich reap gargantuan rewards at their expense, the horrifically large number of innocent people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion, the use of torture as a legitimate interrogation and punishment device, the embrace of indefinite detention for people not convicted of (or even formally charged with) crimes, the acceptance of a permanent state of war against anyone declared to be The Enemy, and so on and so on. Can one put those factors on one side of the scale, and put violent films on other, and then say that the Columbine or Virginia Tech or Batman shooters did what they did because movies got them all excited?44 I revisit these issues, and consider additional ones – pro and con – in the pages to come. Cogent arguments have been abundant at all points along the Eastwoodapproval spectrum, and debating them has been a cottage industry for critics and a spectator sport for moviegoers since the early days of his career. Notes 1

2 3 4

5 6

7

Ric Gentry, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ in Gerald Duchovnay, ed., Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 63–90, cited at 65. David Sterritt, Interview with Richard Schickel, 2003. The five films about ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan are Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988). David Kehr, ‘Eastwood Noir,’ feature Essay for American Masters, Public Broadcasting Service/WNET New York. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/ database/eastwood_c.html (accessed 29 June 2007). Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance,’ in Essays: First Series (New York: John B. Alden, 1886), pp. 63–96, cited at 72. Pauline Kael, ‘Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris,’ in Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies: Film Writings 1954–1965 (New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), pp. 292–319, cited at 298. This essay originally appeared in Film Quarterly in 1963. The attack on Hitchcock quoted here comes from Kael’s polemical ‘Circles and Squares’ essay (see previous note) laying into the auteur theory in general and c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

19

8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17 18

19 20 20

Andrew Sarris, its first and most influential American proponent, in particular. The irony, of course, is that while Kael was anti-auteurist in theory she became a world-class auteurist in practice, sticking with such directors as Brian De Palma and Sam Peckinpah (understandable) and Philip Kaufman and Walter Hill (not) way past the high points of their careers. The consistency of her assaults on Eastwood were the flip side of her auteurist enthusiasms, about which she remained in staunch denial. William Beard, Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000). Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, p. 8. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, p. 7. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, pp. 12, 2. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, pp. 13, 157. Laurence F. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films Analyzed (Jefferson: McFarland, 1996) pp. 2, 6. Knapp writes that both ‘artistic input and physical presence’ are essential to the ‘context … meaning, and … guiding spirit’ of films by starteurs like Eastwood and Chaplin, and that their ‘efforts to retire their screen selves while remaining active filmmakers have resulted in a fascinating struggle between the commercial demands of their persona and the need for personal expression’ (4). Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 8–9, 9–21. A word of explanation about the practice of ‘crossing the axis’ in shooting and editing: In the classical film style, the shots edited together to form a sequence should all come from camera positions on one side of an imaginary line running through the field of vision; were the camera to cross that line, the left-right positions of people and objects in the frame would be altered in ways that might confuse the audience, thus calling attention to the film qua film, distracting attention from the seamless flow of narrative events, and interrupting the ‘reality effect’ whereby audiences accept the on-screen action as if it were happening in life. Eastwood’s flexible approach to this convention is seen by critics like Knapp as an inventive and effective way of heightening the visual impact of certain scenes and supplementing the enjoyment provided by the narrative with the additional pleasure of cinematic style for its own sake. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 23, 47, 73, 125, 189. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, eds., Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. vii-xix, cited at vii. Kapsis and Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ p. xiii. Altman: ‘Since all these films pass through me – I’m like a sieve, a form – they all have my shape, more or less.’ Quoted in David Sterritt, ‘Robert Altman: no masterpieces, please!’ The Christian Science Monitor (12 December 1978), pp. B33–B34, cited at B33. Kapsis and Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ p. xii. Kapsis and Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ pp. xiii–xiv. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31

The first quotation is from Ric Gentry, ‘Director Clint Eastwood: Attention to Detail and Involvement for the Audience,’ Millimeter (December 1980), pp. 127–133. Reprinted in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 62–75; cited from Kapsis and Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ p. xvi. The second is from Pascal Mérigeau, ‘Eastwood en son Carmel,’ Le Nouvel observateur (5 March 1998), pp. 50–52. Reprinted as ‘Eastwood in His Carmel,’ trans. KC, in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 233–238; cited from Kapsis and Coblentz, ‘Introduction,’ p. xvii. Christine Holmlund, ‘Sexuality and Power in Male Doppelganger Cinema: The Case of Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope,’ Cinema Journal vol. 26, no. 1, 1986, pp. 31–42, cited at 40. Ric Gentry, ‘Clint Eastwood: An Interview,’ Film Quarterly vol. 42, no. 3, 1989, pp. 12–23, cited at 12. Gail Jardine, ‘Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change,’ Art Journal vol. 53, no. 3, 1994, pp. 74–75, cited at 75. Edward Buscombe, Unforgiven (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 12–13. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 280. Quoted in Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 272. See also Jay Cocks, ‘Outside Society,’ Time (3 January 1972) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/ 0,9171,879053,00.html (accessed 6 January 2009). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 498. Quoted in Michael Carlson, The Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2002), p. 7. Aljean Harmetz, ‘The Man With No Name is a Big Name Now,’ The New York Times (10 August 1969), p. D9; reprinted with addendum in Aljean Harmetz, Rolling Breaks and Other Movie Business (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 184–193, cited at 192. David Denby quoted in Patrick McGilligan, Clint: The Life and Legend (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 588. Paul Attanasio, ‘Heartbreak Ridge,’ The Washington Post (5 December 1986) http://www.washingtonpost. com/wpsrv/style/longterm/movies/videos/heartbreakridgerattanasio_a0ad80.htm (accessed 14 October 2008). Michael Sragow, ‘White Hunter Black Heart,’ The New Yorker (1 November 1993) http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/white_ hunter_black_heart_eastwood (accessed 14 October 2008). Charles Taylor, ‘Hang Him High,’ Salon http://www.salon.com/feb97/absolute970214.html (accessed 6 January 2009). Peter Rainer, ‘Space Cowboys,’ New York (14 August 2000) http:// nymag. com/nymetro/movies/reviews/3641/ (accessed 25 October 2008). David Edelstein, ‘‘Tis the Season…,’ New York (15 December 2008) http://nymag.com/ movies/reviews/52914/index3.html (accessed 28 January 2009). Roger Greenspun, ‘Play Misty for Me,’ The New York Times (4 November 1971) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1731E473BC4C53 DFB767838A669EDE (accessed 22 December 2008). Judith Crist quoted in McGilligan, Clint, p. 585. Vincent Canby, ‘Firefox,’ The New York Times (18 June 1982) http://movies. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E04EFDB143BF93BA25 755C0A964948260&scp=3&sq=Firefox&st=cse (accessed 12 December 2008). c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

21

32

33

34

35

36

37 38

39 40

41 42 22

Vincent Canby, ‘Sudden Impact,’ The New York Times (9 December 1983) http:// movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9404EFD61F39F93AA35751C1A9659 48260&scp=2&sq=Sudden%20Impact&st=cse (accessed 22 December 2008). Kenneth Turan, ‘‘Eastwood Plays Beat the Clock,’ The Los Angeles Times (19 March 1999) http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie990326– 4,0,6268289.story (accessed 12 December 2008). David Walsh, ‘Clint Eastwood, the critics and the “heart of darkness”,’ World Socialist Web Site (3 November 2003) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/ nov2003/myst-n03.shtml (accessed 13 May 2007). Christopher Orr, ‘Dirty Harry or p.c. wimp?’ Salon (24 February 2005) http://dir. salon.com/story/ent/movies/feature/2005/02/24/eastwood/ index.html (accessed 22 March 2007). Michael Savage quoted in ‘Clint Eastwood as Tokyo Rose?’ WorldNetDaily (22 December 2006) http://www.wnd.com/news/article. asp?ARTICLE_ID= 53477 (accessed 22 March 2007). Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved quoted in Andrew Gumbel, ‘Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of “Hollyweird”,’ The Independent (23 February 2005) http://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/americas/eastwood-the-republican-pinup-is-new-target-forthe-enemies-of-hollyweird-484446.html (accessed 22 March 2007). Michael Medved, ‘My “Million Dollar” Answer,’ The Wall Street Journal (17 February 2005) http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006305 (accessed 22 March 2007). Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 178–179. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.132 Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 119. The terrorists these writers have in mind include the Shiite Hezbollah operatives who took journalist Terry Anderson prisoner in Beirut; the Hezbollah members who hijacked TWA Flight 847 en route from Rome to Athens; and the Palestine Liberation Front forces who commandeered the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in Egyptian waters. Christina Banks and Michael Bliss, ‘Movies and Political Landscapes,’ in Stephen Prince, ed., American Cinema of the 1980s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 126–144, cited at 126–127. Banks and Bliss, ‘Movies and Political Landscapes,’ p. 138. Armond White, ‘Myths of Clint Eastwood’s Working Class,’ New York Press (7 October 2003) http://www.nypress.com/article-8213-myths-of-clint-eastwoodsworking-class.html (accessed 3 August 2009). Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 312. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, p. 27. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

43 44

Carl Plantinga, ‘Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven,’ Cinema Journal vol. 37, no. 2, 1998, pp. 65–83, cited at 79–80. The last-named atrocity took place during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman movie directed by Christopher Nolan, at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

23

CHAPTER TWO

A Fistful of Movies: Rowdy Yates and the Man With No Name

Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born on 31 May 1930 in San Francisco, California, a city and state that play ongoing roles in his life and work.1 His mother, Ruth Runner Eastwood, was a lover of music and dance who had once hoped to become a ballerina. His father, Clinton Eastwood, was a University of California dropout who had the ill fortune to be working as a bond salesman when the stock market crashed in 1929, putting quite a damper on that particular line of work. Clint’s childhood was punctuated with moves the family made to facilitate the various jobs his father found – jewelry sales, shipyard work, pumping gas at a friend’s service station, working for his brother-in-law’s refrigeration business, and so on – in California and elsewhere on the Pacific coast. Clint was a lacklustre pupil throughout his school years, but he got along well with his parents, recalling them later as tolerant and open-minded. The first movie Clint saw was (probably) the Walt Disney animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered in 1937. Films he admired later in his boyhood ranged from Howard Hawks’s war movie Sergeant York and Preston Sturges’s show-biz comedy Sullivan’s Travels, both released in 1941, to Michael Curtiz’s musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Billy Wilder’s film-noir melodrama Double Indemnity (1944). He grew interested in jazz at an early age, teaching himself to play his grandmother’s German-built upright piano and listening intently to his mother’s Art Tatum and Fats Waller records. As a teenager he found that tickling the ivories was a good way to attract girls’ attention, compensating for his quiet demeanor and his family’s low-end socioeconomic status. Later he discovered the big-band swing of Woody Herman, the saxophone genius of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, and the fiery bebop of Dizzy Gillespie and, especially, Charlie Parker, fearless pioneers on the cutting edge of modern jazz. 24

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

As we shall see in due course, Eastwood’s immersion in such music had a deep and lasting impact on his work as both actor and director. Ditto for the country music he heard while working in an Oregon pulp mill after graduating from Oakland Technical High School, where he majored in aircraft maintenance after his first secondary school, the more upscale Piedmont High, decided that lackadaisical Clint should move to different pastures whether he wanted to or not. Looking at his overall educational record, biographer Patrick McGilligan sees the post-high-school Eastwood as ‘already that strange mixture of half-lazybones and restless driving force that would be manifest in his character later on’.2 Clint held a series of motley jobs in addition to his pulp-mill stint – logging, baling hay, driving a truck, stoking blast furnaces on the night shift at a steel factory, working in the parts department at an aircraft plant. He was gearing up for a try at college, where he hoped to improve his music skills, when the army drafted him and sent him to Fort Ord, the base in Monterey Peninsula where he was inducted. By all accounts Clint despised the army, and lived in dread of being shipped to the Korean conflict on a jam-packed vessel like a sardine in a can. As things turned out, such worries were needless: he never left the country, or even Fort Ord, during his two years of service. Since he had worked as a lifeguard in one of his prior jobs, Clint landed the position of Ford Ord life-saving instructor and swimming-pool supervisor. This placed him in the Division of Faculty, which entailed various perks, including safety from being sent overseas and the chance to meet Hollywood people stationed at the base, such as David Janssen and Martin Milner, gifted young actors just beginning their long and productive careers. Serving at a base near Hollywood also meant Clint could attend concerts by major jazz musicians, from giants like Billie Holliday and Lionel Hampton to rising stars like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, who performed at the base and in nearby venues. Some say that Eastwood’s teaching routine gave him his first taste of acting, since he had to deliver prearranged lectures to his swimming-pool trainees and to students in the other classes he taught from time to time. Mention must be made of an army-related incident that receives special notice in Eastwood biographies. In autumn of 1951, Clint traveled to Seattle, Washington, on a three-day pass (allegedly for a rendezvous with a girlfriend) and cadged a return flight to California from a Navy pilot; after hitting a triple whammy of terrible weather, communications breakdown, and oxygen failure, the pilot had to crash-land the small Navy plane at sea, three or four miles from the Marin County coast. According to newspaper reports, Eastwood and the pilot ejected from the plane, climbed into rafts, used their shoes to paddle toward land, and swam to the beach when breakers overturned their lifeboats. Schickel’s biography calls this event a ‘journey into hell’ that Clint prefers not to talk about ‘lest it be mistaken for a heroic adventure’ rather than a merely ‘suspenseful and shaping’ incident. McGilligan’s biography is more sceptical, noting that while some accounts claimed Eastwood swam three or four miles to shore, a friend recalled Clint saying that any swimming he had done had been less of a challenge than walking back to quarters with no shoes.3 Americans’ chronic jitters about the possibility of wartime sabotage earned the event some attention in the press, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

25

but the San Francisco Examiner headline wasn’t exactly dramatic: ‘Swimming Teacher Paddled 2 Miles After Plane Crash.’4 Eastwood Goes Hollywood Out of the army after his two-year hitch, Clint took a couple of part-time jobs and enrolled in Los Angeles City College to study business administration, foreshadowing the era when his ability to bring movies in on time and on budget would become one of his major assets in the Hollywood system. The school was near Hollywood, as it happened, and it had a respected drama program. Remembering the pleasure he had taken in performing music for friends, female and otherwise, Clint started dropping in on acting classes at the Theater Arts Department and, later, at private studios around the city. Before long he was sneaking onto the Universal-International studio lot to observe film industry folks and get a feel for the moviemaking community. There he met cinematographer Irving Glassberg, who urged him to apply for the Universal Talent School. Like similar arrangements at other studios, this Universal program provided lessons in performance skills (diction, singing, dancing, riding and the like) in exchange for workaday services such as voice dubbing and posing for camera tests. Glassberg and another new friend, director Arthur Lubin, coaxed Universal into giving Clint a kind of low-rent screen test called an ‘interview test’ to find out how photogenic he might be; the aspiring actor was aghast when he saw the results – he looked like ‘an absolute clod’ he told an interviewer years later – yet the studio offered him a contract.5 Not a great contract, to be sure, paying a paltry $75 per week for a mere six months, then jumping to a slightly less piddling $100 a week if it was renewed. But it offered more than Clint was earning from odd jobs and the GI Bill benefits that followed his military service, and it wasn’t bad for someone whose previous acting experience consisted of playing a ‘backward youth’ in a school play.6 Eastwood and Hollywood were now officially acquainted. Some people in the Talent School, comparing Clint with Gary Cooper and James Dean, felt his slightly offbeat looks – unusual height, light hair, squinty eyes – would help him stand out from the crowd; others thought his difference from reigning Universal hunks like Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis would work to his disadvantage. Eastwood didn’t think much of his competitors, which helped him keep his confidence up, and he knew he could capitalise on specific assets – his ability to memorise dialogue quickly, to shrug off disappointments, to be at ease with his limitations – that his teachers recognised and valued. Clint landed his first movie role in 1954, courtesy of producer William Alland, who asked him to play a lab technician in Revenge of the Creature, the 3-D sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon, a hit for Universal that year.7 Clint spoke six or seven sentences, depending on how you punctuate and whether you count ‘Hey, doc.’ Jack Arnold, the first-rate genre filmmaker who directed both Creature features, wanted to eliminate Clint’s scene before it was shot, deeming it irrelevant to the story. Alland persuaded him otherwise, however, and Eastwood history was made.8 26

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Next up was Francis in the Navy (1955), the penultimate entry in Universal’s sevenpicture ‘Francis the Talking Mule’ series, which stretched from Francis in 1950 to Francis in the Haunted House in 1956. The conceit of these movies is that the title animal can speak (in Chill Wills’s voice) and that he is usually smarter and more mature than the human characters who cross his path, not excepting the companion (played by Donald O’Connor in all but one entry) who regularly pals around with him. Clint’s part in the 1955 installment – he plays a sidekick of the ne’er-do-well villain – was billed in the credits, another first for the young actor. The screenplay gave him little to say, but he was frequently on screen and Lubin, who directed the picture, made sure the camera took notice of him. With speaking roles in two studio pictures now under his belt, Eastwood was launched. But being launched did not mean being a movie star, or even a significant movie actor. Still uncertain about whether a Hollywood career was a realistic option, Clint bided his time playing miniscule (and uncredited) roles in a series of minor Universal productions – the First Saxon in Lady Godiva of Coventry (1955), directed by Lubin and starring Maureen O’Hara as the eponymous heroine; a Jet Squadron Leader in Tarantula (1955), another Arnold science fiction opus; a lab technician named Will in Never Say Goodbye (Jerry Hopper, 1956), a Rock Hudson romance; an anonymous Marine in Away All Boats (Joseph Pevney, 1956), a World War II drama; and a ranchhand named Tom in Star in the Dust (Charles F. Haas, 1956), a western with John Agar and Mamie Van Doren as a sheriff and his wife. Along the way Clint also played a young army officer on an NBC-TV variety show put together by Universal for promotional purposes. Considered separately or as a whole, these definitively obscure parts in mostly forgettable films did not augur well for the aspiring actor’s future. When its option on Eastwood came up for renewal at the end of six probationary months, Universal chose to show him the door instead. As of 25 October 1955, he was out of a job. Hard times, good times Clint took this setback in stride; he was savvy enough to know that such things happened, and Schickel reports that he was grateful for the benefits Universal had bestowed on him, including some genuine screen credits and a new awareness of the sense of community a studio could foster.9 Pressing on in Hollywood, he landed occasional small parts in movies and TV shows while doing blue-collar jobs to supplement the modeling income brought in by Maggie Johnson Eastwood, the longtime girlfriend he married on 19 December 1953, further increasing his sense of being a grown-up in the adult world. He had tryouts at Warner Bros., Columbia, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Paramount, none of which panned out, and landed small parts on the TV series Highway Patrol, starring a drunken Broderick Crawford, and the longforgotten TV Reader’s Digest, where his appearance in an episode called ‘Greatest of the Apaches’ resulted in the first media interview of his career. Lubin re-entered his life in 1956, giving him a part in an RKO feature he was directing: The First Traveling Saleslady, a comedy western starring Ginger Rogers as a corset entrepreneur, Barry Nelson as an inventor and Carol Channing as a model. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

27

Playing a recruiting officer for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders – the story takes place in 1897 – Clint did the best he could with a script so weakly written that he ‘couldn’t make head nor tail of it’, reminding himself that his part made up in quantity of scenes what it lacked in quality of material.10 The job didn’t win him the RKO contract he hoped for, however, and subsequent months brought nothing but a couple of TV commercials; he and Maggie had to make do with Maggie’s income as a model and Clint’s meagre earnings as a swimming-pool digger and weekend janitor. He passed much of 1956–1958 being ‘idle and lolling by the Villa Sands pool’, in McGilligan’s words,11 but he continued to exploit the tentative start he had made on his TV career, appearing on West Point as a cadet facing an emergency and on Death Valley Days as a hapless prospector, plus more ephemeral parts on other shows. He also started regular workouts at a gym and attended acting workshops run by an acquaintance from his Universal days. Then a friend told Clint that CBS was scouting actors for an upcoming western series called Rawhide, so he loitered at the network’s studio long and often enough for an extremely lucky break to come his way. He caught the attention of series creator Charles Marquis Warren, scored an audition, and got the part of Rowdy Yates, the not-so-rowdy young ‘ramrod’ who works alongside Gil Favor, trail boss and father figure to a diverse bunch of cowpokes on a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri in 1866 – or, rather, in eternity, since the program ran for seven years without getting to either Missouri or 1867. The first episodes were filmed during the summer of 1958, following CBS’s plan of shooting as many outdoor scenes as the budget allowed at ranches in Southern California and Arizona, filming the dramatic scenes on soundstages, and splicing in cattle shots from an authentic roundup held in the region. Each installment was budgeted at about $40,000, enough to approach if not quite attain the sense of pseudo-historical ‘authenticity’ that lent distinction to the period’s greatest TV western, Gunsmoke, an earlier Warren brainchild still in the early stages of its phenomenal twenty-year run (1955–1975).12 Then the network hesitated about airing the series, uncertain of its appeal despite the huge popularity of TV westerns at the time – or because of it, since potential

Eastwood took little pride in his work for Jodie Copelan’s western Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958) 28

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

sponsors already had a dozen such shows bidding for their advertising dollars. Fearing that the program would be permanently shelved and his performances consigned to oblivion, Eastwood momentarily lost his knack for shrugging off disappointment and went into a full-fledged tizzy, complete with an attack of hives, according to McGilligan, and a spell of hyperventilation that required a middle-of-the-night visit by local paramedics. ‘Three or four times,’ the biographer writes, ‘this cool, manly star … woke up, all knotted into a ball, unable to breathe, convinced he was experiencing fatal chest pains.’13 Not until Christmastime did CBS send word that Rawhide would debut in the winter season, in the timeslot currently held by a series being cancelled for low ratings. Clint, who had worried that his feeble work in the feeble movie Ambush at Cimarron Pass earlier that year would jinx whatever chance he ever had for a screen career, was a TV star. And a western star. And a for-real actor whose days as an intermittently glimpsed tenth banana were over for good. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ When it finally reached the airwaves, Rawhide was an immediate success, neatly capitalising on the fashion for ‘adult westerns’ that flourished for several years after Cheyenne, produced by Warner Bros. Television, debuted on ABC in 1955. Warren’s obvious model for the show was Howard Hawks’ ambitious and influential 1948 cattle drive western Red River; written by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, the movie stars John Wayne as cattle baron Tom Dunson and Montgomery Clift as his adopted son Matt, who rebels against Tom’s domineering ways during a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri – roughly the same route traveled by the Rawhide drovers – and redirects the herd toward Kansas with a furious Tom on his trail. Relations between Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates are vastly less dramatic than the rivalry in Red River, but the film’s narrative format was very workable for a long-running TV series, since every new stretch of trail could bring a new adventure to the show’s seven-member cattle team, consisting of Gil, the boss; Rowdy, the ramrod; Pete Nolan, the indispensable scout; Joe Scarlet and Jim Quince, all-around cattlemen; George Washington Wishbone, the comical cook; and Harkness ‘Mushie’ Mushgrove III, the cook’s slow-thinking gofer. Warren also drew on the 1870s diary of a real-life trail boss named George C. Duffield and on his own recent film Cattle Empire, a 1958 hit in which the actors he tapped to play Wishbone, Scarlet, and Quince had played similar roles. For a crowning touch of Old West atmospherics, Warren commissioned composer Dimitri Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington to provide the theme song that pop crooner Frankie Laine would belt out during the credits.14 Sample stanza: Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ Though the streams are swollen Keep them dogies rollin’ Rawhide! Rain and wind and weather Hell-bent for leather c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

29

Rawhide made Eastwood a TV star during its successful run from 1959 to 1965

Wishin’ my gal was by my side. All the things I’m missin’, Good vittles, love, and kissin’, Are waiting at the end of my ride. The song is neither momentous as music nor passable as poetry, but it was popular enough to be recycled by various singers in subsequent years and to be pastiched in such movies as The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980) and Shrek (Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson, 2001). There is little about Rawhide that anticipates the screen personae or filmmaking style of Eastwood’s later career in westerns, but his work in the long-running series was an important learning experience. For one thing, shooting on film necessitates lengthy waiting-around periods while lights and cameras are configured, and Clint put his mind to work during the pauses, making up-close observations of how the show’s directors staged and shot their scenes. And the program gave him noteworthy directors to observe over the course of its 217 episodes; among them were Tay Garnett, Andrew V. McLaglen, Laslo Benedek, Stuart Heisler, Christian Nyby, George Sherman, and on four occasions Jack Arnold, who had been responsible for Clint’s feature-film debut.15 Although the Rawhide directors were not a prestigious bunch, their experience in the no-frills world of B movies had prepared them well for the rigors of TV production, and Eastwood’s insistence on efficiency and economy in his own pictures was surely influenced by what he had seen during his Rawhide years. ‘I just would watch everything,’ he told Schickel, ‘the old-timers and the new-timers and some of the hacks, too.’16 Rawhide posed rigors for Eastwood as well as for the show’s directors and technicians. Filming took a full six days each week, from 5:30am until all the scenes were in the can, which was sometimes as late as midnight; the average working day was about twelve hours. Asserting that the production team found this pace ‘intolerable’, critic Daniel O’Brien cites an incident when Eric Fleming, the costar who played Gil Favor, decided to ‘take a stand, announcing one day that he would finish work at six 30

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

o’clock in the evening’ whether or not the shooting was complete, and won the argument because CBS balked at the cost of replacing him midway through a season.17 There is no reason to dispute this incident, but it is likely that Fleming’s stand was based less on principle than on personal pique; he threatened to walk off the show on more occasions than this, and although he was a quick study and had a commanding voice, Schickel describes him as an ‘isolated man, alternately withdrawn and blustery’, burdened by the aftereffects of an accident in the 1940s and by ‘the bitterness accumulated over many frustrating years in the business’. One of the Rawhide directors called him a ‘hamola,’ and Clint said he ‘loved to … annoy a lot of people’.18 Be this as it may, Eastwood liked Fleming and got along well with him. What he didn’t much like was his own Rawhide character; new though he was to the acting trade, he found Rowdy too incorrigibly shallow to provide a meaningful challenge or at least be fun to play. This gave him another reason to fill the hours studying his fellow actors and the directors who presided over their episodes. Over the years Eastwood has come up with different stories about his early desire to direct. In the middle 1970s he traced it to a dramatic event on a Rawhide location, when he found himself in the middle of a cattle stampede and yelled for a camera so he could shoot the action, but got carelessly shrugged off; in 1984 he claimed that his CBS contract provided for him to direct several Rawhide episodes, but the network ‘changed policies’ because of bad experiences with other actor-directors; in 1988 he said that ‘an actor colleague on another series exceeded the budget and the schedule with his directorial debut,’ making management more wary and thereby spoiling Clint’s chances.19 Whatever the facts of the case, Clint definitely wanted to direct, and his divided attention on the Rawhide set – part of his mind focused on acting, the rest focused on the directors’ camera techniques – may account for the mixed reviews he received from some of those directors in later years. On the positive side, Ted Post recalled him as ‘a young man truly struggling to master the craft of acting, trying hard to understand it’. On the negative side, Gene Fowler Jr. called him ‘lackadaisical’ and Thomas Carr said he was ‘lazy’ and so habitually late for work that he ‘always cost you a morning’.20 All told, Rawhide was spawning a prolific future actor-director whose laidback demeanor came from temperament as well as technique. From these early days through the present, Clint’s flair for understatement – or, alternatively, his weakness for shortcuts and easy solutions – has spawned a wide range of opinions among critics evaluating his acting style. Eastwood took advantage of his newfound TV stardom in ways other than acting, observing, learning the tricks of assembly-line production, and pulling in a regular paycheck. He shot some Rawhide trailers, and after crooning a song called ‘Unknown Girl (of My Dreams)’ in a 1960 episode he talked CBS into releasing it as a single, which went nowhere on the charts and ended any immediate prospect of a ‘singing cowboy’ turn in Clint’s career.21 Yet as time passed he grew increasingly frustrated by the limitations of his character and the show itself: the plots were formulaic, the shooting sessions were routine, and Rowdy’s bland personality offered little in the way of challenge or variety. Eastwood also became increasingly resentful of CBS’s contractual power over his acting career. Going public with his complaints in 1961, he told a c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

31

Hollywood Reporter interviewer that his contract was forcing him to turn down lucrative British and Italian film offers and that he would voluntarily go on suspension if CBS didn’t loosen its hold – all of which was a fabrication and a bluff, since the restrictions in his contract applied only to TV work, and even then he had been allowed to play himself in a 1962 episode of Lubin’s popular CBS sitcom Mister Ed, which starred a talking horse (as opposed to the talking mule of Francis in the Navy). Since he was free to act in movies during the summer production breaks, but never availed himself of the opportunity, O’Brien is probably right to conclude that ‘either the touted European movies didn’t appeal or were more hypothetical than actual’ and that Eastwood was nervous about re-entering the feature-film arena, especially as a married man with financial responsibilities.22 Garner and McQueen Eastwood’s uneasiness was understandable. Adhering to the principle that movies are larger than life and TV is smaller than life, Hollywood believed that appearances on the tube diminished an actor’s stature, and that audiences would not pay good money to see you when they could view you at home for free. Accordingly, very few TV stars had successfully crossed over to the big screen; among those who had, the ones most comparable with Eastwood were Steve McQueen, who starred in the CBS western series Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958–1961), and James Garner, who played Bret Maverick in ABC’s comedy-western series Maverick (1957–1960). McQueen and Garner were attractive, self-assured young actors with the same leading-man potential that Clint saw in himself. Unlike the slower-moving Eastwood, however, these performers racked up numerous feature film credits while their television series were on the air. McQueen, born the same year as Eastwood, had appeared in numerous TV shows and series, spanning the seasons between his 1955 debut on Goodyear Television Playhouse and the 1958 premiere of Wanted: Dead or Alive, and during the latter show’s three-season run he made several other TV appearances and almost half a dozen features, scoring particularly well with science-fiction buffs in The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958) and with general audiences in The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960),23 one of the period’s most popular western movies.24 McQueen used his TV success as a springboard to important movie roles in Hell Is for Heroes (1962), directed by future Eastwood mentor Don Siegel, and The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), where he and Garner shared top billing. Garner, born two years earlier, made his TV bow in the ABC series Warner Bros. Presents, which ran only in the 1955–56 season but spawned the long-running ABC western series Cheyenne, in which Garner appeared four times between 1955 and 1957. Before and during Maverick he also turned up on CBS in Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater; on ABC in Sugarfoot, playing Bret Maverick in one episode; and three times on ABC in Conflict, which alternated with Cheyenne and paved the way for Maverick by airing an unofficial pilot episode in 1956. Garner’s first movies were Mervyn LeRoy’s test-pilot drama Toward the Unknown and David Butler’s army-life comedy The Girl He Left Behind, both released in 1956, and during his five Maverick 32

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

seasons he appeared in two big-screen westerns, Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (Richard L. Bare, 1957) and Alias Jesse James (Norman Z. McLeod, 1959; here he played Bret Maverick again), the romantic drama Cash McCall (Joseph Pevney, 1960), and no fewer than five dramas with military settings, including Joshua Logan’s acclaimed Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando) and two 1958 pictures by Hollywood veteran William A. Wellman, Darby’s Rangers and Lafayette Escadrille, in the second of which Garner (playing an uncredited bit part) shared the screen with Eastwood, still a year shy of his Rawhide period.25 Garner then glided from Maverick to William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour (1961), a much-discussed ‘adult’ drama based on Lillian Hellman’s play, and The Great Escape. In sum, McQueen and Garner were steadily rising stars who saw their TV series as career-enhancing tools, whereas Eastwood, failing to profit by their example, saw his as a boring and confining dead end. Clint might have consoled himself with the thought that Garner had more discretionary time to appear in outside projects, since his character did not appear in every Maverick episode; as the show entered its second month the studio decided to ease up the shooting schedule by devising a second main character (Bret’s brother Bart, played by Jack Kelly) and filming Bart and Bret episodes simultaneously with different crews, then airing them in alternate weeks.26 But the fact remains that movie studios were not knocking on Eastwood’s door, the apocryphal European offers notwithstanding. In an astute analysis of Clint’s early career, O’Brien suggests that he was stymied in the 1950s because he did not have the wholesome, clean-cut style of stars like Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, and that he was re-stymied in the early 1960s because Rowdy Yates gave him no chance to display either McQueen’s cool sexiness or Garner’s witty savoir faire.27 While other young leading-man types used TV shows as stepping stones to bigger things, Eastwood – now 33 years old and well on his way to 128 episodes of Rawhide – worried about getting stuck on the small screen for good, and typecast as a cowboy to boot. As things turned out, he was right about the cowboy part, for the next few years at least. But he was wrong about the small screen. Europe finally came calling after all, courtesy of Sergio Leone, a flamboyant moviemaker with a visual style so expansive that even the elongated Techniscope format seemed barely big enough to contain his vision. Enter the Man With No Name The next, decisive phase of Eastwood’s career began with a 1964 phone call from Jolly Film, an Italian production company. The producers at Jolly liked Leone’s style, and had agreed to back him in a project as soon as he presented them with an acceptable script. Now they had a deal with Ocean Films, a Spanish company based in Madrid, and Constantin Film Produktion, a German company based in Munich, to finance a Leone western along the lines of recent movies based on novels by Karl May, the popular German author (1842–1912) whose tales of the American West enthralled European readers with their canny blend of exoticism, mysticism, and Noble Savage romanticism. (May’s fans included Hermann Hesse and Albert Einstein as well as Adolf Hitler, who reread him after seizing power in 1933.)28 Movies recycling May’s c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

33

stories and characters were perennially popular with German studios, which turned out nearly two dozen such adaptations between the silent movie era and the late 1960s. Many of the later productions featured French actor Pierre Brice as Winnetou, a righteous Apache chief, and Lex Barker (whose roles include Tarzan in five RKO releases) as Old Shatterhand, the chief ’s white blood brother; shot in West Germany and Yugoslavia, these were distributed in the West German market by Constantin, which made healthy profits on them. Looking for a similar outcome, Italian producers cranked out about two dozen low-budget westerns in 1963 alone, and Jolly hoped to capitalise further on the trend with Sergio Leone’s project, initially called El magnífico extranjero, or The Magnificent Stranger, but released as Per un pugno di dollari, aka A Fistful of Dollars, a title it acquired just days before its premiere. Leone’s screenplay was inspired by – some would say cloned from – the Japanese action picture Yojimbo, directed by Akira Kurosawa and released in 1961. The producers at Jolly evidently devised the film’s original title, The Magnificent Stranger, to signal its similarity to The Magnificent Seven, a popular Hollywood western of 1960 that is itself a remake of Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai (1954).29 Similarly, the main character was initially called Ringo, after John Wayne’s character in John Ford’s classic Stagecoach (1939), although he then became Texas Joe and simply Joe in the finished film. Part of the commercial strategy mapped out by Leone and Jolly was to have an American actor play the lead, thereby boosting its marketability in English-language territories. (Producers would use the same device two years later, hiring Hollywood actor Rod Cameron to play Old Firehand in the 1966 western Winnetou und sein Freund Old Firehand, alias Winnetou: Thunder at the Border, which nonetheless helped to polish off the Karl May franchise.) It is a measure of Eastwood’s low-end Hollywood status that his reasons for accepting the lead in this low-budget, low-prestige enterprise were tied to the comforting thought that unless the picture proved extremely successful – an unlikely prospect at a time when European audiences were conspicuously bored with westerns – it would live out its brief life on European screens, safely removed from the American audiences, critics and moguls on whom his future relied. Here again, as all the world now knows, he was mostly wrong – ‘mostly’ because the film’s United States premiere was delayed for three years because of a lawsuit filed by Kurosawa against Jolly Film, but ‘wrong’ because the movie became a huge international hit, first in Europe and then the United States, catapulting Eastwood’s career to a whole new level. Leone courted numerous American actors for the leading role in A Fistful of Dollars: Rory Calhoun, Steve Reeves, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Henry Silva, Frank Wolfe and Richard Harrison all found the $15,000 salary inadequate, and even Rawhide topliner Eric Fleming turned the director down. ‘I didn’t know who Sergio Leone was,’ Coburn said later, ‘and I’d heard nothing but bad about Italian filmmakers.’ Bronson was blunter, calling the script ‘just about the worst … I’d ever seen’.30 Digging farther down in the barrel of Hollywood leading men, Leone and his producers accepted a William Morris agent’s invitation to view a Rawhide episode (a 1961 installment called ‘Incident of the Black Sheep’, wherein Rowdy fights a testy sheepherder to resolve a dispute) that gave Clint a particularly strong showcase. Leone 34

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

was impressed by Eastwood’s knack for upstaging Fleming, with whom Leone was miffed for rejecting his offer. Clint was ‘good at getting on a horse’, Leone saw, ‘and he had a way of walking with a tired, resigned air’. On the downside, Leone recalled, Clint seemed ‘a little sophisticated, a little “light”, and I wanted to make him look more virile, to harden him, to “age” him for the part … with that beard, that poncho which made him look broader, those cigars’.31 For his part, Clint was doubtful about the viability of a European western – the genre’s recent surge in Europe had created a glut on the market and exhausted its prospects for the foreseeable future – but he overcame his misgivings when he saw how heavily the screenplay was influenced by Japanese samurai movies. ‘Sergio Leone had only directed one other picture,’ he recalled later, ‘but they told me he had a good sense of humor.’ In addition, he said, ‘I had the [Rawhide] series to go back to as soon as the [summer] hiatus was over. So I felt, “Why not?” I’d never seen Europe. That was reason enough to go.’ Another reason was that his extramarital girlfriend Roxanne Tunis would soon be giving birth to his child and a professional engagement on the other side of the Atlantic would offer a good excuse for being absent from the blessed event, which he apparently preferred not to think about.32 Clint’s character in the Leone films is so famously laconic that it is amusing to realize how prolix and shapeless the original screenplay for A Fistful of Dollars was. It looked ‘more like the manuscript of a novel than a script’, according to Schickel, ‘with the dialogue embedded in long descriptive passages’. Clint found a good deal of it ‘atrocious’, and even before leaving for Rome he started scratching out as much of it as possible. When the shooting began, he also had to deal with the fact that Leone’s cast spoke in three languages – English for Eastwood and Spanish or Italian for the others. (Following standard practice for Italian productions, only a rough dialogue track was recorded while the camera rolled; dialogue for the final cut was post-dubbed in the studio sound room, using the rough track as a guide.) In subsequent years, Eastwood and Leone differed in their accounts of how and why the script came to be extensively trimmed. According to Duccio Tessari, who wrote the scenario with Leone and Víctor Andrés Catena, the finished film was virtually identical to the script; according to Clint, the screenplay was littered with ‘endless pages of dialogue’ meant to flesh out his character’s backstory.33 Be this as it may, the film went into production with a stripped-down shooting script that suited the star’s taste for economical, visually oriented character development. ‘I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement,’ Eastwood explained later. ‘It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time – keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience.’34 In keeping with his sceptical view of Clint’s capabilities, McGilligan finds room in his biography to criticise Eastwood for what others would consider sound practice. Like many non-writers, McGilligan says, Eastwood rarely started from scratch when working to improve a script; in order to make progress he ‘needed someone else’s work to attack, removing what he considered excess verbiage and adding … Clintc h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

35

isms’. While paring away material is a time-honored part of the filmmaking process, McGilligan adds, ‘it might also be considered a defensive strategy for an actor such as Clint, insecure about loquacity or emotional revelation’.35 There are at least two problems with this argument. First, if the screenplay needed and received the streamlining that Clint claims to have given it – and the evidence does point in that direction – then the star played a direct creative role in fashioning a new kind of minimalist western hero performance style, which dovetailed perfectly with Leone’s fondness for gestural acting, communication via body language and extreme close-ups of facial expressions, twitches and tics. Second, the effects that Clint apparently sought and achieved became bedrock properties of his acting, and of his preferences when directing other actors, for decades to come. With these felicitous outcomes in mind, it is hard to begrudge Eastwood proper credit for his share in what amounted to one of the most artistically fruitful actor/director partnerships of its day. Indeed, some Italian trade papers announced him as both star and ‘western consultant’ for the picture.36 Beyond working on the screenplay, Eastwood also contributed to the wardrobe design. ‘That face – with a cigar’, is what Leone purportedly enthused about when he decided to sign Clint for the film. And by ‘that face’ Leone meant exactly what the words denote, regardless of how much or how little acting talent might be attached. ‘The truth is that I needed a mask more than an actor,’ he told an Italian interviewer in 1989, ‘and Eastwood at that time had only two expressions: with or without a hat.’37 Plus two more, one presumes: with or without a cigar. It is hard to accept McGilligan’s claim that the screenplay ‘forced the cigar on Clint’, given Clint’s obvious irreverence toward the script. Leone’s concept of the character did call for a lot of smoking, though, and while he has never been a smoker, Clint cheerfully went for the idea, buying several boxes of long, thin cigars made of tobacco wrapped around a bamboo strip, and cutting them into thirds so they would always look partially smoked. These played into the character’s taciturnity and helped Clint enter the cantankerous mood he was after (‘I don’t really like them,’ he remarked, ‘but they kept me in the right kind of humour – kind of a fog…’).38 Also in the luggage he carried to Rome were multiple pairs of black Levi’s jeans that he had personally roughed up, a sloping, flat-crowned western hat purchased at a Hollywood costume shop and a sleeveless sheepskin jacket. The character’s poncho, purchased in Spain, was Leone’s idea. But the guns, holsters, boots and spurs came straight from the Rawhide wardrobe closet. Leone Sergio Leone was born in 1929 to a cinematic family. His parents, Vincenzo Leone and Bice Valerian, had acted in Italian movies prior to the 1920s; one of Valerian’s films was a proto-spaghetti western, the climax of which presented her on a white horse surrounded by Indian braves. Leone’s father, better known by his professional names – Roberto Roberti and Roberto Leone Roberti – was a director as well as an actor, making a long list of silent pictures (and a handful of sound productions) in a career that lasted into the early 1950s. 36

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

The younger Leone entered the industry as a child extra in one of his father’s movies, and went on to serve as script supervisor (briefly) and assistant director (often) for a wide range of productions, starting with Carmine Gallone’s film version of the Giuseppe Verdi opera Rigoletto in 1946; the directors he assisted include Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Mervyn LeRoy (Quo Vadis, 1951), Luigi Comencini (La tratta delle bianche, 1952), Robert Wise (Helen of Troy, 1956), Fred Zinnemann (The Nun’s Story, 1959), William Wyler (Ben-Hur, 1959), and Robert Aldrich (Sodom and Gomorrah, 1962). He launched his screenwriting career in 1958 with Mario Bonnard’s Afrodite, dea dell’amore, aka Slave Women of Corinth, one of the many sword-andsandal epics that Italy was exporting to the world at the time. Leone was the (uncredited) co-director of Hanno rubato un tram (Mario Bonnard and Aldo Fabrizi, 1954), starring Aldo Fabrizi, and when Mario Bonnard became ill he directed nearly all of The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, 1959), starring Steve Reeves and Fernando Rey, receiving no screen credit but opening the door to his solo directorial debut with The Colossus of Rhodes (Il colosso di Rodi, 1961), featuring American actor Rory Calhoun as Darios, an ancient Greek warrior, French star Georges Marchal as Peliocles, a rebel ringleader, and Italian actress Lea Massari as the winsome Diala, whose father constructed the eponymous statue in Rhodes, which succumbs to an earthquake in the climax. After directing part of the Fernandel comedy Il cambio della guardia in 1962, uncredited again, Leone set about making A Fistful of Dollars, his first personal film. McGilligan’s occasionally rough treatment of Eastwood in his biography is kids’ stuff compared with his description of Leone’s personal traits. Leone, he writes, ‘didn’t bathe properly. He was maniacally cheap. He had gross appetites that turned him into a fat, truculent bear over time. He treated people terribly and had an ugliness in his psyche that was mirrored in his films’. On a professional level, however, McGilligan echoes the view of many observers who have looked seriously at Leone’s oeuvre, stating that ‘most of the world’s critics would agree that he was one of the cinema’s visionary film-makers, in spite of the fact that his output over thirty years was limited to only a handful of titles’.39 On the set, Eastwood found Leone a ‘very nervous, intense and serious guy’ who ‘loved the joy of it all’ and ‘had a good time shooting when he wasn’t getting furious’. Clint was especially amused when Leone, who spoke barely a word of English, acted out a gesture or bit of business to show the star how he should do it. ‘I’d see this guy with these little tiny glasses and the western hat on trying to do me,’ Clint recalled. ‘He looked like Yosemite Sam.’40 Once the camera started rolling, the director and star settled into a relationship that was in some ways detached – owing partly to the language problem – and in other ways intuitively close. Leone: ‘In real life, Clint is slow, calm, rather like a cat. During shooting he does what he has to do, then sits down in a corner and goes to sleep immediately, until he is needed again. It was seeing him behave like this on the first day that helped me model the character.’ Eastwood: ‘Italian actors come from the Helzapoppin’ school of drama. To get my effect I stayed impassive and I guess they thought I wasn’t acting. All except Leone, who knew what I was doing.’41 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

37

The samurai, the gunfighter and the detective Clint scoffs at the often-repeated rumor that Leone had a print of Yojimbo threaded up on a Movieola in the trailer so that he could run its equivalent to whatever scene he was working on. Richard Schickel42 Regardless of how imperfectly he might have bathed, Leone was a world-class cinephile with a sweeping range of knowledge and a multitude of daring ideas. Before we explore the origin and nature of A Fistful of Dollars, synopses of its story and that of Yojimbo will be useful. A Fistful of Dollars: A cool, distant wanderer named Joe (Eastwood) rides his mule into a Mexican border town called San Miguel, where he is mocked and affronted by thugs working for Sheriff John Baxter (W. Lukschy), a criminal who peddles guns and whisky to Indians, among other illicit activities. Asking the proprietor of the local saloon for information, Joe learns that the Baxters are perpetually at war with a rival gang run by Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté, as Johnny Weis), which is equally ruthless and avaricious. Disregarding the innkeeper’s advice to leave town without a backward glance, Joe walks outside, kills the four men who harassed him, and applies to Rojo for employment. Before long, however, a treacherous ambush and robbery executed by the Rojo mob – the take is a large amount of gold being transported by soldiers – conclusively demonstrates that they are no less morally bankrupt than the Baxter outfit. Resolving to exploit both gangs for his own profit, Joe creates a diversion to throw everyone off guard, enters Rojo’s hacienda to grab the gold, and gets surprised by Marisol (Marianne Koch), a young woman being held captive there. Joe brings her to the Baxters, who use her in a prisoner exchange with the Rojos, and then frees her and her family from the Rojos’ clutches, after which he is set upon by Ramón Rojo and beaten almost to death. As the Rojos launch an all-out attack on the Baxters, thinking they now have Joe on their side, Joe is spirited to an abandoned mine by a friendly undertaker (in a coffin, appropriately) and tended to by the helpful innkeeper until he regains his strength. The story reaches its climax when Joe returns to town seeking vengeance on Rojo for abducting and tormenting the innkeeper who saved his life. In a gambit that the real-life Ned Kelly gang would have applauded, Joe fits himself up with a bulletproof iron breastplate under his poncho, knowing that Rojo always aims for the heart in a gunfight. Rojo shoots, confident that he has dispatched

Eastwood made history as The Man With No Name, alias Joe, in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a breakthrough hit for him and director Sergio Leone 38

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

his enemy. Joe rises unharmed, kills the bad guys, and rescues the innkeeper, who has been hanging from a signpost ever since the Rojos beat him up. And then he is off to the desert, ready for whatever destiny next throws into his path. Yojimbo: A samurai warrior called Sanjuro Kuwabatake (Toshirô Mifune), roaming the countryside with no master to serve, arrives at a crossroads and tosses a stick in the air to determine by chance which way he will wander next. Walking in the direction indicated by the fallen stick, he comes upon a broken-down village, which he enters, remaining impassive when several young thugs try to provoke him. Conversing with Gonji (Eijirô Tôno), a tavern keeper, Sanjuro learns that the town is split into a pair of warring factions. One group sides with Tokuemon (Takashi Shimura), a sake brewer, while the other follows Tazaemon (Kamatari Fujiwara), a purveyor of silks and sex. But things are actually more complicated, since Tazaemon is merely a front for the criminal Seibê (Seizaburô Kawazu), who runs a brothel with his overbearing wife, while Tokuemon is the puppet of rival crime boss Ushitora (Kyû Sazanka) and his vicious brother. None of these people are driven by anything more elevated than bitterness, animosity and greed, and these qualities have long since infected the entire town. Sanjuro offers his services as bodyguard (yojimbo) to the highest bidder, and signs on with Seibê after proving his skill by winning a face-off with the thugs who confronted him earlier. But he switches to the other side when he discovers that Seibê plans to kill him once Ushitora is defeated, and it doesn’t hurt that Ushitora’s brother turns out to be a gunman with the only pistol in the vicinity. After many further developments in which Sanjuro plays each faction against the other, he is captured and beaten by Ushitora’s gang, from which he escapes with help from Gonji and the town cooper, who hides him in a coffin before fleeing the violence that is erupting and escalating all around. Returning to the village after weeks of recuperation, Sanjuro finds a captured and beaten Gonji hanging from a rope over the main street. He also finds his remaining enemies eager for a fight, which he readily gives them, killing virtually all of them with his samurai sword and ancillary carver’s knife. Tazaemon finishes off Tokuemon as well. Freeing the tavern keeper from the rope, Sanjuro then strides off to resume his wanderings on the open road. It is obvious that the story and action of A Fistful of Dollars were heavily influenced by Yojimbo, which Leone had seen with Tessari and Catena (under its Italian title, La sfida del samurai) shortly before they all sat down to write. Leone may have felt empowered to draw on Yojimbo because he recognised key elements of it from a far earlier work he admired, The Servant of Two Masters, a comic play written by the Venetian dramatist and librettist Carlo Goldoni in 1745. (Goldoni’s play is itself strongly influenced by the improvisational commedia dell’arte of sixteenth-century Italian theater.)43 Yojimbo takes place in 1860, and its suitability for adaptation as a western is clear from its basic setup. ‘As their echoing names suggest,’ critics Andrew and Gina Macdonald point out, ‘there is little from which to choose’ between Tazaemon and Tokeumon, since their feud has ‘reached the point at which hope for sensible compromise has been overwhelmed by mindless hatred.’ In his wanderings, ‘Sanjuro has seen this pattern repeated all too often as the old social order of the Tokugawa Shogunate has broken down and the feuding upstarts of the merchant class have taken over’.44 This evokes c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

39

the lawlessness of the Old West as well as that of the declining feudal shogunate, which met its end in 1868 as the Meiji Restoration rose to its full power. Commentators on A Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo have also linked it with a work that appeared in 1929, long after Goldoni’s play and somewhat before Kurosawa’s movie: Red Harvest, the first novel by Dashiell Hammett, a pioneer of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction.45 Its protagonist, a sleuth with no name called the Continental Op, travels to Personville, a mining town (nicknamed Poisonville by its cheerless inhabitants) riven with warfare involving a mobster’s gang, a crooked police chief ’s cronies and two other violent factions. There he offers his services to crime lords on different sides, prods them into pointless and self-defeating actions, and ultimately explodes what passes for stability in the utterly corrupt community, all at the price of his own mental health. ‘This berg’s getting to me,’ he says at the end. ‘If I don’t get away soon, I’ll be going blood-simple, like the natives.’ So he hightails it out of town, much as Sanjuro and Joe would do a few decades hence. Numerous critics have noted the parallels between Red Harvest and Hollywood western formulas. One is Allen Barra, who likens Hammett’s novel to conventional westerns in which robber barons hold all the power and there’s no legal mechanism with the strength or authority to control them. Red Harvest parts company with the western tradition, however, by replacing white hats (good) and black hats (bad) with shades of grey for everyone.46 Only one movie version of Red Harvest has been made, and it is hardly true to Hammett’s vision; titled Roadhouse Nights (Hobart Henley, 1930) and starring comedian Jimmy Durante as a fellow named Daffy, it was billed as an ‘action-comedy’ upon its short-lived release. Since then filmmakers as different as Wim Wenders, James Bridges, Neil Jordan, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alberto Grimaldi, and Mel Gibson have expressed interest in filming it, but nobody has managed to do so, even though every other Hammett novel has been adapted to the screen at least once. Sundry reasons for this have been hypothesised, ranging from the cost of motionpicture rights to Hollywood’s chronic ideological timidity (the novel is inflected by the Marxist views that Hammett espoused in the middle 1920s). Yet while nobody has filmed Red Harvest under its rightful name, two directors appear to have tapped it indirectly: Kurosawa, who dressed it in samurai garb, and Leone, who was doubly indirect, since he drew upon Kurosawa’s movie rather than Hammett’s book. ‘Kurosawa’s Yojimbo was inspired by an American novel of the ‘série noire’, so I was really taking the story back home again,’ Leone remarked at one point.47 It is a testament to the high reputation accrued by Red Harvest that the much-admired Yojimbo has been hailed (or deprecated) as its cleverly camouflaged doppelgänger. Film scholar David Desser straightforwardly asserts that Yojimbo is an adaptation of Hammett’s book, and Barra finds it unlikely that the many plot similarities could have just happened, stating that at a minimum they ‘share an obvious derivation from the themes of classic westerns, right up to the point where the hero, finding no moral barometer outside himself, sells his services to both sides’.48 Artist and film critic Manny Farber also saw clear parallels between the works, but used them to disparage Kurosawa’s picture, saying it ‘bowdlerized’ the novel by dissolving ‘the whole superstructure of Hammett’s feudal small town … into an inchoate mass of Goyalike 40

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

extras whose swarmings and mouthings are composed with naïve pictorialism’, and by replacing ‘exposition of character through vocation’ with ‘a shorthand of the character’s daily habit, jotted into a corner of the role by set-designer, costumer, author’.49 In his analysis of the relationship between Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, spaghetti-western scholar Christopher Frayling identifies two important scenes that Leone and company invented on their own – the Rojos’ massacre of the soldiers and Joe’s trick of using propped-up corpses as decoys – and notes that Leone eliminated some scenes of Yojimbo in which the protagonist is not involved. At the script level, Frayling observes, the most significant differences between the Kurosawa and Leone pictures stem from the latter’s heightened emphasis on star performances and spectacular set pieces. At the level of the finished films, he adds, differences between the Kurosawa and the Leone emerge in various details. At the beginning of Yojimbo, for instance, Sanjuro sees a dog trotting down the street with a human hand in its mouth, whereas A Fistful of Dollars starts with Joe seeing widows scurrying out of sight and a corpse set on a horse with a sign reading ‘Adios Amigo’ on its back. Kurosawa thus launches his movie with an atmosphere of tragicomic monstrousness linked with incipient swordplay, while Leone opens his with images of helpless citizens intimidated by unseen malevolent forces. ‘Kurosawa’s image is economical, austere,’ Frayling concludes. ‘Leone’s is more humorous [and] flamboyant.’50 (Frayling also calls Leone’s opening more ‘easily accessible’, which is a peculiar judgment; the hand-carrying dog has provoked much merriment in the audience at every showing of Yojimbo I have attended.) These differences between the films do not obscure deep similarities rooted in their common interests (the Servant of Two Masters and Red Harvest themes) and in the fascination with the anarchy of the Old West that Leone and Kurosawa shared. Looking at Yojimbo as the Kurosawa film best known in Western countries, the Macdonalds trace its popularity to skillful use of a ‘grammar’ that Kurosawa learned primarily from John Ford’s westerns. It is true that some properties of Kurosawa’s cinematic grammar overlap with some of Ford’s, but it is also true that Kurosawa’s supercharged moral scepticism is more akin to Leone’s sensibility, and the Macdonalds’ summary of the Japanese film’s general effect can be applied to A Fistful of Dollars without changing a word: ‘Its black humor, bleak realism, and brutal violence are offset by the image of a lone individual, competent, aloof, who sympathizes with the ordinary townsfolk, restores order and rights wrong at heavy cost, and then moves on.’51 None of this means Kurosawa necessarily drew on Red Harvest deliberately or directly. Two years before the director’s death in 1998, Donald Richie remarked that in his opinion, ‘the similarity in themes is just coincidence’, adding that Kurosawa always acknowledged the sources he used. Kurosawa himself, meanwhile, is said to have credited Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key, a 1942 film noir – based on a different Hammett novel, published in 1931 – as a source of the Yojimbo storyline. (Critics have cited one scene in particular, where the hero is captured and tortured before managing to get away, as a near-identical twin to one in the earlier noir.) These considerations notwithstanding, however, it is likely that Kurosawa did consciously take elements of Yojimbo from Red Harvest, as an anecdote in David Carradine’s autobiography attests. Carradine was invited to star in The Warrior and the Sorceress (John C. Broderick, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

41

1984), something of a Yojimbo knockoff, by B-movie impresario Roger Corman, the film’s (uncredited) executive producer. Reading the screenplay, Carradine worried that it was too similar to Yojimbo for comfort; Corman responded: Let me tell you a story. When [A Fistful of Dollars] opened in Tokyo, Kurosawa’s friends called him up and said, ‘You must see this picture.’ Kurosawa replied, ‘Yes, I understand it’s rather like Yojimbo.’ His friends corrected him, ‘No, it’s not like Yojimbo, it is Yojimbo. You have to sue these people.’ ‘I can’t sue them,’ he responded. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because,’ Kurosawa confessed, ‘Yojimbo is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.’52 I take this as the last word on the subject. Jolly maneuverings A final twist on the connection between Leone and Yojimbo transpired when A Fistful of Dollars went into European release. Soon after his first viewing of Yojimbo made a deep impression on him, Leone had written to Kurosawa and requested permission to make a western out of it. Kurosawa had done his own share of borrowing from outside sources, as we have seen, but perhaps mindful of the profits accrued by the Americans who had remade his Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, he demanded $10,000 for the rights, payable in advance. Leone had presented Jolly Film with a modest $200,000 budget, including the payment to Kurosawa, so he was taken aback when Jolly refused to pay the fee. He went into production anyway, and when the film was finished, Kurosawa – not fooled by the change of title from The Magnificent Stranger (which recalled The Magnificent Seven) to A Fistful of Dollars – filed a lawsuit against the producers. Jolly now feared for the security of its ownership, and American distributors balked at acquiring the film despite its overnight success in its first European runs. Looking for a way around the impasse, Jolly principals Giorgio (George) Papi and Arrigo (Harry) Colombo worked out a tentative arrangement whereby Kurosawa and Toho, the studio that produced Yojimbo, would forego the $10,000 charge in return for exclusive distribution rights and all gross profits in Japan, South Korea and Formosa (as Taiwan was then called), plus fifteen percent of the total worldwide grosses. Jolly considered this quite generous, since the popularity of Clint and Rawhide on Japanese television gave the picture a pre-sold audience. On their own side of the equation, Papi and Colombo felt they now had an East Asian distributor lined up for the sequels they hoped to make. These maneuverings kept A Fistful of Dollars from reaching American and British screens until 1967, by which time Leone and Eastwood, having completed For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), were equipped for a one-two-three punch in these hugely profitable markets. Jolly’s expectation of an ongoing relationship with Kurosawa and Toho did not pan out, however, since Leone sued Papi and Columbo to cancel his contract on the ground that Jolly was withholding his share of the profits from A Fistful of Dollars. 42

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Eastwood plays The Man With No Name, alias Blondie, and Eli Wallach plays Tuco in Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Leone found new backers for the sequels, and the budgets they provided were a good deal higher than the $200,000 he spent on his first western. Alberto Grimaldi and Produzioni Europee Associati pumped $350,000 into For a Few Dollars More, with Leone receiving a sixty percent share of the profits. Not surprisingly, one of the first items on his agenda was to make certain that Eastwood would be back in the saddle for this second installment. United Artists executive Arnold Picker then agreed to $1.2 million for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which at the time of the deal had no story beyond the bare-bones idea of ‘three bums that go around through the Civil War looking for money’, dreamed up by screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni on the spur of the moment when Picker, in Rome buying distribution rights to For a Few Dollars More, unexpectedly asked, ‘What are you going to do next?’53 From cool commodity to star and mini-mogul Rawhide aired its last episode in January 1966, after eight seasons. Eastwood wrapped up his work on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly six months later, and in 1967 the entire Dollars trilogy opened in his native land. Clint was now internationally famous and finally unhitched from Rowdy Yates, but he was still a cooler commodity on the market than he had hoped. ‘On occasion I’d run into him,’ director Ted Post said of this period, ‘and he was very, very angry, frustrated and alienated.’54 This downbeat situation proved short-lived, yet apart from the Dollars films Eastwood added only two items to his filmography in 1967, and they were instantly forgettable items at that. The first was The Witches, aka Le streghe, a five-part anthology film (fashionable at the time) patched together by Italian über-mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who personally solicited Clint’s participation. Eager to capitalise on his sudden popularity across the Atlantic, thanks to the recent arrival of the first two Dollars films in various European countries – including Italy, where Clint was widely known as El Cigarello – the producer brought him to New York so as to wine, dine and woo him, eventually offering him the choice between a $25,000 fee or a $20,000 fee plus a new Ferrari sports car. It is no surprise that Clint chose the latter, partly because he liked cars and partly because (as he said at the time) he wouldn’t have to pay his agent a percentage on it. Eastwood accepted his role in The Witches after seeing only an outline of his halfhour segment, but he read enough to know that the vignette would be no more than an amusing trifle. This posed no problem, since he liked the idea of briefly stepping c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

43

away from the macho image he had acquired. He was also pleased by the prospect of working with director Vittorio De Sica, who had helped define Italian neorealism with such classics as Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. (1952), and of acting with Silvana Mangano, with whom he ‘fell in love’ while watching her performance in the neorealist melodrama Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) years earlier.55 Then too, Rawhide was definitely on its way to the glue factory, limping through a final unwanted, unneeded season in which Rowdy was now the trail boss and Clint had to carry every show for the same old ramrod salary.56 De Laurentiis dreamed up The Witches as a way of renewing Mangano’s career (they were married) at a time when Sophia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida were outshining her in the Italian sexpot line. To this end he hired five of Italy’s most renowned filmmakers to direct the film’s five episodes, in each of which she would star, showcasing the variety of her skills and the enduring sway of her charms.57 Eastwood’s segment, ‘An Evening Like the Others’, comes last in the line-up, probably because Clint is in it and it is slightly less awful than the other four. He plays an American businessman named Charlie who lives with his love-starved wife, Giovanna, in a monumentally tedious middle-class marriage. Try as she may to spark Charlie’s inexplicably moribund sex drive, he does nothing but complain about the busyness of modern life – the world would be more peaceful if everyone got enough sleep, he opines – and look forward to hitting the hay himself, assuming he can muster the energy to walk all the way to the bedroom. This evidently goes on every night, and all Giovanna can do is abandon herself to riotous fantasies of erotic derring-do. Set during a typical evening, the vignette alternates between the couple’s wearisome reality and Giovanna’s boisterous daydreams, which are so trite that a fantasy master like Federico Fellini would have quit the business before committing them to film. The segment is as lazy as Charlie, recycling the theme of Jean-Luc Godard’s much stronger short ‘Laziness’ (‘La Paresse’, 1962), also about a man too torpid to have sex.58 The only shot with momentary visual interest shows Charlie and Giovanna walking down a corridor toward their bedroom, filmed through a glass-brick wall that makes their bodies appear to be half in slumberland already. And that’s about it. Clint takes the debacle in good stride, perhaps unaware of how lame it actually is, playing goodnaturedly against his usual type and letting the cinematic chips fall where they may. Malpaso Frustrated though he was as 1967 began, Eastwood had reason for optimism once A Fistful of Dollars opened in American theaters on 18 January, meeting with strong results at the box office. For a Few Dollars More was scheduled for release in May, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was waiting in the wings; so when still another Leone project came Clint’s way, one might have expected him to grab it with hardly a second thought. He was starting to show genuine savvy about the choices he should and should not make, however. Leone had been trying to recruit him for his next epic western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and now he tried again, asking Eastwood to play an enigmatic gunslinger who has a distinctive trademark – a wistful 44

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

‘waah-waah’ on the mouth organ he carries – but with, you guessed it, no name. He is known only as Harmonica. This offer had a great deal in its favor. Eastwood and Leone knew each other well, and both had profited greatly from their collaborations to date. Better yet, this venture held forth the prospect of a seamless transition from the European scene to the Hollywood system: Once Upon a Time in the West was a generously funded Paramount production to be filmed entirely on American locations. Surprisingly, however, Eastwood took a pass. One reason appears to have been a bad meeting between the two, during which Leone described the movie he had in mind. Schickel amusingly describes it: Leone particularly (correctly) loved the movie’s opening sequence, in which three gunfighters await the arrival of Harmonica at a train station and engage in much memorable and subtly satirical western business. Somewhat to Clint’s impatience he focused on the entrapment of a fly in a pistol barrel by the figure [Snaky] who was played in the film by the iconic Jack Elam. ‘It took him fifteen minutes to get past that part,’ [Clint] says, and he remembers asking, ‘Wait a second, where are we headed with this?’ But Leone was not to be hurried, and continued his synopsis at his own overly detailed pace.59 Despite the American credentials that Once Upon a Time in the West would have, Clint was concerned that ‘it would inevitably be perceived as just another pasta dish’, and Leone said nothing to allay his worry. Clint also felt that although he would be the top-billed star, others would be playing the most memorable roles: Frank, a vicious assassin, and Cheyenne, a wrongly accused renegade. So he turned Leone down, which proved to be both a good decision and a bad one. Good because when the film reached US theaters it tanked so completely that after two weeks Paramount tried to juice it up by slicing away twenty minutes, a desperation tactic that only made matters worse; bad because the picture’s reputation has soared in subsequent years, and today Clint would probably be pleased to have it among his credits.60 Around the same time, Clint made another such call for different reasons. His representative at the powerful William Morris Agency steered him toward Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969), a Columbia Pictures western with a generous budget and a multistar cast. Based on a novel by Heck Allen, who had been a longtime gag man for MGM cartoon maestro Tex Avery, the picture was written and produced by Carl Foreman, a veteran of the Hollywood blacklist with screenplays for many socially progressive dramas and ‘problem pictures’ to his name, from Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949) and The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950) to High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957). He wanted Clint for his western, and William Morris wanted Clint to be surrounded by the likes of Gregory Peck, Edward G. Robinson, Eli Wallach, Omar Sharif, Burgess Meredith, Raymond Massey and other famous faces, all under the direction of Thompson, who had directed Foreman’s blockbuster hit The Guns of Navarone (1961). The premise of Mackenna’s Gold is hardly novel: Colorado, an outlaw, abducts Mackenna, a lawman, because he thinks Mackenna has knowledge of a treasure map, and soon everyone c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

45

from the cavalry to the Indians barge into the action. This added up to little in Clint’s estimation. ‘I don’t get the script,’ he told his agent. ‘It’s just an extension of Rawhide,’ he said to Foreman on his way out the door.61 Even with Peck as McKenna and Sharif as Colorado, this picture tanked as decisively as Once a Time in the West did, and its reputation has not improved over the years. Hang ’Em High (1968) The project Eastwood said yes to around this time was more modest than its competitors: the unsubtly named Hang ’Em High, penned by Leonard Freeman and Mel Goldberg, who were primarily television writers. Clint plays Jed Cooper, a former marshal who is now a cattleman. Driving a newly purchased herd across the Rio Grande, he is attacked by a nine-man vigilante crew who tell him the wealthy man whose cattle he bought has just been murdered. Jed is the obvious suspect, so they summarily string him up and ride away, leaving him for dead. A passing lawman fortuitously rescues him and brings him to Fort Grant for trial before Adam Fenton (Pat Hingle), the judge – the hanging judge, ironically enough – who presides over the local court. Learning that the cattle baron was actually killed by the intermediary who sold Jed the herd, the judge deputises Jed and authorises him to hunt down the men who hung him, helped by information from a vigilante who turns himself in. Other characters include a prostitute and a businesswoman who attract Jed’s interest, and the nasty Captain Wilson (Ed Begley), who led the vigilante group. Responding favorably to the script, Clint decided to make it the debut project of his fledgling production company, Malpaso, named after a creek on his Carmel Highlands property. (The word means ‘bad step’ in Spanish.) Numerous other stars had set up such companies over the years, including Clint’s rivals Steve McQueen (Solar, founded in 1963) and James Garner (Cherokee, founded in 1964), and despite the deal-making complications and financial losses these enterprises often brought, Clint evidently believed he could succeed where others had failed. Also tempting was the prospect of reinforcing his image as a Hollywood outsider – playing marginalised loners had made him a star, after all, and in European movies at that – by establishing a base outside the major-studio system. But mainly, one suspects, Clint decided he could make a lot of money by capitalising on his knack for economy-minded business practices. In this his instincts were correct. A report in the Hollywood Reporter called Malpaso a ‘unique formula for getting rich’, since it allowed him to control the company’s stock and hold a principal office and market himself to studios and producers under exclusive contract to his own outfit. Under the arrangements he put in place, Clint could make upwards of a million dollars per film in salary and percentages, spreading the tax bite via deferred payments. On top of all this, he would generally have the final say about scripts, directors and casting.62 Eastwood and his business manager, Irving Leonard, originally expected Malpaso to occupy itself mainly with loaning Clint out to other companies. It soon turned into a full-fledged production company, however, and from the start it gave Clint a sense of controlling his career, allowing him more influence over Hang ’Em High than he could 46

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

possibly have exercised over a studio entertainment machine like Mackenna’s Gold.63 Setting up Hang ’Em High as a co-production of Malpaso and screenwriter Freeman’s production company, Clint brought United Artists in as distributor and successfully lobbied for Ted Post – an experienced TV hand with two dozen Rawhide episodes under his belt – to direct it. Things fell smoothly into place, allowing him to reach his long-elusive goal of starring in a Hollywood feature, and to do so on his own creative and financial terms. Hang ’Em High appealed to Eastwood for at least three reasons. First, its relatively small scale made it a safe vehicle for Malpaso’s initial outing. Second, it was a western, and even though he turned down two others during this period, he knew the genre was a safe one for him; the violent and treacherous Western frontier was the movie territory where he felt most at home. The third reason for his interest is the most intriguing: Hang ’Em High reminded him of The Ox-Bow Incident, which he has called ‘a great film’ and one of his favorite pictures.64 Directed by William A. Wellman, the 1943 release is based on Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel about three law-abiding men mistaken for cattle rustlers and strung up by vigilantes, who then discover the grievous error they have made. (Clint had given a Henry Fonda monologue from the film in his screen test for Rawhide. Decades later, some critics find echoes of The Ox-Bow Incident in the last section of Unforgiven.)65 Schickel’s friendship with Clint shades into grandiosity when he waxes philosophical about Clint’s affection for Wellman’s movie, saying it expresses ‘one of the main themes of [Clint’s] inner life, his abhorrence of false witness, false accusation’. It does appear, however, that the script for Hang ’Em High struck Clint as a thoughtful look at capital punishment, mob violence, and justice, three issues he was interested in, and he liked the idea of playing a protagonist who is not a ‘symbol’ but a conflicted individual facing hard questions about the criminal-justice system and his own relationship thereto.66 Since the story begins with his character barely surviving a lynching, it also allowed him to revisit the theme of resurrection, which had figured in A Fistful of Dollars.67 As the title suggests, the hook of Hang ’Em High is the dramatic spectacle inherent in hanging. Judge Fenton is based on Isaac Parker, an actual judge who sat on the bench in Fort Smith, Arkansas, beginning in 1875, and commanded immediate attention by hanging six men simultaneously a few months after taking office; thereafter he earned respect all the way to the East Coast by holding court six days a week from eight in the morning until sundown, conducting the proceedings swiftly and efficiently. Before his first year at Fort Smith was over he ordered more executions than had been carried out in the town since the Western District court had moved there four years earlier, and unlike his predecessor he never allowed bail for those condemned. The gallows at Fort Smith could accommodate a dozen victims, and executions ordered by Parker became popular public displays, drawing thousands of onlookers from as far as fifty miles away. It appears, however, that Hanging Judge Parker relied not on his own proclivities but on federal statutes to determine when capital punishment was warranted. The death sentences he imposed were not weighted strongly toward Native Americans, as had been the case before, and Parker never attended an execution himself – indeed, upon handing down his first death sentence he openly wept in the courtroom. Near the end c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

47

of his life he stated that he would support abolishing the death penalty ‘provided there [was] a certainty of punishment.’68 The crowds of thousands that ogled Parker’s multiple executions are considerably pared down in Hang ’Em High, but the festive mood among the onlookers remains the same, and while the fictional Judge Fenton does observe the hangings he has ordered – from his window, signaling when to pull the trap with a sombre nod to the executioner – he does so with no evident pleasure. He is certainly a hanging judge, and today conservatives would hail him as a law-and-order man who is ‘tough on crime’ and refuses to ‘coddle criminals’. But the rationale for his actions is larger than this. He sees himself as being in the vanguard of progress, charged with imposing judicial order on the territory so it can become a solid candidate for statehood and enter the Union, after which it will acquire a fully functioning criminal-justice system with a governor, an appeals court and other such tools, which is a prospect he welcomes. The movie makes plain that Judge Fenton is sincere in his concern for the territory’s future good, and he seems genuinely saddened by the first group execution we see. Still, the film shows signs of ambivalence about him, and when Jed speaks of the impending ‘six-man hanging’ with disgust, the construction of the scene and our knowledge of his character clearly lead us to sympathise with him rather than the judge. Jed himself is ambivalent about Fenton and the situation in which he finds himself. The judge respects Jed’s abilities from the beginning and wants him as an ally in his fight to keep order in the territory. After taking care of all but two of the vigilantes who tried to hang him at the beginning, Jed takes off his badge in the tried-and-true High Noon manner, only to pick it up again when Fenton writes out a pardon for the old man who tried to save Jed earlier. Jed thereby compromises with the judge and the values he represents. At the end of the film Jed rides off to hunt down the two remaining evildoers, and the story surprisingly ends on this note, offering no definitive resolution; yet Jed promises to bring his quarries back to Fort Grant so they can face proper proceedings before the judge. In sum, Clint’s character here is no Dirty Harry, nor is Fenton portrayed as a cruel tyrant hiding aberrant impulses under his judicial robe. Hang ’Em High has been faulted for pointless violence, awkward spaghetti-western touches and perfunctory handling of female characters who are underwritten to begin with; and Eastwood has been scolded for trying to make Jed Cooper a queasy blend of Rowdy Yates amiability and Man With No Name amorality. None of which prevented Clint from receiving $400,000 and a hefty percentage of the profits for his work. He earned his pay by bringing a fair amount of movie-star charisma to the film (even if Jed looks like he spends a lot of time fussing with his hair) and by doing his own stunts, to the point of being dragged across the Rio Grande by a rope around his neck.69 His energy may have been boosted by eagerness to launch Malpaso with a bang, but whatever the reason for his zeal, it paid off generously: Hang ’Em High pulled in higher North American grosses than any of the Leone films, came in twentieth among the year’s highest-grossing pictures, and earned Eastwood the first of his eighteen consecutive appearances on the annual Quigley Publications survey of exhibitors, which asks respondents to name the year’s top box-office draws.70 Eastwood was now firmly positioned as a 48

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Hollywood star, and thanks to Malpaso he was a mini-mogul with more financial and creative power than he could have dreamed of a couple of short years earlier.71 Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12

The most thorough accounts of Eastwood’s life and career are found in Richard Schickel, Clint Eastwood: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) and Patrick McGilligan, Clint: The Life and Legend (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). My biographical accounts in this and other chapters draw on these books as well as other standard sources. McGilligan, Clint, p. 42. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 51; McGilligan, Clint, pp. 50–51. The very different tones in which Schickel and McGilligan write about this event is a good index of how different their Eastwood biographies are. Schickel, whose book appeared first, is a seasoned journalist, a respected film critic and a longtime friend of Clint who gives his crony the benefit of every doubt. McGilligan is a veteran biographer and also something of a contrarian who enjoys disagreeing with previous writers (compare his upbeat 2003 biography of Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, with Donald Spoto’s downbeat treatment in 1983) and who got sued by Eastwood for $10 million over allegations in Clint that, among other things, the filmmaker had beaten Maggie Eastwood, his first wife. Eastwood filed the lawsuit in 2002 and settled it in 2004 on terms that are undisclosed except for an agreement by McGilligan and his publishers to remove the offending passages from future printings (‘Eastwood settles over wife-beating allegations,’ guardian.co.uk, 13 August 2004 (accessed 29 November 2008)). San Francisco Examiner, 2 October 1951; quoted in McGilligan, Clint, p. 50. Arthur Knight, ‘The Interview: Clint Eastwood,’ Playboy, February 1978. Quoted in Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 68. When he filled out the application for the Universal talent program, his first employment form for show-business work, Eastwood wrote ‘Little Theater in Seattle’ in the ‘Previous Experience’ space. The experience probably amounted to passing out programs and raising the curtain with the aim of pleasing a female friend, according to McGilligan (Clint, p. 54). Alland was also an occasional actor, debuting in 1941 as the reporter Jerry Thompson in Citizen Kane and playing bit parts in a couple of Orson Welles’s later films. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 81–2. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 87. Quoted in Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 90. McGilligan, Clint, p. 87. Warren had been friend and agent to F. Scott Fitzgerald in the late 1930s, and after navy service in World War II he parlayed his experience as a young magazine writer (Argosy Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post) into a successful career as c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

49

13 14

15

50

a novelist (Only the Valiant, Valley of the Shadow), screenwriter (Springfield Rifle, Day of the Evil Gun), film and TV producer (Cavalry Patrol, The Meanest Men in the West), and director (Hellgate, Charro!). His screenplays for Streets of Laredo (1949) and Little Big Horn (1951) were nominated for Writers Guild of America awards and ‘Incident at Dragoon Crossing,’ a 1960 episode of Rawhide, won the Bronze Wrangler in the Western Heritage Awards competition, honoring Warren, director Ted Post, writer John Dunkel, and the series’ regular cast, Eastwood among them. Warren wrote and/or produced and/or directed 52 episodes of Gunsmoke during its first two seasons, including the 1955 pilot episode, ‘Matt Gets It,’ and did the same for 53 episodes of Rawhide during its first three seasons, including the 1959 kick-off installment, ‘Incident of the Tumbleweed,’ which also inaugurated the show’s trademark ‘Incident of…’ title format. Western novelist Jim Miller reports that Louis L’Amour, the hugely prolific writer of western stories and novels, considered Gunsmoke to be TV’s most authentic western series; see Jim Miller, ‘Clint Eastwood: A Different Kind of Western Hero,’ in Archie P. McDonald, ed., Shooting Stars: Heroes and Heroines of Western Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 182–95, cited at 185. McGilligan, Clint, p. 99. Tiomkin had started his career as a Hollywood composer, adaptor, conductor, and music director in the early days of talkies and had scored such major westerns as The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Giant (George Stevens, 1956), and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sky (1952) and Rio Bravo (1959), as well as Warren’s own Tension at Table Rock (1956) and, yes, Hawks’s Red River. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for best music score with Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), won his first Academy Award for best music score with High Noon, and earned his first Academy Award for best original song with that movie’s ‘High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’)’, sharing the prize with Ned Washington, who wrote the lyrics. Frankie Laine, whose long career flourished from 1930 to 2005, sang the title songs of several 1950s movies and TV shows, including 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957), as well as the western spoof Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974), and his occasional acting jobs included a 1960 episode of Rawhide. A few names and titles will give an idea of some Rawhide directors’ credentials. Tay Garnett’s many films include The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949). Andrew V. McLaglen alternated theatrical movies with such major western series as Gunsmoke and the remarkable Have Gun – Will Travel. Laslo Benedek directed Fredric March in Death of a Salesman (1951) and Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) before becoming a prolific TV director. Stuart Heisler helmed a long list of movies including such respected dramas as The Glass Key (1942) and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947). Christian Nyby worked with Howard Hawks on The Thing from Another World (1951) before starting a hugely productive TV career. George Sherman made scores of B-westerns dating back to 1937. In addition to Creature from the th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

16 17 18 19

20 21

22

Black Lagoon and Tarantula (1955), the gifted Jack Arnold directed The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Mouse That Roared (1959) plus countless TV episodes through the early 1980s. Ted Post directed 24 Rawhide episodes, although these are overshadowed by his 55 installments of Gunsmoke and his whopping 178 installments of the excellent Peyton Place television series. Besides directing such killer B’s as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), Gene Fowler Jr. edited features for the likes of Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and John Cassavetes during a career lasting almost fifty years. Thomas Carr’s credits include theatrical westerns in the 1940s, Adventures of Superman spinoffs in the 1950s, and many TV episodes, 26 installments of Rawhide among them, in the 1960s. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 120. Daniel O’Brien, Clint Eastwood: Film-Maker (London: B.T. Batsford, 1996), pp. 34–5. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 114–15, 113. Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter, ‘Clint Eastwood: Auteur,’ Film Comment vol. 14, no. 1, 1978, pp. 24–32; reprinted as ‘Eastwood Direction’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 42–61, cited at 42. Michael Henry Wilson, ‘Entretien avec Clint Eastwood,’ Positif no. 287, 1985, pp. 48–57; reprinted as ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ trans. KC, in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 96–116, cited at 99. Milan Pavlović, ‘`Kein Popcorn-Film’’ (‘`Not a Popcorn Movie’’), steadycam no. 10, 1988, pp.18–20; reprinted in expanded form as ‘Clint Eastwood Interviewed by Milan Pavlović,’ trans. KC, in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 137–52, cited at 147. Quoted in McGilligan, Clint, pp. 112, 111. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 39. Eastwood’s singing spot was a consolation prize from CBS, according to O’Brien, granted after the network reneged on the directing opportunity it had allegedly promised him; both the network and the star may have been motivated by the success that Rawhide regular Sheb Wooley, who played Pete Nolan in the series, had achieved with ‘The Purple People Eater,’ a novelty song that flew to the top of the Billboard pop chart in 1958. The ill fortunes of ‘Unknown Girl’ did not keep Clint from releasing three more singles in the early 1960s – the A sides were titled ‘Rowdy,’ ‘Cowboy in a Three Piece Suit,’ and ‘For You, For Me, For Evermore’ – followed by an LP called Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. Other series regulars who felt the urge to flex their creative muscles did so by co-writing an episode or two – Wooley, Fleming, and Steve Raines did so during the third and fourth seasons – but Eastwood passed up this possibility, ‘not being particularly inclined towards script endeavors’, as O’Brien puts it. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, pp. 39–40. O’Brien gives a good account of the issues faced by TV performers interested in transitioning to film and draws useful comparisons between Eastwood and other stars in somewhat similar situations. I am indebted to his research. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

51

23

24

25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

52

The Magnificent Seven is an uncredited remake of Akira Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai (1954), much as Eastwood’s first major film, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), is a remake of Kurosawa’s action film Yojimbo (1961). McQueen also made the crime drama The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (Charles Guggenheim and John Stix, 1959), the war picture Never So Few (John Sturges, 1959), and the comedy The Honeymoon Machine (Richard Thorpe, 1961) during the three-season run of Wanted: Dead or Alive, and the melodrama Never Love a Stranger (Robert Stevens, 1958) opened just before the series’ premiere. The television shows he appeared in between 1958 and 1961 were Climax! (CBS; one episode), Tales of Wells Fargo (NBC: one episode), Sam Peckinpah’s Trackdown (CBS; two episodes), and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS; two episodes), where his second appearance was as the Gambler in the legendary ‘Man from the South’ episode based on Roald Dahl’s short story. Garner’s other features during the Maverick years were both directed by Gordon Douglas, a reliable Hollywood craftsman: Bombers B-52 (1957; only the actor’s voice was heard) and Up Periscope (1959). Many years later, of course, Garner would costar in Eastwood’s Space Cowboys. Garner nonetheless remained the backbone of Maverick during its first three seasons. He then quit the show because of a contract dispute, whereupon Roger Moore joined up as Beau Maverick, a cousin; later still, Robert Colbert came along as Brent Maverick, another brother, but by this time the series was in terminal decline. In the final tally Bret had been featured in 52 episodes, considerably fewer than Bart’s 75 but many more than Beau’s fifteen. Garner returned as Bret in The New Maverick, a 1978 television movie; in one episode of Young Maverick, a CBS series in the 1979–1980 season; and in Bret Maverick, an NBC series in the 1981–1982 season. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 40. ‘Ich bin ein Cowboy,’ The Economist (24 May 2001). Economist.com http://www. uwec.edu/geography/articles%5Ckarlmay.htm (accessed 11 November 2008). In an amusing later development, the title El Magnifico extranjero was recycled for a 1967 feature cobbled together from two Rawhide episodes: ‘Incident of the Running Man’, first aired in season three on 5 May 1961, and ‘The Backshooter’, first aired in season seven on 27 November 1964. This odd hybrid was put on the market by none other than Jolly Films, in partnership with Avis Film, a West Germany company. Eastwood reportedly sued his Italian associates over the release and El Magnífico extranjero was yanked from distribution, never to return. Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner (London: Robson Books, 1992), p. 45. Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 145. Eliot, American Rebel, pp. 58–60. Frayling reports that Leone wrote the storyline, with help from Tessari and Catena, in his Rome apartment. (The Internet Movie Database indicates that th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45

46

47

48

Leone penned the story with Catena and A. Bonzzoni, listing Tessari along with Eastwood and three others as uncredited writers of unspecified contributions.) Leone never sat at the typewriter, according to McGilligan; instead he acted out the scenes, leaving his collaborators to fiddle with details and resolve inconsistencies. ‘Last night I dreamed three words,’ he would say, in Tessari’s account. ‘You must put this idea in the film.’ Tessari would ask, ‘What kind of scene will this fit into?’ And the director would imperiously reply, ‘That is not my problem. That is your problem.’ Clint, p. 130. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 131; McGilligan, Clint, p. 133. McGilligan, Clint, p. 132. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 146. Francesco Mininni, ‘Sergio Leone.’ Il Castoro Cinema (January/February, 1989). Quoted in McGilligan, Clint, p. 131. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 146. McGilligan, Clint, 129. In addition to his Eastwood pictures, Leone’s credited films as director are The Colossus of Rhodes, the westerns Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Duck, You Sucker (1971), and the crime drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 141, 144. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 146. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 143. The device referred to, usually spelled Moviola, was a standard film-editing device until flatbed systems and then digital techniques displaced it starting in the 1970s. Il servitore di due padroni was first produced in 1753, in a revised version that reduced the commedia dell’arte elements of the earlier drafts. Andrew and Gina Macdonald, ‘Yojimbo,’ Film Reference, n.d. http://www. filmreference.com/Films-Wi-Z/Yojimbo.html (accessed 19 February 2010). Frayling finds Red Harvest to be, like Yojimbo, a variation on what he calls ‘the Two Masters idea.’ He also argues that aspects of Mark Twain’s story ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1900), filtered through the protagonist of Red Harvest, ‘provide one model for all the various “anonymous stranger” westerns’ from A Fistful of Dollars to High Plains Drifter. See Spaghetti Westerns, p. 152. Allen Barra, ‘From Red Harvest to Deadwood.’ Salon (28 February 2005) http:// dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2005/02/28/hammett/index.html (accessed 22 May 2008). Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 151. La Série noire, issued by the French publisher Gallimard, is a line of noir and policier novels founded by editor and actor Marcel Duhamel in 1945. Given its name by the great French poet Jacques Prévert, it is known for its distinctive black-and-yellow covers and black jackets with white edging. Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Ed McBain (pseudonym of Evan Hunter) are among the Anglo-American authors who constitute most of its list. Barra, ‘From Red Harvest to Deadwood.’ Barra also quotes David Desser, The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

53

49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63 54

Manny Farber, ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, expanded edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), pp. 145–154, cited at 149. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, pp. 147–148. Macdonald, ‘Yojimbo,’ n.p. David Carradine, Endless Highway (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995), 539. Quoted in Bruce Jackson, The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), pp. 166–167. McGilligan, Clint, p. 148. Eliot states that UA offered between $1.2 million and $1.6 million to finance and hold the North American distribution rights for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. See American Rebel, p. 73. My account of the Kurosawa affair and its aftermath draws on McGilligan, pp. 130, 144, 147–148 as well as O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 55, and Eliot, American Rebel, pp. 64, 71. McGilligan, Clint, p. 159. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 165–166. McGilligan, Clint, p. 150. De Laurentiis hired high-class writers, too. Cesare Zavattini, the great screenwriter and theorist of neorealism, co-wrote ‘An Evening Like the Others’ with Fabio Carpi and Enzo Muzii, and also co-wrote ‘The Witch Burned Alive’ with Giuseppe Patroni Griffi; these episodes are the least flawed, but they are leagues below the level of other films Zavattini helped write, such as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1946). Under their joint moniker Age-Scarpelli, the team of Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, who helped write The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, co-wrote ‘Civic Spirit’ with director Mauro Bolognini and Bernardino Zapponi, a frequent Federico Fellini collaborator; Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote his own script for ‘The Earth Seen from the Moon’; and Franco Rossi penned ‘The Sicilian Belle’ with veteran screenwriters Roberto Gianviti and Luigi Magni. How it could have taken three people to write a trifle like ‘The Sicilian Belle’, or four people to pen the sub-trifle ‘Civic Spirit’, is a mystery. ‘La Paresse’, starring Eddie Constantine, is a segment of the French-Italian anthology film The Seven Deadly Sins (1962). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 184. McGilligan quotes this account at length (Clint, p. 158). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 184–185. Charles Bronson played Harmonica, with Jason Robards as Cheyenne and Henry Fonda playing against type as Frank. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 185. Heck Allen published the novel Mackenna’s Gold under the name Will Henry, his customary pen name. Foreman co-produced the picture with Dimitri Tiomkin, the legendary Hollywood composer who had written music for Rawhide in the early 1960s but did not do so for Mackenna’s Gold, which was scored by Quincy Jones. McGilligan, Clint, p. 162. McGilligan cites ‘Clint Eastwood Formula for Jumping His Take’, Hollywood Reporter (16 June 1969). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 186. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

Jousse and Nevers, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 183. E.g., Adrian Gargett, ‘Unforgiven,’ Kamera.co.uk, n.d. http://www.kamera.co.uk/ reviews_extra/unforgiven.php (accessed 22 September 2009). Jousse and Nevers, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 183. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 186. Roger H. Tuller, Let No Man Escape: A Judicial Biography of ‘Hanging Judge’ Isaac C. Parker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), pp. 53–54, 56, 58, 63, 67, 65. Tuller holds that capital punishment served a variety of purposes in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) of Parker’s day: the ritual ‘demonstrated incontrovertibly the ultimate power of the State’ and ‘with their carefully prescribed methods and religious sanction, [hangings] symbolized the triumph of order – both civil and moral – over chaos’. As a bonus, ‘for the isolated residents of the Indian Territory frontier, a hanging provided one of the few opportunities for socializing, a kind of morbid holiday’ (p. 61). Boris Zmijewsky and Lee Pfeiffer, The Films of Clint Eastwood (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), p. 72. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 192. Twenty-nine pictures have been released under the Malpaso Company banner, starting with Hang ’Em High and Coogan’s Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968) and continuing through Bird in 1988; a sibling organisation, Malpaso Productions, has handled other Eastwood movies, from The Gauntlet in 1977 through J. Edgar in 2011. Although both Malpaso operations have focused primarily on Eastwood’s own pictures, they have occasionally been involved with projects by other filmmakers, such as the 1986 fantasy Ratboy, directed by Eastwood’s former companion and co-star Sondra Locke for the Malpaso Company, and the 1988 documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, directed by Charlotte Zwerin for Malpaso Productions, with Eastwood as executive producer.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

55

CHAPTER THREE

The Rising Star: Clintus, Siegelini, and Company

He started to come up with ideas for camera set ups. I started to call these Clintus shots and even if I decided not to use them they invariably gave me another idea, threw me into a Siegelini shot. Don Siegel1 All told, 1968 was the most productive year Eastwood had enjoyed so far in his career. After wrapping Hang ’Em High he went straight to a pair of very different starring roles, and the first one brought about a momentous event – his initial meeting with Don Siegel, who became his filmmaking mentor as well as one of his most effective directors. Universal, now keen to work with the actor it had broken into the business and then unceremoniously spurned just a few years before, offered him the lead in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), a modern-day western about one Walt Coogan, a deputy sheriff from rural Arizona who is dispatched to New York to oversee the extradition of an accused murderer who has been apprehended there, but manages to escape before Coogan can get him onto a westbound plane. The title refers to a promontory that looms over Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, and the hook is culture clash, with Coogan scooting around sin city in a cowboy hat and boots, ever exasperated when people think he is from Texas because he reminds them of a buckaroo. Siegel was a Hollywood veteran by the time Eastwood met him in 1968. He began as an assistant editor at Warner Bros. in 1934, and moved up to editing montage sequences for the likes of Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz five years later. After directing two Academy Award-winning shorts in 1945 (Star in the Night, a Christmas movie, and Hitler Lives, a documentary), he started directing features, first at Warner Bros., where his unpretentious storytelling and no-nonsense efficiency 56

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

were in sync with the studio’s prevailing style, and then in other venues of similarly modest means, scoring solidly with such hard-hitting pictures as Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Lineup (1958). His budgets became bigger in the 1960s, when he also started producing some of his pictures. As a director he favored location shooting, in-camera editing and careful planning so as to minimise retakes when the camera rolled. His lean-andmean aesthetic is a by-product of his professional frugality, as Laurence F. Knapp aptly observes, and his visceral editing lends his pictures a taut, muscular tone. In a seminal essay on Siegel, auteur theorist Andrew Sarris wrote that his characters add up to a ‘gallery of loners’; yet despite the anomie they express, the ‘moral architecture of his universe is never undermined by the editing, however frenzied’.2 According to Siegel’s autobiography, published by his widow two years after his death, he and Eastwood first crossed paths because of a computer glitch. Siegel was unacquainted with Eastwood in 1968 – he had never seen Clint, either in the flesh or on film. Clint had accepted Universal’s offer to star in Coogan’s Bluff, and arranged for Malpaso to co-produce it with the studio, on the basis of a screenplay draft by Herman Miller, a TV writer who had been the story editor for Rawhide during its final season. As pre-production approached, Clint had to decide between two directors – Alex Segal and Don Taylor – who had been suggested for the film. ‘But alas,’ Siegel writes, in the basement of [the Universal executive building] there existed proudly a brand-new computer. Two names were fed to the ever-ready computer: Alex Segal and Don Taylor. The computer, like all executives, made a mistake. The name that appeared was Don Siegel. Clint was puzzled. He asked the executive producer, Dick Lyons, ‘Who the hell is Don Siegel?’3 Lyons informed Eastwood that Siegel’s three previous pictures were the just-completed Madigan (1968, with Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda), Stranger on the Run (1967, a TV movie with Fonda and Anne Baxter) and The Killers (1964, with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson, loosely based on Ernest Hemingway’s story). After watching them, Clint was sufficiently impressed to offer Siegel Coogan’s Bluff. Figuring that turnabout is fair play, Siegel demurred until he had been able to screen the three Dollars pictures. ‘I thought they were great fun,’ he recalled later, ‘magnificently photographed, very well directed and no question that a new star was born – Clint Eastwood.’4 Eastwood told a tamer version of the tale a few years later, saying that Universal suggested Siegel to him along with one or two other names and supported their recommendation by saying, ‘You’re out of European films and, although he isn’t, he’s got sort of a cult following in France; he’s well thought of in those groups.’5 Later still, Clint said he and Siegel started their collaboration by working through ‘a very sort of surly relationship. “I don’t like your suggestion for this.” “I don’t like yours.” Finally we just zeroed in, started agreeing on a few things, and then we became fast friends’.6 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

57

Coogan’s Bluff (1968) Eastwood’s confidence in Siegel was bolstered when Siegel, finding that eight screenplay drafts for Coogan’s Bluff had already been written and rejected by Universal and/ or Malpaso, went to work on a fresh version, helped by Clint and Dean Riesner, a TV writer whose instincts Siegel trusted. ‘When I came into [Clint’s] office,’ Riesner recalled later, ‘they actually had four scripts with pages all over the floor and the two of them, Clint and Don, were saying things like “Here’s a pretty good page,” and “Look at this paragraph.” They were like a couple of kids cutting and pasting paper dolls on the floor.’ They handed Riesner 45 pages – ‘pieces of different scripts stapled together with some handwritten stuff’ – and in two rapid-fire weeks he shaped a finished screenplay around them.7 The result combined the best elements of earlier drafts and put a different spin on them. According to the original concept, as Clint described it, Coogan was a guy who’s always losing his wallet and being taken by all the people in the big city. … Well, I thought that had been done a lot of times in the past, with James Stewart and a lot of guys. I felt, what happens if it doesn’t mean anything that he’s a small-town guy? Maybe he was in the war in Korea, he’s traveled a little bit around the world, and he’s been exposed to other things. … Plus the fact that maybe his kind of prairie cunning might work well for him against a big city background.8 Clint showed a canny sense of character psychology here, and the people who turned the project in this direction, Riesner and Siegel, each went on to work with him in four subsequent movies.9 Since this was Eastwood’s first starring role in a contemporary story, Coogan’s Bluff posed the challenge of rejiggering his image from tough, great-looking guy of the old frontier to tough, great-looking guy of the present-day city, without alienating his fans in the process. Siegel had a clear idea of how this could be done. Coogan, he wrote, ‘is a modern-day primitive. An instinctive hunter, he rarely fails to track down his prey, animal or human … Coogan is also a loner, a trait which often gets him into trouble with his superior.’ And again, ‘In Arizona, when hunting his two-legged prey by means of scent, 10/10 vision – and that includes girls as well as malefactors – Coogan used Western lore and knowledge. But in New York City he can only see across the street, his vision blocked by huge skyscrapers. He is assailed by a thousand scents. He is indeed a fish out of water.’10 In keeping with these notions, Siegel begins Eastwood’s transformation in the film’s opening moments. A pan across a desert landscape reveals a modern-day Indian with a telescopic rifle in his hand and a predatory look in his eye; in the distance a dust trail signals the arrival of Coogan’s speeding jeep. Gone are the Indian’s bow and arrow, vanished are the cowboy’s horse and stirrups. When hero and heavy come face to face the action is as blunt and elemental as in westerns of yore, but the setting and details present just enough difference-within-similarity to smooth the transition of 58

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Eastwood’s persona from the old milieus his fans valued to new milieus they could, and would, equally enjoy. Clint did his own stunts, as he had for Hang ‘Em High – he insisted on this, in fact, even when a high-speed motorcycle chase on slippery, frost-covered surfaces put his personal safety, and the film’s timely completion, at obvious risk. Siegel shrugs this off in his autobiography. ‘Luckily, Clint was an expert motorcyclist,’ he writes, adding that between Eastwood, supporting actor Don Stroud, camera operator Bruce Surtees, and two stunt drivers wearing camera helmets, there were ‘plenty of hairy skids and scary falls, but no blood.’11 The actual situation may have been more complicated, however. Stroud, who had never ridden a motorcycle, readily agreed to being doubled by a stunt driver. Eastwood did not, and when Siegel refused to let him participate in the more difficult shots, the star temporarily left the location in protest. It is ironic that after so much trouble and contention, the motorcycle chase is far from universally admired; to the eyes of Daniel O’Brien, who gives a convincing account of the stunt-double brouhaha, ‘it goes on too long and makes use of some speeded up footage that fails to convince’.12 This was not the only element of Coogan’s Bluff that bothered some critics. No less an Eastwood supporter than Richard Schickel argues in his biography that the script, Siegel, and perhaps Clint himself pushed the protagonist in directions that were ‘too improbably (and too unpleasantly) macho’. Plenty of evidence supports this contention. Coogan has a daytime quickie with a married woman while the Indian fugitive he has captured sits handcuffed in the jeep outside; Coogan beats up a woman for information and then cruelly rapes her. And consider some of the dialogue, such as this exchange between Coogan and Julie, a parole officer who has (immediately) fallen for his manly charms and tries to settle the cheque when they have dinner together: Coogan: You’re a girl, aren’t you? Julie: There are rumors to that effect. Coogan: Then sit back and act like one. Schickel accurately skewers the film’s caricature of hippies as well, saying that their scenes verge on silliness in retrospect and seemed clueless even in 1968, obviously fashioned by ‘Hollywood guys trying to be hip and knowing and not quite making it’. Although he admires other aspects of Coogan’s Bluff and likes the title character, who sometimes manifests ‘a sort of shy courtliness … that puts one a little in mind of Gary Cooper when he played a rube at large in the city’, the bottom-line assessment by Clint’s highly sympathetic biographer is harsh: the film ‘remains what it apparently was from its first-draft script, a muddled and tone-deaf movie, never finding its true pitch, constantly wandering – lurching, actually – from key to key’.13 Coogan’s Bluff was a critical and commercial success anyway, and as O’Brien points out, it initiated Eastwood’s relationships with production personnel who became recurring figures in his career.14 Camera operator Bruce Surtees, son of the great cinematographer Robert Surtees, worked the camera again (uncredited) on the next Eastwood/ Siegel collaboration, Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and then graduated to cinemac h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

59

tographer for many a Malpaso film, from Play Misty for Me and The Beguiled (1971) through Escape from Alcatraz and Firefox to Ratboy and The Stars Fell on Henrietta (1995). Lalo Schifrin, already an important Hollywood composer, went on to score seven more Eastwood movies, starting with Kelly’s Heroes (1970) and ending with The Dead Pool. Alexander Golitzen had been an art director for Rawhide and a number of Clint’s apprentice movies in the 1950s, and after Coogan’s Bluff he held the same position on four other Malpaso pictures, from The Beguiled to Breezy. And stunt double Buddy Van Horn, who took Clint’s place in the opening scene of Coogan’s Bluff, has served Malpaso as credited or uncredited stunt double (often, from Paint Your Wagon (1969) to The Stars Fell on Henrietta), stunt coordinator (many times, from Two Mules for Sister Sara to J. Edgar), second-unit director (Magnum Force, The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power), actor (The Beguiled, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider), and technical consultant (Unforgiven), in addition to directing three Eastwood features (Any Which Way You Can (1980), The Dead Pool, and Pink Cadillac (1989)) in his own right, or as close to ‘in his own right’ as one could be with Clint on the set. Add in the inauguration of Eastwood’s partnership with Siegel and it is clear that Coogan’s Bluff was a key production in the star’s burgeoning career. Where Eagles Dare (1968) They look like Nazis but … The Major is British … The Lieutenant is American … The Beautiful Fräuleins are Allied Agents! Slogan for Where Eagles Dare It’s certainly unusual wearing war uniforms as opposed to ponchos. … If you thought that I shot a lot of people with a six-shooter, you should see how we can do with a machine gun. Clint Eastwood15 Eastwood’s third picture of 1968, the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare, was penned by adventure specialist Alistair MacLean, whose novels had been adapted into such expansively produced films as The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Ice Station Zebra (1968). This was his first original screenplay, initially written as a short story (‘Eagle Castle’, aka ‘Adler Schloss’) and then dashed off as a script in a mere six weeks.16 Richard Burton had originated the project, suggesting to agent-turnedproducer Elliott Kastner that they team up for a straightforward action yarn. And war movies – especially World War II movies – were very much in fashion: American entries over the past few years had included The Guns of Navarone, The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962), Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes, John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), and while the war wagon appeared to be losing some of its momentum, a stylish production with a bigname cast seemed a reasonably safe bet for Winkast Film Productions, the British company that Kastner and producer Jerry Gershwin had founded at Pinewood Studios a couple of years earlier. It was also a good bet for Burton, whose vaunted 60

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

reputation was on the wane after the 1967 triple whammy of Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew, his own Doctor Faustus (co-directed with Nevill Coghill), and Peter Glenville’s The Comedians, plus the imminent disaster of Joseph Losey’s Boom! (1968), all co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, his wife and frequent acting partner at the time. Where Eagles Dare centres on a small group of Allied combatants dispatched by British Intelligence to rescue an imprisoned American general from a formidable fortress deep within Nazi territory. Led by English officer John Smith (Burton), the squad consists of five British soldiers, American lieutenant Morris Schaffer (Eastwood), and two female agents, one of whom has already infiltrated the community nearby. When two of the men are killed at the start of the mission, Smith and Schaffer turn their suspicions on the other three; but the show must go on, so they proceed with their plan to penetrate the stronghold, which is called the Castle of the Eagles because of its vertiginous height and impregnable fortifications. After they have wormed their way inside, the movie’s physical derring-do is replaced by a string of psychological twists, some of them as startling and unpredictable as the bewildering layout of the castle itself. Numerous betrayals, chases, fights and skin-of-teeth escapes later, the story arrives at a sort-of-happy-ending aboard the military plane carrying the survivors away. Setting up the picture at Winkast as a United States/United Kingdom co-production, Kastner and Gershwin quickly signed Burton for a fee in the million-dollar range. To direct it they hired Brian G. Hutton, a former actor with only three directorial credits (a romance, a comedy and a thriller) and none on remotely so large a scale. To play the American character, a must for US marketing, Burton wanted Richard Egan, who had turned to TV acting in the early 1960s when it looked like his featurefilm career would never quite pan out. Hutton wanted Eastwood, though, and MGM readily agreed, persuading Clint to accept second billing by offering him $800,000, just shy of Burton’s salary.17 Burton had never heard of Eastwood but went along with the decision, and also with the selection of Mary Ure instead of his own candidate, Leslie Caron, as the female commando.18 For the primary location the producers hit upon Burg Hohenwerfen, a castle in the Salzach Valley near Salzburg, Austria, perched on a 155-metre rock between the Tennengebirge and Hagengebirge ranges. Originally constructed in 1075–1078, the edifice has been extended and renovated several times since, serving as everything from a royal retreat and a maximum-security prison (in medieval times) to a police training camp (when the film was shot) and a tourist attraction (today). Shooting at Burg Hohenwerfen posed daunting logistical problems, since equipment and living necessities for more than three hundred people had to be transported on a long, winding road too narrow for two-way traffic. In the environment: blizzards raged, snowdrifts reached four feet, temperatures plunged below zero and possible avalanches loomed.19 In the production: Burton drank, Ure was nearly blind without her glasses, supporting player Derren Nesbitt suffered a serious eye injury from a faulty blood-squib detonation and Clint was forbidden to do his own stunts.20 Fortunately for everyone’s peace of mind, better conditions prevailed in other parts of German-speaking Europe where material was filmed, including c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

61

the adventurous cable-car scenes, which used the Feuerkogel-Drahtseilbahn line in Ebensee, Upper Austria;21 and interiors were all shot at the MGM British Studios in Borehamwood, England. The results of these labors, recorded in Panavision splendor by cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson, are colorfully described by critic Howard Hughes, who – calculating that Clint kills more people here than in all his Leone films combined – likens the picture’s snow-draped violence to ‘an apocalyptic war movie unfolding on a Christmas card’.22 This is true mostly of the last portion, however, when the film’s better elements are elbowed off the screen by a superfluity of chases, explosions and characters hanging off cable cars at dismayingly high altitudes. Before this decline into unadulterated cliché, Where Eagles Dare is a reasonably dignified example of the 1960s war movie, serving up interesting dialogue, a great deal of crafty scheming and much atmospheric skulking in darkly exotic locales. Eastwood has considerably less screen time than Burton, and far fewer lines to say, but he carries his limited part with ease and assurance, projecting steely stoicism with just enough real-human-guy touches to make him likable rather than purely distant. Hutton apparently meant the picture as a spoof of action movies, but audiences were happy to enjoy it as the genuine article, making it the year’s top-grossing MGM release. Paint Your Wagon (1969) Ben and Pardner shared everything – even their wife! Paramount tagline for Paint Your Wagon I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. All these extras, all these unions to contend with. You’re afraid to give anybody an extra line to say or the budget will go up another $10,000. You have to organize all these horses, all these cows, all these people. … I’m living each day to the next. I can’t wait to get back to civilization. Joshua Logan, directing Paint Your Wagon23 Almost fifteen years after marrying Clint in 1953, Maggie Eastwood gave birth to their first child, Kyle Eastwood, a few days before Where Eagles Dare wrapped up production in May 1968. It was not Clint’s first child; his longtime relationship with dancer, stuntwoman and occasional actress Roxanne Tunis, which started around 1960 and lasted until 1975, had produced daughter Kimber Tunis in 1964. But baby Kyle was the first Eastwood offspring to be publicly acknowledged, and the blissfully ignorant press responded with enthusiasm, gushing over Clint’s portrayal of proud papa, everyday family man and spectacular yet somehow reluctant celebrity. Moving in another new direction, Clint signed up for his first musical – a musical western, to be sure, but different enough from his usual assignments to pose a fresh kind of challenge and extend his talents into novel terrain. Little did he know how painful the experience would be. Paramount thought it had a winner when it bought the rights to Paint Your Wagon, a Broadway show that ran for 289 performances in the 62

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

1951–1952 season, and Malpaso thought the same when it arranged to co-produce the movie version. The stage musical had numerous assets to exploit. It was directed by Daniel Mann just before he broke into Hollywood, where he specialised in play adaptations (The Rose Tattoo in 1955, The Teahouse of the August Moon in 1956) and melodramas. The words and music were by the celebrated team of Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had the stellar Broadway hit Brigadoon (1947) and other shows to their credit. And the choreography was by the gifted Agnes de Mille, known for such major Broadway musicals as Brigadoon, Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949). On the liability side, however, the stage production of Paint Your Wagon had done mediocre business by Lerner and Loewe standards. And back in Hollywood, some recent musical extravaganzas – Joshua Logan’s Camelot (1967), Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Dolittle (1967), Robert Wise’s Star! (1968) – had not matched the popularity of slightly earlier entries like George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964), Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins (1964), and Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965), which suggested that the genre was on the wane.24 The situation was not completely dire – George Roy Hill’s Thoroughly Modern Millie was a hit in 1967 and William Wyler’s Funny Girl was a smash in 1968 – but Paramount began to suspect that its potential gold mine might not actually yield much gold. As created by Lerner and Loewe, Paint Your Wagon told of a widower named Ben Rumson and his 16-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who make a strike during the California gold rush in 1853. Finding themselves at the centre of a thriving new boom town, named Rumson after its founder, they have bittersweet encounters with prospectors, romantic possibilities, a polygamous Mormon and a flock of fun-loving Fandango girls. Among the show’s more memorable songs were ‘Wand’rin’ Star’ and ‘I Talk to the Trees’ as well as ‘They Call the Wind Maria’, which became a standard. No sooner did Paramount decide to adapt the musical, however, than anxieties arose. Lerner had found the book (theater parlance for script) of the theatrical show ‘a brute to write’, and some critics had found the story, jammed with characters and incidents, hard to follow (throughout the show’s run, Lerner said later, he ‘never stopped tinkering’ with the script).25 In addition to the challenge of making the film version flow more easily and seamlessly, the studio also started foreseeing the difficulties of producing a traditional screen spectacle at a time when audience tastes were shifting, rapidly and often bewilderingly; this was the time when edgy, new-fangled pictures like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (both 1967) were opening a fresh and adventurous youth market that showed every sign of becoming the dominant audience for the foreseeable future. Could the Fandango girls and ‘I Talk to the Trees’ lure young moviegoers away from the likes of The Dirty Dozen and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)? Paramount addressed its concerns to Lerner, who was producing the picture. This was his first (and last) venture as a movie producer, but he had considerable experience with movie musicals, having penned the screenplays for Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), among others. Evidently uncertain that he could give Paramount what it wanted, assuming he could figure out what Paramount wanted, Lerner called in Paddy Chayefsky to transform the story and script c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

63

into the makings of a timely, with-it entertainment. Chayefsky was a pioneering writer for live television starting in the late 1940s, and with crisply naturalistic movies like Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955, based on Chayefsky’s 1953 television drama) and John Cromwell’s The Goddess (1958) he made a strong impact on Hollywood screenwriting as well. (He remains the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for best screenplay.) If anyone could revitalise a sagging script, he could. Paramount was less confident about director Joshua Logan, whom Lerner hired over the studio’s objections; although Logan had turned such theatre works as Picnic (1955; original play, 1953), Bus Stop (1956; original play, 1955), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical South Pacific (1958; original play, 1949) into successful movies, he was unable to shake a stagy visual style that kept promising properties like Picnic and Camelot from realising their full potential on the screen (Time magazine: ‘Logan [is] a successful stage director whose ponderous film adaptations … follow him like a string of mules’).26 By this time the die was cast, however, so Paramount handed Lerner a $10 million budget and crossed its collective fingers. Chayefsky liked musicals, but when Lerner approached him he said that his Bronx-bred sensibility did not relate well to westerns. Lerner replied that he should not consider Paint Your Wagon a generic tale of Old West pioneers but rather a fable of ‘wonderful courageous men who set out, as we all do in life, in search of the American dream, and somehow get lost along the way’. This allayed Chayefsky’s nervousness, and in any case, he needed the work and the money. He was in something of a slump, battling writer’s block, and he welcomed a project that would not engage his emotions. Better still, the salary Lerner offered was generous ($150,000 plus a percentage of the profits) and the perks were terrific, including a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, an office and secretary on the Paramount lot, and use of the studio’s private jet for research and visits to the shooting locations. So he accepted the deal, read numerous books about the gold-rush era, and set to work.27 Agreeing with Lerner that drastic alterations were needed, Chayefsky scuttled the musical’s script, excised some of the songs – Lerner wrote replacements with André Previn – and crafted a whole new scenario. Of the innumerable ways in which the movie departs from the letter and spirit of the stage show, the most conspicuous is its introduction of a ménage à trois consisting of Rumson, the grizzled prospector; Pardner, his partner, a man with no name in a town with no name; and Elizabeth, who is Ben’s wife and Pardner’s lover simultaneously.28 ‘California, being too young and innocent to have ever heard of polygamy, certainly had no laws against it,’ Chayefsky said, perhaps assuming too much about the Golden State’s erstwhile naïveté. Equally novel is the finale he dreamed up, wherein a quixotic get-rich scheme leads Rumson and company to dig tunnels beneath No Name City, which then collapses into the void beneath, taking the movie with it. Logan pronounced the new script ‘a preposterous story. Lusty. A mixture of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Paddy Chayefsky. It wasn’t anything like the original stage show, except for its background.’ Lerner found Chayefsky’s work considerably less stimulating. Summoning the writer to his office, he complained that there was too little ‘musical structure’, by which he meant that the script did not properly cue up the all-important songs he 64

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

had composed.29 Chayefsky replied – remarkably, since he knew he was addressing the tunesmith himself – that the songs weren’t much good, and besides, the stars Lerner had hired ‘couldn’t sing for shit’. Not surprisingly, Lerner fired him and re-wrote the script again; the completed film gives Lerner credit for the screenplay, Chayefsky only for the adaptation. (Chayefsky wanted his name completely off the picture, but without the adaptation credit he would have forfeited his share of any profits that accrued.) When the movie opened, Chayefsky declared that it was bad, boring and barely connected with the script he had submitted, apart from a couple of his ideas altered almost beyond recognition. Such were the difficulties of turning an old-fashioned stage musical into timely, with-it entertainment in the latter half of the swinging ’60s. The casting was neither smooth in its progress nor felicitous in its outcome. Lerner hoped that Mickey Rooney or James Cagney would play Rumson, but both of them declined. It is not clear that either of them would have made a more persuasive prospector than Lerner’s final choice, Lee Marvin, given the limitations of the screenplay and the cascade of production problems that plagued the picture; but surely some available actor could have made the character a more enticing figure than Marvin manages to be, especially for the million-dollar salary (plus a share of any profits) paid to the star. No profits materialised, but one assumes that the million-dollar fee comforted Marvin for having turned down The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), which tried to enlist to him at the same time. In theory, Marvin was a good prospect for the part. He had the rough-and-ready look of a seasoned westerner, and his portrayal of Kid Shelleen in Elliot Silverstein’s western comedy Cat Ballou (1965) had earned him an Academy Award for best actor plus additional prizes from the British Film Academy, the National Board of Review, the Golden Globes and the Berlin film festival. In practice, however, he was unable to brighten the lacklustre dialogue or rise above the drab quality of Logan’s directing, or should one say staging, of the action. The movie’s third-billed star, Jean Seberg, reportedly likened his singing voice to ‘rain gurgling down a rusty pipe’, although his rendition of ‘Wand’rin’ Star,’ arranged by the great Nelson Riddle and accompanied by the movie’s male chorus, somehow became a number-one single on the UK pop charts.30 Worst of all, Marvin was drunk much of the time, and his well-meaning girlfriend could not police his intake at every hour of every day, although she tried. For a while Marvin rebelled against Logan, supporting Lerner’s effort to replace him with Richard Brooks, who had directed Marvin in the 1966 western The Professionals. Brooks said no to the opportunity, urging Marvin to cooperate with Logan despite his misgivings about Logan’s lack of filmmaking savvy. Cooperating was something Marvin, distracted by his ongoing quest for the next drink, could not or would not do; instead he became ‘something like a scary ghost haunting the production’s by-ways’, in Schickel’s words, ‘spreading chaos whenever he appeared’. Schickel gives the best analysis of why Marvin’s performance did not appeal to audiences when the picture opened: ‘He was properly grizzled and disheveled looking, this hard-used man, but called upon to play a dirty old man, he stubbornly, charmlessly remained … a dirty old man. When rolling his eyes and broadly commenting on his own raffishness, his performance is clumsy, unfunny, distancing. He is, finally, the opposite of a star; c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

65

he is a black hole, swallowing this little universe.’31 As does the earth in the movie’s miscalculated ending. Seberg was not a first choice either. Lerner initially tried for Julie Andrews, whose 1965 megahit The Sound of Music was fresh in memory. Andrews’s soon-to-be husband, Blake Edwards, had come close to replacing Logan as director of Paint Your Wagon during pre-production, but creative differences led Lerner to stay with Logan, whereupon Edwards moved on to his World War I espionage musical Darling Lili (1970) and Andrews went with him, playing the title role.32 Diana Rigg, best known in the mid-1960s for the internationally popular TV show The Avengers, failed to pan out as well. It is not entirely clear why Lerner turned to Seberg, but she had good reason to accept the invitation. She had recovered by then from her famously ill-received debut in the 1957 hagiopic Saint Joan, for which Otto Preminger had selected her by way of a highly publicised national talent search; still, she had been unable to sustain a major career despite her strong creative work in Preminger’s tragic romance Bonjour tristesse (1958), Jean-Luc Godard’s legendary Breathless (1960), and Robert Rossen’s remarkable Lilith (1964), to name her most memorable pictures. The third-billed role in a large-scale studio production offered Seberg the possibility of reviving her reputation in Hollywood, and it certainly promised a refreshing break from the French pictures that had dominated her résumé since Breathless. She was not by any stretch a singer, and unlike Marvin and Eastwood she readily agreed to having her voice post-dubbed (by Anita Gordon, an occasional actress) for the finished film. Clint had one of his many on-location affairs with Seberg, but as Schickel observes, what comes through in their performances is not so much mutual affection as a shared remoteness from the production that was spinning out of control all around them.33 In any case, Paint Your Wagon did little for Seberg’s career. After it she appeared in a string of minor pictures, mostly European, and in 1979 she died from an overdose of barbiturates, aged 41. (Some believe she was driven to suicide by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover, owing to her support for the Black Panther Party and other organisations of the radical American left.) Eastwood had multiple motivations for climbing onto the Paint Your Wagon bandwagon, a decision he regretted almost immediately. For one, the money ($750,000 according to Schickel and Hughes; $500,000 plus extras according to McGilligan and Eliot) was excellent. For another, he was able to involve Malpaso on the business end of the production, which looked reasonably solid on paper. For a third, he liked Logan’s directing style, which he felt was actor-oriented, as opposed to the by-thenumbers methodology Hutton had employed on Where Eagles Dare. And of course Clint loved music. Here was a movie that would showcase whatever singing talent he could muster, with new tunes composed by Previn in the jazzy, easygoing manner that Clint favored. Eastwood had already cut a handful of records, as noted earlier, joining a trend that began in 1961 when television actor Edd Byrnes, who played the part-time private eye Kookie on the ABC series 77 Sunset Strip, recorded ‘Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb’, a novelty duet that alternates his off-key singing with Connie Stevens’s more mellifluous voice. When the single became a hit, reaching number four on the Billboard chart, the record industry made it ‘sort of fash66

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

ionable’, in Clint’s words, ‘to take anybody who had a little warmth going, who made it in a TV series or something’, and cut a tune or two as fodder for the burgeoning teen market. Clint recorded three singles over a couple of years – the first was ‘Unknown Girl (of My Dreams)’ with the standard ‘For All We Know’ on the B-side – and also the LP titled Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Songs.34 None of them had made a ripple, but years later Clint still harbored an aspiring singer within, and Paint Your Wagon would give it a little air and exercise. ‘I’m not exactly Howard Keel,’ he said, ‘but I think it’ll work.’35 One more reason for Eastwood’s interest in Paint Your Wagon was his fondness for the script – the original script, before Chayefsky and Lerner got their hands on it. ‘Not an up story at all, kind of a moody piece, very dark,’ he commented. ‘I’d never seen a musical with this kind of a story line at all,’ he added, impressed that the central character Rumson actually died at the end. Musicals with a downbeat edge were about to become hot commodities on Broadway, as innovators like Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim revised and transcended outworn formulas in such revisionist works as Company (1970), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Sweeney Todd (1979). Those working to revitalise Paint Your Wagon had not received any memos about the impending revolution, however, and the dark, moody script perused by Clint was the early draft that Lerner subsequently scrapped. Reading the new version on location for Where Eagles Dare, he found virtually no resemblance to the script he had liked. ‘It wasn’t a dark story at all,’ he recalled later. ‘It was all fluffy. Fluffy, and running around talking, and they’re having Lee do ‘Cat Ballou II’.’ Alarmed, he called his agent: ‘This has really gone haywire. Just get me out of this. Get me totally, completely out of this.’36 Clint’s contract had an escape clause based on script approval, but despite the desperate tone of his ‘get me out’ plea, he chose not to exercise the option, perhaps because the behemoth had already started lumbering into production and many people’s livelihoods would be jeopardised if he abruptly jumped off. So he accepted his lot, steeled himself to the fluffiness and talkiness, and embarked upon what proved a disagreeable voyage for all concerned. The shooting location, in northeast Oregon, was inhospitable and more than fifty miles from the nearest town. Marvin’s drinking threw things off schedule. Logan’s dithering threw things off schedule. Clint’s wife Maggie showed up with their three-month-old baby, interrupting his romance with Seberg, and Seberg’s husband, novelist Romain Gary, showed up suspicious and angry, interrupting her romance with Clint. The weather gods pummeled the $2.4 million set with mud-making rain and drift-making snow, flummoxing logistics and messing up shot continuity. The budget zoomed toward $20 million, twice the original figure. Chayefsky biographer Shaun Considine gives a colorful description of the ordeal: Perpetual havoc, frequent brawls, inter-star fornication, and the threat of a duel with pistols dominated the landscape behind the camera. In front of it, a cast of two hundred, including imported Chinese extras, per diem Indians, wandering hippies, plus numerous horses, mules, oxen, sheep, mongrel dogs, chickens, ducks, a bull, and a grizzly bear ran amok, oblivious to Logan’s direction.37 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

67

All that was missing, one can safely say, were the locusts. Notwithstanding its many problems before and during production, Paint Your Wagon was more successful – more precisely, less unsuccessful – than one might have expected. It earned back three-quarters of its $20 million budget in domestic rentals, and overseas sales and TV licensing probably made up the rest.38 Critical responses were decidedly mixed. Roger Ebert, a generous critic who enjoyed dispensing praise, was unable to do so on this occasion. The film ‘doesn’t inspire a review’, he wrote. ‘It doesn’t even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind – a big, heavy lump.’ Rex Reed, a less forgiving critic, called it ‘a monument to unparalleled incompetence’ in his Holiday review. Eastwood was ‘destroying his taciturn reputation by speaking often and badly’, Newsweek opined, ‘as if the script girl had neglected to give him each succeeding line’. The powerful New York Times critic Vincent Canby was not exactly wowed by the picture, writing that in structure and style it ‘looks like something Logan might be trying out in New Haven – twenty years ago’. He deemed the screenplay ‘so casual that it stops being a story after intermission’, and wrote that Clint ‘sort of croons his [songs] in an early Frankie Avalon mode’. In all, however, Canby deemed it a likable movie that could ‘be enjoyed more often than simply tolerated’, and he observed that although the top-billed players are ‘nonsingers’, they are ‘real stars, which … is more important’. Most of the time, Canby concluded, ‘Paint Your Wagon is very easy to take, as amiable as Marvin, Eastwood, and Miss Seberg, whose contemporary movie presences give an old property brand-new cool’.39 I think Canby is too lenient about the movie’s flaws, but his open-minded attitude toward its peculiarities is refreshing. Its myriad flaws notwithstanding, my own critical opinion of Paint Your Wagon inclines away from the judgments of its severest detractors. A movie including ‘They Call the Wind Maria’ can’t be all bad, even if the gang singing it is called the Rotten Luck Willie Chorus. Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) A hard drinking gun with a cigar smoking nun. Marketing slogan, Two Mules for Sister Sara Eastwood’s next picture was a richer and more appealing project, and better suited to his talents. His involvement started when he and Richard Burton were in Austria making Where Eagles Dare, and Elizabeth Taylor flew in to visit her husband. She and Clint had not met before, and they got to thinking it would be interesting to make a film together. Taylor even suggested a promising vehicle for such a venture – a screenplay called Two Mules for Sister Sara, which Universal had recently sent her to look over. It was based on an original story by Budd Boetticher, who is best known today for the seven minimalist westerns he made with Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960, and it was written by Albert Maltz, a member of the Hollywood Ten during the blacklist era. A gifted and versatile writer, Maltz had scripted movies as different as the World War II drama Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943), the progressive western 68

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Broken Arrow (Daves, 1950) and Henry Koster’s biblical epic The Robe, which introduced the CinemaScope process in 1953. Martin Rackin, a writer and producer who had left his job as head of production at Paramount to start Mart Rackin Productions in 1964, was preparing to film Two Mules for Sister Sara at Universal, and Clint showed the script to Don Siegel with this in mind. ‘I told Clint that I thought the story was great fun,’ Siegel recalled in his autobiography, perfect for Clint and Liz. It takes place in Mexico. Clint rescues a woman from being raped by three bad hombres by killing all three. He discovers, when she puts her clothes back on, that she is a nun. Reluctantly, he takes Sister Sara with him and they run into adventure after adventure. … Both the stars fitted the parts they were to play: Clint the Western adventurer, Liz the dark-haired, dark-skinned Mexican nun.40 The kicker, revealed late in the movie, is that Sara is not now and never has been a nun. She is quite the opposite, in fact, and it is likely that most audience members figure this out – her swearing, whisky and cigars provide unsubtle clues – long before Hogan, her protector, does. Sara is also complicit with revolutionary Juaristas in the territory, and since Hogan himself is reconnoitering the area for a coming attack on the revolutionaries’ French enemies, dodging French forces is a necessity they share. Eastwood happily informed Universal that he, Taylor and Siegel were eager to proceed with the picture. Rackin and the studio started negotiating. And then a major obstacle appeared. Burton was scheduled to shoot a movie in Spain, and Taylor now insisted that Two Mules for Sister Sara be filmed there as well. ‘Her reason was unshakeable,’ Siegel writes. ‘She wanted, at all times, to be near her husband, whom she loved dearly.’ One suspects she wanted to express that love by steering him away from alcohol; in any case, Universal vetoed Taylor’s request, she dropped out of the picture, and the studio assigned Shirley MacLaine to replace her. MacLaine had earned Academy Award nominations for Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958), and for Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Irma la Douce (1963). Less felicitously, she had just finished playing the title taxi dancer in Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, the 1969 movie version of his hugely successful Broadway musical based on Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957); although Universal did not know it yet, Fosse’s film-directing debut was fated to earn back only twenty percent of its $4 million budget. Be this as it may, Siegel considered her ‘a fine actress with a great sense of humour’. Yet he had a misgiving: ‘her skin was fair, her face – the map of Ireland. She most likely would look ridiculous if she played a Mexican nun.’ Evidently distrustful of its makeup department, Universal revised the screenplay to suit her appearance. Further revisions were made to accommodate the locations Siegel scouted out in Mexico, where the picture was shot.41 Once again, production problems plagued an Eastwood picture as soon as shooting got under way. Some stemmed from Rackin’s cost-cutting, others from MacLaine’s restiveness, aggravated by the hot Mexican weather. In addition to frequent flashes of ill temper, MacLaine got sick enough from local bacteria to put the movie on hold c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

69

for a week. Clint’s conservatism comported poorly with her liberal-Democrat politics, as did his macho habit of playing cowboy (so she claimed) whether the cameras were present or not. When she proved unable to master the art of mule riding, Clint and Siegel had to rescue her by dreaming up a minor plot twist that would switch her to a burro for subsequent scenes, the title of the picture be damned. On the bright side, for Clint and Siegel at least, MacLaine sided with them against Rackin in various squabbles that arose during the 65-day shoot. Two Mules for Sister Sara allowed Eastwood to build on his western-hero image in a story that combines moderately offbeat elements, including irreverent religious humor and a female character who is every bit as important as her male counterpart, with a full inventory of traditional ingredients. It also provided the opportunity to darken his character’s personality without sacrificing his heroic role. Tracing this aspect of the film to Boetticher’s sensibility, Jim Kitses likens Hogan’s integrity, equilibrium, and intimate familiarity with his environment to the selfsame qualities of Boetticher protagonists in such films as Ride Lonesome (1959) and Comanche Station (1960). In his original scenario for Two Mules for Sister Sara, Boetticher describes the first view of Hogan as he rides across the desert shortly before twilight: It is impossible to determine his age. He could be thirty, or maybe even forty, but we’ll never be sure because the wrinkles around his eyes and at the corner of his tight lips could have come into being from the desert sun. He wears his sweat-stained hat low down over his eyes to shade them from the fading light, but there is a sparkle of all-consuming awareness in those eyes that makes you feel certain that not even a lizard more’n half a mile away could skitter across the sand without his knowing which way it was headed. Unpleasantly there is an aura of meanness about the man. Watching him you smell the sticky odour of hate that seemingly envelopes everything around him except his horse. But in spite of the meanness that you feel, or the suspicion that his deep-rooted loathing includes even the sand and the rocks, you are suddenly overwhelmingly aware that the man is all-over, downright beautiful. Even the slight movement of his body as he swings his head and shoulders around to check his pack-pony is cat-like and deadly…42 The prose is purplish, but Boetticher makes it clear that this character is self-sufficient when alone, endangered yet courageous when dealing with others. We can say of this Eastwood hero what Kitses says of the hero played by Scott in Boetticher’s own films – that at times he is ‘the very butt of the world, tossed about like a leaf, tragicomically at the mercy of life,’ while at others he is ‘the world itself, as relentless as the landscape, as regular and predictable as the seasons’.43 The special twist of Two Mules for Sister Sara is the pleasure of watching Shirley MacLaine toss the hero around like a leaf, hoodwinking and exploiting him in ways that ultimately benefit them both. I see reflections of Howard Hawks’s worldview here. While the male working group of many Hawks films is absent, the intrusion of the feminine into a male-dominated world, bringing comedy and chaos at first, then the 70

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

prospect of reconciliation and growth, carries the life-affirming buoyancy of Hawks’s lighter films. This shines most radiantly in the film’s brief coda, when Sara has assumed her true identity, tamed her man, and decked herself out with a sartorial exuberance worthy of the eternal feminine – Hollywood style, of course. I must add that not everyone reads the conclusion the way I do. Paul Smith has a very different analysis, for instance, and I think his argument is wrong-headed enough to merit a rejoinder. Smith observes that the gradual unveiling of Sara as a Juarista ally corresponds with the film’s step-by-step revelation of her as a prostitute. He then asserts that ‘it is difficult to not read [sic] this parallelism as a measure of the movie’s political intendment – she becomes a political whore’. Instead of backing up this strained reasoning, Smith references the film’s finale as evidence: ‘This negative intendment is perhaps confirmed [a conspicuously hedged formulation] by the picture’s short final sequence,’ where Sara is ‘now proposed as an entirely ambiguous figure: she is dressed as a “lady” in a bright scarlet dress. This further transformation to “lady” is not a comfortable one – her clothes are coded as those of a pretentious whore.’ Hogan reacts to this new situation with an ‘impatience and disdain’ that ‘leave little doubt about the gender positions that are being proposed here: that the woman’s whorish nature peeps through whatever masquerade, and that it is this which defines her beyond any of the elements of their adventure together’.44 From here it is a small step to Smith’s conclusion that the entire film constitutes a ‘misogynist gesture’. It appears to me that Smith’s interpretation stems more from his own prejudices and preconceptions than from some mean-spirited ‘intendment’ on the filmmakers’ part. As the film was being edited, Universal announced that Two Mules for Sister Sara would be the first movie in a recently established arrangement whereby Universal and Sanen Productions of Mexico would co-produce at least one major picture a year over five years, in Mexico, with Universal distributing the films internationally and Sanen serving as ‘consulting experts in the selection of Mexican national actors, craftsmen and production personnel’.45 Siegel does not mention this in his autobiography, but he does mention the many disagreements he had with Racklin over this picture, starting with arguments over whether the production should make use of Mexican or American character actors and horses. The producer won most of these quarrels, and while Siegel attributes Racklin’s stubbornness to a proclivity for saving money in the wrong places, it is likely that the impending deal with Sanen also played a part in his decisions. Rackin did the final editing of the film, but Siegel said that his shooting style made this a limited victory for the producer, explaining that ‘if you cut the picture in the camera, shoot the minimum and get to do the first cut as Alfred Hitchcock or I do, then there isn’t that much leeway in editing, unless the producer orders more film shot’.46 The latter option did not appeal to Rackin, given his concern for costs, so this can safely be considered a Siegel film, or rather a Siegel/Eastwood film. Two Mules for Sister Sara premiered in West Germany on 12 February 1970 and opened on American screens four months later, earning solid profits and garnering many good reviews. Roger Greenspun, the second-string film critic of the New York Times and a committed auteurist, hypothesised that the development of major themes and minor preoccupations derived from Siegel while its ‘narrative shapeliness’ was c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

71

more a Boetticher contribution. Greenspun found that the film ‘stays and grows in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do’, and he lauded Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography, declaring that nothing in Figueroa’s films with the towering Spanish director Luis Buñuel surpasses the best passages here. (Interestingly, this was only the second picture Figueroa had shot in color.) Archer Winston, the cine-literate New York Post critic, wrote that Eastwood is ‘letter-perfect in his familiar role’, while the movie as a whole is ‘too familiar to be praised highly, but too professionally competent … to he damned out of hand’. Variety disagreed about the acting: ‘Eastwood simply does not act (in this film, anyway) … Miss MacLaine and Mr. Eastwood don’t generate any chemistry together and Siegel does little or nothing to fill the vacuum.’47 Discussing the film as a semi-anachronistic product of the late 1960s, cultural historian Richard Slotkin notes that Hollywood did not seek to imitate Two Mules for Sister Sara despite its box-office success – a sign that public rejection of the western genre, and of the ideologies it customarily represented, was in high gear and would be difficult or impossible to stop, going beyond ‘antipathy for a particular ideology to a rejection of the very idea that the Frontier could provide the basis of a national public myth’.48 Clint did not see things this way, however. After revisiting World War II in his next picture, the combat comedy Kelly’s Heroes, he would return to westerns no fewer than three times in three consecutive years. Kelly’s Heroes (1970) When it was finished, the picture had lost its soul. Clint Eastwood on Kelly’s Heroes49 Eastwood may have disliked Brian G. Hutton’s mechanical handling of Where Eagles Dare, but this did not stop him from signing up for Hutton’s next movie, Kelly’s Heroes, another tale of intrigue and skulduggery with World War II raging all around. (The project was first offered to Don Siegel, at Clint’s suggestion, but he was still doing postproduction work on Two Mules for Sister Sara.) This time the action had a humorous ring, and before the production became too ambitious for its own good it appears to have been intended as a rambunctious dark comedy with a message about the grim absurdity of war. The screenplay was by Troy Kennedy-Martin, whose only non-TV writing credit at that point was Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job (1969), a clever British caper comedy about a crook who assembles a crew to steal $4 million in gold from an armored car in Turin, Italy, diverting attention from the heist by setting up the mother of all traffic jams. Kelly’s Heroes, originally to be called ‘The Warriors’ or ‘Kelly’s Warriors’, has a similar slant. The rascally protagonist is an American private (busted down from lieutenant) who plies a captured German colonel with booze, learns about a bank vault holding $16 million in gold, and recruits a motley gang of misfits to sneak behind enemy lines and grab the treasure for themselves. While the cast of Where Eagles Dare has a European flavor, Kelly’s Heroes surrounds Eastwood with a crowd of familiar Hollywood faces, including Telly Savalas and 72

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Donald Sutherland, who had earned their military stripes in The Dirty Dozen; character actor Carroll O’Connor, soon to be a star in the hit television series All in the Family; and Don Rickles, an abrasive comedian playing one of his occasional semidramatic roles. Eastwood headed for Yugoslavia, where filming took place, as soon as he could get away from Two Mules for Sister Sara in Mexico, where shooting had not gone altogether smoothly, as we have seen. If he hoped for an easier experience in this vastly larger production, he was disappointed. Bad weather, mishaps with pyrotechnics, and the film’s enormous number of extras made for complicated logistics, and to Clint’s particular irritation the shoot went on and on and on. Eventually he and a few others would refuse Hutton’s request for additional work after the exposed film was shipped to the studio. The footage was gone, and so were they. Eastwood’s character in Kelly’s Heroes is one of the less colorful personalities on display – the more amusing shticks are given to prankster types like Big Joe (Savalas), second in command of the burglary squad; Oddball (Sutherland), a spaced-out hippie; Colt (O’Connor), an egomaniacal officer; and Crapgame (Rickles), a supply sergeant clearly modeled on Sgt. Ernie Bilko of The Phil Silvers Show, a TV hit of the 1950s. What attracted Clint to the picture was less the role he would be playing than his appreciation for its implicit commentary on outrageous excesses of the Vietnam War, which he (and Americans by the millions) had come to oppose. Kelly crystallises this aspect of the film when he waxes personal about his past: as a hot-blooded young officer he inadvertently killed half a company of US troops because of faulty orders from his superiors, and he has been sickened by the war ever since. As shooting trudged along, however, Clint got an uneasy sense that the movie was not coming together the way he had expected. ‘Our styles were inconsistent,’ he complained, speaking of the film’s heterogeneous actors and Hutton’s failure to make a well-functioning ensemble out of them. ‘People off on different trips. No cohesion.’50 He also felt the comedy was losing its anti-war edge as the shooting dragged along and impatience rose among the cast and crew. The worst was still to come. MGM was the funding and distribution company for Kelly’s Heroes, and the studio’s management went through a major upheaval just as the picture was going into active production. As often happens in such transitions, the incoming team was less than enthusiastic about projects initiated by its predecessors. In this case the situation was aggravated by changes affecting Hollywood as a whole, most notably the fascination with modestly budgeted, easily marketed ventures that swept the industry after Dennis Hopper’s scruffy Easy Rider (1969) racked up phenomenal profits. Controlling interest in MGM now belonged to Las Vegas tycoon and corporate raider Kirk Kerkorian, who had no intention of prolonging the practices that led to losses of $35 million in the 1968–69 fiscal year.51 The studio’s chief of production now became James Aubrey, who had been president of CBS from 1959 to 1965, during which time the network (and Rawhide) had largely flourished, in terms of money if not morale. Aubrey was not universally liked; the legendary producer John Houseman once called him ‘the smiling cobra’, and the nickname stuck. He had left CBS under a cloud of alleged misdeeds, and after a few years of independent projects he now promised to bring prudence and commonsense to MGM on Kerkorian’s behalf. No longer would c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

73

the risky likes of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey keep executives up at night with worry. No more would budgets climb to dizzying heights – or to any heights at all, since a ceiling of $1 million was imposed across the board. A dozen pictures were canceled immediately upon Aubrey’s accession; hundreds of employees’ contracts were terminated; props, costumes, equipment, the studio’s film library and much of its real estate were auctioned off or sold outright; archives were removed from storage and destroyed. For films that did make it into production, Aubrey was often a busy micromanager. Which brings us back to Kelly’s Heroes, still known as ‘The Warriors’ when Aubrey decided it needed a special dose of postproduction medicine. Changing its moniker to ‘Kelly’s Warriors’ and then to the title it now bears, he exercised the studio’s right to determine the final cut, ordering Hutton to make a series of revisions and re-edits that appear to have pleased nobody but Aubrey himself. Viewing the amended version, Clint was dismayed by the removal of a scene about two-thirds of the way through, in which Kelly and Big Joe talked and ‘just sort of summed up the philosophy of these loose ends, and what the war had done to them’. But there was nothing that Eastwood or Hutton could do, especially with the release date ‘creeping up on them’, in Hutton’s words. And the release date was yet another thorn in Eastwood’s side, since it called for Kelly’s Heroes to open almost the same day as Two Mules for Sister Sara. ‘Why should I open across the street from myself?’ Clint asked Aubrey in a raging phone call from Louisiana, where he was now on location with Siegel shooting The Beguiled. ‘How much can [the public] tolerate one actor?’ In exchange for a delay he offered to supervise a new cut that everyone would be content with, saying he needed only a single day in the editing room to prove his point.52 Aubrey was unmoved, however, and the picture opened as scheduled on 23 June, one short week after the 16 June debut of Two Mules for Sister Sara. As predicted, Clint was competing with himself – and doing so twice over, since Paint Your Wagon was still in theatres. Never had Eastwood been so ubiquitous, and never did he want to be so again. Kelly’s Heroes would almost certainly have fared better at the box office if the anti-war wit that drew Eastwood to Kennedy-Martin’s original screenplay had not been drained away, first by the protracted shoot and then by Aubrey’s editing. The release cut was more silly than sardonic, leaving the military-satire field to Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 and Robert Altman’s wildly popular MASH, both of which also opened in 1970. Kelly’s Heroes earned only about $600,000 more than Two Mules for Sister Sara, and the war picture had cost a great deal more to make. In a crowning irony, the slow but steady Paint Your Wagon more than doubled the business of both of them, with gross earnings of almost $7 million.53 Reviews of Kelly’s Heroes were also poor, and Clint’s opinion of it is plain from subsequent comments. ‘It was a very fine anti-militaristic script,’ he recalled in 1984, one that said some important things about the war, about this propensity that man has to destroy himself. In the editing, the scenes that put the debate in philosophical terms were cut and they kept adding action scenes. … If action 74

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

and reflection had been better balanced, it would have reached a much broader audience. I don’t know if the studio exercised pressure on the director or if it was the director who lost his vision along the way, but I know that the picture would have been far superior if there hadn’t been this attempt to satisfy action fans at any cost. And it would have been just as spectacular and attractive.54 Roger Greenspun of the New York Times expressed surprisingly similar ideas in his review. When it offers a smorgasbord of demolitions, bomb blasts, advancing tanks and crumbling buildings, he wrote, the movie partakes of good clean scary fun. But when men are killed, and a lot of men are killed, many Germans, a few Americans, the balance alters to the horrors of war. To acknowledge its deaths the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and comradely pieties of most war movies. And since its subject is not war, but burglary masquerading as war, the easy acceptance of the masquerade … becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination. [The film seems] big, expensive, loud and innocuous. I don’t think it is so innocuous.55 By all accounts, the ungainly proportions and lurching progress of Kelly’s Heroes – hot on the heels of similar aggravations with Paint Your Wagon, plus the recent Shirley MacLaine wars – were key factors in Eastwood’s decision to involve himself only with Malpaso productions in the future (his company wasn’t involved in Kelly’s Heroes) and to make efficiency and economy his watchwords as a producer and director. ‘I can’t stand long locations or production schedules,’ he said in a 1973 interview. ‘Once you get moving, I don’t see any reason to drag your feet. During production, I can function more fully and efficiently if I move full blast. Maybe it’s because I’m basically lazy.’56 It’s an interesting equation: full blast + lazy = effective filmmaking. The formula would yield good results for Clint and Malpaso in time to come. The Beguiled (1971) One man … seven women … in a strange house! Universal Pictures slogan for The Beguiled Don Siegel was Eastwood’s role model when it came to efficient, no-nonsense filmmaking, so Clint was surely pleased to have another Siegel film in place after the Kelly’s Heroes ordeal. The project started when producer Jennings Lang sent Thomas Cullinan’s eponymous novel to Clint, who found it intriguing.57 Or sort of intriguing, judging from the peculiar verdict he conveyed to Siegel the following day: ‘I don’t know whether I hate it or like it, or even understand it.’ Siegel was also intrigued, but neither his enthusiasm nor Clint’s resided on the highest possible plane. According to Siegel’s account, their post-reading discussion was an odd mixture of mock PR taglines and fantasies related to the book: c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

75

Siegel [holding the book he’s just finished]: I lived [sic] the Gothic, macabre book of an innocent thirteen-year-old child being kissed by a beguiler; of succulent nymphs caressing each other. I dreamed of a succubus, head of a seminary, who had ‘relations with her younger brother’ and lesbian yearnings for her lovely, innocent assistant, while you kissed both of them… Eastwood [getting into the spirit]: My leg was cut off and I was poisoned by the ‘innocent’ child who prepared, for me only, toadstool soup, which killed me. It’s a frightening book. No wonder I was crazy. Siegel: Clintus, if the Black Tower [Universal office building] bigwigs allow us to make this book into a film, it could be the best picture we’ve ever made … Jennings [Lang] will relish the fact that it will make a dirty flick.58 Whether or not Siegel and Clint hoped for a dirty flick as well, this story of dark obsessions and unnatural acts was certainly an offbeat property by Hollywood standards, even in the Easy Rider-ised moral climate of the early 1970s. I hasten to add that Cullinan’s novel is not nearly as gamey as Siegel’s comment makes it sound. Clocking in at four hundred pages, it unfolds its cautionary tale through the eyes and minds of several first-person narrators, somewhat in the style of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930). By the end, almost every significant character has related parts of the story, and since each contributor is either an inhibited Southern lady or a mannerly Southern girl, the ambience is courtly, the rhetoric is polite and incidents involving sexuality or violence are set forth in the circumlocutory language one would expect from such folks. The tale concludes with a murder, but it is a quiet and inevitable one, described in bittersweet, autumnal terms. In sum, Siegel’s remark about ‘the Gothic, macabre book’ owes as much to his steamy imagination as to what Cullinan actually wrote: no succulent nymphs caress one another; improper relations between the headmistress and her late brother are obliquely suggested, never stated or spelled out; lesbian yearnings are submerged deeply in the subtext, if they are present at all; and there is no threesome with the story’s lone male character or anyone else. In addition to distorting the novel’s contents, Siegel’s words miss its tone by an enormous margin – so enormous that the statement reveals more about the director than about the book in which he so readily saw the makings of a lascivious romp. The movie departs from the novel in some respects, but follows the same outline. The setting is a Louisiana boarding school for young ladies. Eastwood plays the protagonist, Cpl. John McBurney, a Civil War deserter on the lam. Rendered helpless by a broken leg, he is found by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), the youngest student at the school, as he languishes in the woods nearby. Repairing to that institution in search of help, healing, and a place to hide, McBurney becomes something of a highly-sexed mascot for headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) and the youthful scholars in her charge. As time passes he becomes the lover of teacher Edwina Dabney (Elizabeth Hartman), who believes he returns her romantic feelings, and of a teenage student 76

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

named Carol (Jo Ann Harris), who lives in the attic; he also gets into emotionally fraught relations with Hallie, the school’s African-American slave (Mae Mercer) and little Amy, whose discovery of the injured soldier (now pretending to be a Quaker medical officer) set all this in motion. McBurney uncovers a number of secrets along the way, including Martha’s sexual relations with her late brother, a scoundrel who also tried to rape Hallie on at least one occasion. Frustrated, furious and jealous, Martha pushes McBurney down a staircase, critically damaging his game leg; insisting that gangrene will now set in and kill him, she then arranges an improvised amputation of the injured limb. When he regains his senses and realises what has been done to him, McBurney goes after Martha and Hallie in a demented rage, threatening to murder the headmistress and rape the servant. Edwina remains loyal to him, agreeing to flee with him and start a better life elsewhere. But the others at the school are less forgiving. In a scene that outdoes the dowager Livia of ancient Roman times (or the sociopathic Livia of The Sopranos in contemporary times) for sheer ruthlessness, Martha hosts a farewell dinner party featuring a batch of poisonous mushrooms, picked by Amy and served to McBurney by the women of the school, bringing about his prompt and nasty death. The film ends with his burial a short way from the school – far enough to remove the sense of his presence and mollify whatever guilt the women and girls may feel, yet near enough to suggest their inchoate reluctance to entirely disown the riotous desire that he brought into their lives. Turning this macabre narrative into a major-studio production called for much inventiveness. Siegel had not been altogether happy with Albert Maltz’s screenplay for Two Mules for Sister Sara, but since he was generally pleased with the artistic quality of the finished film (and aware that Shirley MacLaine and Martin Rackin had been more responsible than Maltz for that production’s uneasy progress) he called on Maltz to adapt Cullinan’s novel. Maltz was intimidated, however, by the prospect of translating the book’s insalubrious elements – murder, rape, incest, proliferating lusts, sinister secrets and even the slaying of Amy’s pet turtle – into a screenplay that Universal would finance and produce. He saw the picture as a romantic love story, while Siegel saw it as fierce, feverish and bizarre. Trying to turn Maltz around on this issue, Siegel invoked the names of unruly writers – Edgar Allan Poe, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote – whose unbounded imaginations the movie should evoke. Siegel’s autobiography captures the intransigence of their disagreement in another of that book’s dialogues: Maltz [quietly]: I wish I had the talent of [Ambrose] Bierce, Poe, Williams or Capote. Regardless, I can only write it the way I feel. These lovely children, taken in by this beguiler, distress me. Siegel [with a bit more passion]: Pull off the mask of these innocent, virginal nymphs and you will reveal the dark, hidden secrets of wily manipulators. Maltz: I don’t agree. I believe in people. Siegel: But not all people. Surely you are aware of evil people you do not believe in. Maltz: I’m not writing about evil people. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

77

Siegel: You’ve deliberately closed your mind to the exciting possibilities of the suspense and vicious plot complications which enrich this story. Why can’t this very powerful subject be treated with subtlety? Along with delicate plot twists, there are ambivalent characters and conflicting emotions. Maltz: I’m sorry, Don. I’m going into the screenplay the way I feel the film should be made. Siegel: At this point, all I can ask is that you to try to write from a highly imaginative point of view. I intend to film it that way.59 To bolster his argument and strike the proper mood, Siegel sent Maltz to the screening room for a look at Rosemary’s Baby, the deliciously perverse shocker that Roman Polanski had completed a year earlier. ‘If you’d written this script,’ Siegel told him, ‘Mia Farrow wouldn’t have given birth to the devil. She’d have given birth to healthy blond twin sons.’60 The screenplay Maltz eventually handed in, a 133-page job titled ‘Johnny McB,’ pleased nobody. Clint didn’t care for it. Lang wondered how Maltz could possibly think it was adequate, and demanded ‘a complete rewrite that [has] a hell of a lot more to do with the book’. Siegel considered the screenwriter ‘lost and scared’. Production designer Ted Haworth, already at work on sketches and layouts, felt Maltz had turned an exciting book into a dull script. Siegel and Lang were still unsatisfied when Maltz’s fourth draft arrived, complaining that it lacked the allegorical and Freudian symbolism they wanted and either flattened or omitted the book’s best incidents. A personnel change was clearly in order, and Lang suggested that a woman might be best suited to dramatize this particular story. Siegel was sceptical: ‘You mean like William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew might have been better written by a woman?’ Still, he agreed to recruit the woman Lang had in mind. Irene Kamp had only a handful of writing and adapting credits, but they included Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, 1961), a jazz drama, and The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965), a picturesque romance; each entertaining in its way. Unfortunately, her approach did not differ from Maltz’s in some key respects. While she had no objections to writing about nubile young women, the idea of nubile pre-adolescents bothered her. She was adamant about a happy ending. And her title of choice, ‘Nest of Sparrows’, signaled to Siegel and Lang that she was more interested in the children than in Eastwood’s all-important character. ‘Anything that was macabre, or Gothic, she shied away from,’ Siegel recalled later. In short, she rivaled Maltz in her willingness to jettison much of Cullinan’s novel to make room for her own, far milder concept of the tale. Once again the director, producer and star were unhappy with the results. ‘I spoke to Clint the other day,’ Siegel told Lang at a story conference. ‘He said if we can’t come up with a good script, let’s scrap the project and do a new western.’61 The outcome was anti-climactic but unexpectedly agreeable. Siegel asked the film’s associate director, Claude Traverse, to assess the materials accumulated so far. Traverse spent the night reading Maltz’s final draft and the two scripts Kamp had submitted, without knowing what opinions Siegel and the others held. Listening to his report the 78

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

next morning, Siegel was delighted to find that Traverse saw the same failings, envisioned the same solutions and entertained the same concept of the picture as he, Lang, and Eastwood did. Cheerfully ignoring Traverse’s lack of writing credentials – or any credentials, beyond a little TV work – Siegel asked him to generate a script as quickly as he could. Three speedy drafts later, the job was done – although one wouldn’t know this from the movie’s credits, which name John B. Sherry and Grimes Grice, noms de plume for Maltz and Kamp, as the sole screenwriters. A philosophy of the feminine As far as the women in the picture were concerned, the studio didn’t care about who we had in it as long as we had Clint. I pointed out that Clint could use all the help he could get in this. Don Siegel on The Beguiled 62 Eastwood’s enthusiasm for The Beguiled grew partly from his interest in playing a flat-out rogue who dies an ignominious death in the final scene. Universal’s edginess about the project grew from the same source. Looking to mitigate the film’s downbeat conclusion and retain audience sympathies without diluting their commitment to an unsettling, uncompromising tone, the filmmakers set about assembling charismatic actresses to play the women of the story, who may also be rogues but remain alive and breathing in the end. The leading candidate for headmistress was Jeanne Moreau, the versatile French star whose recent English-language films included the western Monte Walsh (William A. Fraker, 1970) and two Orson Welles productions, The Immortal Story (1968), an exquisite miniature, and ‘The Deep’, aka ‘Dead Reckoning’, an unfinished project killed in 1970 by the industry’s lack of confidence in the famously untamable filmmaker. It is unlikely that Moreau drew a heavy paycheck for the work she did with Welles, but her asking price for The Beguiled was more than Lang and Malpaso found reasonable, so second choice Geraldine Page received the role. This was a happy development, since Page proceeded to charm everyone in sight. ‘She is brilliant,’ Siegel remarked, ‘certainly as fine an actor as I’ve ever worked with. I never have gotten along better with anyone than I did with her.’ Eastwood initially thought she would seem imperious, ‘being a big star on Broadway and all’, but she settled his nerves by claiming to be a big Rawhide fan. ‘She set an example for all the young players,’ Clint said, describing her as ‘ready to go right away, ready to roll, no BS.’ Page is sometimes a mannered player whose techniques show through in her performances, but Schickel is right when he calls headmistress Martha one of her most confident portrayals, ‘its surface gentility rendered without flutter, her inner demons kept on a short leash’.63 Elizabeth Hartman, who plays Edwina, had won a best actress Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a blind woman in her debut film, A Patch of Blue (Guy Green, 1965), and the likes of Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Frankenheimer had subsequently sought her out. Her career had been on hiatus for two years before Siegel hired her for The Beguiled, and by her own account she felt such c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

79

anxiety about returning to work that she trembled throughout the first day of shooting. Siegel had seen her opposite Henry Fonda in a 1969 production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, and when Universal expressed doubts about her readiness to play Edwina, the director and Eastwood fought a winning battle to keep her. Siegel said later that Hartman was ‘very difficult to work with because she hates herself so much’, but he found her performance ‘magnificent’ in the end. Asked for her opinion as to why Siegel wanted her and what she brought to her portrayal, Hartman spoke of ‘this introversion and shyness plus this repressed violence which burns in me. The violence was in the character and is in me.’64 It glows subtly but unmistakably through Edwina’s outwardly demure persona, and The Beguiled is arguably Hartman’s most artistically successful film. She did little movie work after this; afflicted with chronic depression, she killed herself in 1987 at age 43. Siegel saw The Beguiled as a chance to make what Hollywood used to call a ‘woman’s picture’. But while that term traditionally meant a movie for women, this would be a movie about women, or more precisely, a movie about Siegel’s personal take on women. Siegel’s films had rarely explored female experience in much depth, and given his slim familiarity with gender psychology, it is interesting that he chose to make his first foray into the subject at the beginning of the 1970s, when second-wave feminism was gathering steam and public attitudes toward a broad array of gender issues were rapidly evolving. In the annus mirabilis of 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, which was translated into eight languages within five months; Kate Millet published Sexual Politics, selling 22,000 copies in four weeks; Shulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, teaming Simone de Beauvoir with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in a radical attack on patriarchy; Bella Abzug was elected to the US Congress; and the US Army appointed its first female generals. Other such developments followed apace.65 It is against this background that Siegel decided to use Cullinan’s novel, Eastwood’s charisma and Hollywood’s resources as vehicles for expressing his philosophy of the feminine, and that philosophy did not reside on a pinnacle of sociopolitical sophistication. ‘Women are capable of deceit, larceny, murder, anything,’ he said. ‘Behind that mask of innocence lurks just as much evil as you’ll find in members of the Mafia. Any young girl who looks perfectly harmless is capable of murder.’66 Seen in the light of this remark, the gothic shadings and sinister trappings of The Beguiled look like so many excuses to indulge an appetite for misogyny that might have seemed too tasteless and shameless for comfort without its exotic disguise, and seemed tasteless and shameless even with the disguise to a significant number of culture-savvy moviegoers who were opening their eyes to the inequities and injustices of patriarchal America. The Beguiled has a dark visual style to match its dark emotional tones. Bruce Surtees had been camera operator for Coogan’s Bluff and Two Mules for Sister Sara, and his third Siegel/Eastwood picture marked his graduation to full-fledged cinematographer, a job he would perform many more times for Eastwood movies.67 Siegel wanted The Beguiled to have the twilight look that Eastwood later favored in many of his own films. At one point, for instance, he wanted a place photographed in darkness illuminated by a lone candle, but without the complicated set-up of synchronised light and dimmers (with 80

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

noisy switches that prevented direct-sound recording) that had enabled such a shot in his 1949 melodrama Night Unto Night; so Surtees simply placed a small light bulb into the candleholder’s base, shot the action, and that was that. Since all the nighttime scenes had to be lit by candlelight, or at least look as if they were, Surtees practiced at home by taking still photographs of candles and people, experimenting with density, texture and the challenge of avoiding the candelabra shadows that frequently show up in candle-lit film sequences. For daytime scenes, Surtees used natural light whenever possible, and when artificial lighting would give a stronger result, he gravitated toward old-fashioned arc lights, which approximate the crispness and clarity of sunlight. For inspiration he looked to Italian cinematographers, especially Giuseppe Rotunno, who shot the flamboyant Fellini Satyricon in 1969, and Pasquale De Santis, who photographed Luchino Visconti’s grim family drama The Damned, also in 1969. By his own testimony, Surtees was influenced as much by painting as by other cinematographers, and the painterly look of many shots in The Beguiled bears out his judicious use of ideas picked up from neighboring visual arts. His contribution is crucial to the film’s aesthetic success, and Eastwood was wise to employ him for subsequent movies. Schickel describes the production team of The Beguiled as ‘a curiously mixed bag – action star, method actress, a sprinkling of what might be called starlets, a director known for his quick-step pace and no-nonsense style, a cameraman shooting his first feature, an editor [Carl Pingitore] out of down-and-dirty television’.68 The film’s baroque storytelling is also something of a mixed bag, notwithstanding the single-minded sense of purpose embraced by its creators. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby ticked off the ingredients of the film’s elaborate narrative style: straightforward exposition, interior thoughts heard on the soundtrack, flashbacks that contradict spoken dialogue, and ‘the kind of fantasies commonly enjoyed – according to literary convention – by hashish smokers, sailors and sex-starved spinsters’. Canby’s evaluation of the mélange was equally mixed: within the space of about 750 words he called it ‘very fancy, outrageous fantasizing’ that many viewers will find a ‘sensational, misogynistic nightmare’ but that he himself found ‘interesting … even when it approached the ludicrous’. One aspect of the picture that Canby does not equivocate about is the cast, including Eastwood, ‘who, by simply reacting well, has become an important actor of movies’. Others shared this opinion, more or less. Eastwood gives ‘an astonishing, though certainly not great, performance’, said Motion Picture Exhibiting, while the Hollywood Reporter praised all of the players, naming Eastwood the ‘most impressive’ of them, ‘particularly in the second half of the film, in which he is called upon to break with the more passive dimensions of the role and demonstrate a greater versatility and range than his best past work has indicated’. By contrast, the reliable Eastwood nay-sayer Judith Crist hated almost everything about the picture, which she deemed a must-see for ‘sadists and woman-haters’. Years later, Eastwood biographer Marc Eliot offered a wry comment that also deserves mention: ‘The Beguiled is about a social rebel and an unrepentant ladies’ man who becomes both a hero and a burden to those who care most for him. In that sense the film was [Clint’s] most autobiographical to date.’69 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

81

Reviews aside, The Beguiled did not beguile many moviegoers; audiences stayed away, turning it into one of Eastwood’s most commercially disappointing films. Universal blamed the movie and Siegel blamed the studio. Armed with advertising sketches by Edward Gorey, whose eccentric style was precisely in sync with this eccentric film, Siegel outlined a marketing plan to Lang, who then went to Universal to firm up the kind of campaign the picture needed. The ideas devised by Siegel and Gorey were never heard from again, however; what emerged from the publicity department was a standard action-movie campaign that had little to do with The Beguiled, although it might have sufficed for a film showing Clint’s character winning the Civil War single-handedly. ‘What little there was of [advertising] was not only misleading,’ Siegel commented, ‘it was a lie.’ Hoping that The Beguiled could open in major film festivals, such as Cannes or Venice, collecting good reviews and perhaps winning prizes, Siegel was outraged when Universal disqualified the picture by prematurely releasing it, and then compounded the injury by testing its European potential in Milan, the spaghetti-western capital of Italy, at a theatre specializing in action-adventure fare. Not surprisingly, spectators were more perplexed than pleased. Siegel says in his autobiography that Universal’s bad handling of The Beguiled started the chain of events that led to Eastwood’s departure from the studio; but Malpaso collaborated with the studio on several more pictures, so Siegel’s claim should not be taken at face value. Be that as it may, The Beguiled soon became a bona fide cult classic, and remains one of Eastwood’s favorites among his works.70 Notes 1 2 3

4 5

82

Stuart M. Kaminsky, Don Siegel: Director (New York: Curtis Books, 1974), p. 220. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 36. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: E. P. Dutto, 1968), p. 137. Don Siegel, A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 294. Perhaps the autobiography is not to be believed. In another account Siegel said, referring to the production’s many problems before he came on board, ‘Sometimes I have the feeling that things were so screwed up that I met Clint and got the picture because my name sounded like a combination of the man who had been director on the film, Alex Segal, and the man they were considering to replace him, Don Taylor’ (Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 215). No mention of happy-go-lucky computers in this version, published much closer in time to the events. I have to agree with Schickel’s observation that in his autobiography Siegel appears to be ‘exercising the director’s prerogative to improve the script as originally written’ (Clint Eastwood, p. 198). Siegel, A Siegel Film, p. 294. Patrick McGilligan, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 21–41, cited at 30–31. Originally published in Focus on Film no. 25 (SummerFall 1976), pp. 12–20. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

6

7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Peter Biskind, ‘Any Which Way He Can,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 193–206, cited at 200. Originally published in Premiere (April 1993), pp. 52–60. Kaminsky, Don Siegel, pp. 218–219. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, 81. Before calling Reisner in, Siegel hired Howard Rodman to assemble a satisfactory shooting script, but Siegel disliked the result (not enough humor) and Eastwood hated it. McGilligan, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ p. 31. Riesner, who penned five Rawhide episodes in the 1963–64 season, has a writing credit on Play Misty for Me, Dirty Harry and The Enforcer, and worked on High Plains Drifter without screen credit. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 300, 306. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 310–311. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 83. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 198–200. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 84. On Location: Where Eagles Dare, 1968; making-of featurette on DVD of Where Eagles Dare from Warner Home Video, 2004. Howard Hughes, Aim for the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), p. 191. Zmijewsky and Pfeiffer, Films of Clint Eastwood, p. 86. Schickel puts Eastwood’s salary at $500,000 (Clint Eastwood, p. 202) and McGilligan reports it at $850,000 (Clint, p. 172). O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 87. Zmijewski and Pfeiffer, Films of Clint Eastwood, p. 88. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 88. See ‘A Medieval Attraction,’ Salzburger Burgen und Schlösser (n.d.) http://www. salzburg-burgen.at/en/werfen/history.php and ‘Burg Hohenwerfen,’ TrekEarth (n.d.) http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Austria/West/Salzburg/Werfen/ photo589304.htm (both accessed 15 September 2008). Where Eagles Dare did not get to Burg Hohenwerfen first – you can spot it in the distance during the ‘Do Re Mi’ song in The Sound of Music (1965). Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 193. James Robert Parish, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2006), pp. 75–76. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 211. Also see Eliot, American Rebel, pp. 104–105. Shaun Considine, Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 247–248. Ray Kennedy and Mary Cronin, ‘New Movies: Fool’s Gold,’ Time (24 October 1969) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901613–1,00.html (accessed 15 May 2009). Considine, Mad as Hell, pp. 247–250. My quotes and other information regarding Chayefsky come largely from this source. In the film as opposed to the stage musical: the town is called No Name City; the Anglo miner called Pardner replaces the Mexican character Julio Valveras who is smitten with Ben’s wife Elizabeth in the theatrical version; Rumson does not have c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

83

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42

84

a daughter; and the ménage à trois replaces Elizabeth’s liaison with miner Edgar Crocker, for whom she ultimately abandons both Rumson and Raymond Janney, another man in love with her. This problem was never satisfactorily solved. McGilligan observes that the song ‘I Still See Elisa,’ sung by Rumson onstage, had to be included in the movie because it was an established hit; since nobody in the movie is named Elisa, however, Rumson cues the song by saying to Pardner, ‘Hey Pard, is that the name of your girl?’ Pardner then sings it. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 91. Also see ‘Paint Your Wagon,’ instantcast (n.d.) http://www.instantcast.com/AllStars/Paint_Your_Wagon_%28film%29/Article/. Marvin’s single kept the Beatles hit ‘Let It Be’ at number two during its three-week ascendancy, according to Wikipedia, which notes that it was one of the records played at Joe Strummer’s funeral. ‘Wand’rin’ Star’ (12 July 2009) http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Wand%27rin%27_Star (both accessed 22 September 2009). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 219. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 91. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 220. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 122–123. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 92. Also see Eliot, American Rebel, p. 105. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 213–214. Considine, Mad as Hell, p. 249. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 223. Eliot claims that the budget reached $30 million, and that the film’s breakeven point was almost $60 million, as against domestic gross earnings of $14.5 million in its first year. He also reports that the film was released in many overseas markets with all the songs removed, in hopes of appealing more to fans of Eastwood’s westerns. Speaking of its first Italian run, Clint defended this maneuver, saying, ‘That’s common practice. Musicals have been terrible flops in Europe, with the exception of West Side Story [Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961]. Most times, they omit all the music.’ Eliot, American Rebel, p. 107; quoting Eastwood from an article by Dick Lochte in Los Angeles Free Press (20 April 1973). Robert Ebert, ‘Paint Your Wagon.’ Chicago Sun-Times (31 October 1969) http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19691031/REVIEWS /910310301/1023. Rex Reed quoted in Frank Manchel, Film Study: An Analytical Bibliography vol. 1 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990), 155. Newsweek quoted in Hughes, Aim for the Heart, 94. Vincent Canby, ‘Paint Your Wagon,’ The New York Times (16 October 1969) http://movies.nytimes.com/ movie/review?_r=1&res=EE05E7DF1738A62CA5494CC0B779958D6896 (websites accessed 5 April 2009). Siegel, Siegel Film, p. 322. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 322–323. Also see Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 225. David Schwartz, ‘Ride Lonesome: A Budd Boetticher Retrospective,’ Moving Image Source, http://www.movingimagesource.us/files/dialogues/0/59292_program_ resources_file_47.pdf (accessed 1 August 2014). th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67

Kitses, Horizons West, pp. 179–180, 181. Smith, Clint Eastwood, p. 59. ‘Universal to Co-Produce With Mexico’s Sanen,’ Boxoffice vol. 95 no. 10 (23 June 1969), p. 11. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 339–340. Roger Greenspun, ‘Screen: “Two Mules for Sister Sara”,’ The New York Times (25 June 1970) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C05E6DA103FE53 BBC4D51DFB066838B669EDE (accessed 3 May 2009). Archer Winston and the unsigned Variety review are quoted in Zmijewsky and Pfeiffer, Films of Clint Eastwood, p. 114. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 632. Two Mules for Sister Sara and Ulzana’s Raid (Robert Aldrich, 1972) are examples of ‘assertively traditional or reactionary’ westerns that managed to spark only momentary interest among moviegoers in the early 1970s. Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 109. McGilligan, Clint, p. 184. Quoted from Los Angeles Free Press (20 April 1973). Leonard Sloane, ‘Aubrey named MGM President: Kerkorian Moves In as Bronfman and Forces Lose Out,’ The New York Times (22 October 1969), p. 57. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 235–236. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 236; McGilligan, Clint, p. 185. McGilligan claims that Kelly’s Heroes and Two Mules for Sister Sara each earned about $1.5 million. Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ pp. 109–110. Roger Greenspun, ‘The Screen: Hutton’s ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ Begins Run,’ The New York Times (24 June 1970) http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res= F60910FF3E5D137B93C6AB178DD85F448785F9 (accessed 5 April 2009). ‘Clint Eastwood: Play Misty for Me,’ Action (March-April 1973). Quoted in McGilligan, Clint, 83. Action is the Directors Guild of America magazine. Thomas Cullinan, The Beguiled (New York: Horizon Press, 1966). Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 341–342. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 345–346. Dialogue form slightly modified. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 238. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 346–349. Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 239 Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 240. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 239. Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 240. ‘The Path of the Women’s Rights Movement,’ The Prism (n.d.) http://www.ibiblio. org/prism/mar98/path.html. Also see ‘Feminist Timeline: United States,’ Brooklyn Museum/Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (2007) http://www. brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_timeline/plain_text.php (both accessed 3 May 2009). Kaminsky, Don Siegel, p. 237. For director Eastwood he photographed Play Misty for Me, High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Firefox, Honkytonk Man, Sudden Impact, and Pale Rider; for Siegel he shot Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz as well as The Beguiled and c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

85

68 69

70

86

The Shootist (1976), not an Eastwood film; among his many pictures for other directors are Tightrope, a Malpaso film starring Eastwood, and The Stars Fell on Henrietta, which Eastwood co-produced. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 241. Vincent Canby, ‘Clint Eastwood Is Star Of Siegel’s The Beguiled.’ The New York Times (1 April 1971) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res= 9402E6DD 163EEF34BC4953DFB266838A669EDE (accessed 3 March 2008). The trade papers are quoted in Zmijewsky and Pfeiffer, Films of Clint Eastwood, p. 122. Crist is quoted in O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 104. Marc Eliot, American Rebel, p. 119. Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 355–356. Also see O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, pp. 103–104.

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

CHAPTER FOUR

Any Which Way He Can: From Misty and Harry to High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales Eastwood’s middle period commenced in the key year of 1971, when he showed new sides of his acting talent in The Beguiled, made his feature-directing debut with Play Misty for Me and scored a pop-cultural bullseye in Dirty Harry. Firmly established as a star, a celebrity and a quasi-studio chief, Clint was now positioned to follow up on an ambition he had nurtured since his early Rawhide days – that of directing his own movies. He both directed and starred in Play Misty for Me, portraying a California disc jockey who is emotionally and then physically menaced by an unstable woman after a one-night stand that she takes a lot more seriously than he does. Encouraged by the film’s favorable reviews and good box-office earnings, Eastwood directed half a dozen more pictures in the 1970s, and appeared in the same number of films by other directors; most were very well received, some (the comic ‘monkey movies’ of 1978 and 1980) were phenomenal hits, and one (Dirty Harry) became not only a box-office sensation – spawning four sequels between 1973 and 1988 – but also a cause de scandale that critics and moralists chewed over for years to come. Starting in the 1980s he took even more control over his career, restricting himself to projects that he either directed personally or assigned to associates who could be counted on to do things the way he would have done them, especially since he would be squinting over the associate’s shoulder. Most critics therefore regard virtually all of Eastwood’s movies from Play Misty for Me onwards to be primarily or exclusively his own work. Yet his authorial power cuts two ways. For partisans, it makes him a true auteur with a distinctive personal style and a consistent set of meaningful thematic interests. For sceptics, it makes him a self-centered control freak with a small bag of technical tricks and a handful of themes that recur because they are what his limited imagination can handle. And the perennial tensions between pro-Clint and anti-Clint perspectives lend all the more interest to his work. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

87

Play Misty for Me (1971) After seventeen years of bouncing my head against the wall, hanging around sets, maybe influencing certain camera set-ups with my own opinions, watching actors go through all kinds of hell without any help and working with both good directors and bad ones, I’m at the point where I’m ready to make my own pictures. Clint Eastwood1 Dave Garland (Eastwood) is a late-night disc jockey who spins cool-jazz platters and gives soft-spoken patter in between. When he takes requests from listeners, a female fan often calls to say, ‘Play “Misty” for me’, referring to Errol Garner’s great ballad of 1954. Dave meets the fan, Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), seemingly by chance; but she knows what bar Dave goes to after the show, and their ‘accidental’ first acquaintance is actually engineered by her. Evelyn is attractive and available – perhaps too available for Dave, who does not want to get too deeply involved in what he hopes will be a brief, casual fling that won’t prevent him from getting back together with his former girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills), for whom he pines. Evelyn pushes for more, more, more – stalking him, coming to his home, messing up a business meeting and eventually staging a suicide attempt at his house, where she also tries to murder his housekeeper, Birdie (Clarice Taylor), in a scene of particular ugliness. This lands Evelyn in a psychiatric institution, but before long another ‘Misty’ call comes to Dave at the station, and that night Evelyn shows up in his bedroom with a very big knife. Ultimately she worms her way into Tobie’s life as well, becoming her roommate under a bogus name. In the explosively violent climax, Evelyn kills Sergeant McCallum (John Larch), the well-meaning cop investigating Birdie’s attempted murder, with a pair of scissors; then she takes Tobie hostage, goes after Dave with another big knife and falls off a cliff to her death when he finally lands a lucky punch. Play Misty for Me was co-produced by Malpaso and Universal Pictures, with Universal holding the US distribution rights.2 It is not clear that Clint intended to star in as well as direct the picture, but according to Eliot’s biography, both producer Lang and Universal chief Lew Wasserman insisted that he appear in the film as boxoffice insurance; agreeing to this, Clint sweetened the deal for himself by giving up his acting salary for a percentage of the profits instead.3 The screenplay came from his old friend Jo Heims, a legal secretary who wrote on spec in her spare time. Liking the premise, Clint gave her 60-page treatment to Dean Riesner with instructions to make a fast, inexpensive production script out of it. Eastwood also changed the setting from Los Angeles to Carmel, making the project more manageable by keeping it closer to home than anything he had made to date. His decision to make the picture ‘for zip’ was motivated partly by the frugality for which he would later become famous, and partly by a wish to shore up his position as prime mover of the film. ‘I know exactly what they were saying behind my back,’ he remarked later. ‘We’ll let the kid fool around with it … and then he’ll probably do a couple of westerns for us, or some other adventure-type film that will seem more commercial at the outset.’4 They could say 88

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Eastwood made his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me (1971), also featuring Jessica Walter and Donald Siegel

anything they wanted as far as Clint was concerned, as long as he and his crew were free to make the picture as they saw fit. Universal wanted a star on the order of Lee Remick to play Evelyn, but Clint, ever wary of being upstaged, preferred a fresh face. Sidney Lumet had filmed Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group in 1966, populating it with several actresses not yet famous, although some of them (Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett) soon would be. Clint screened it and took a liking to Jessica Walter, whom he proceeded to cast as his anti-heroine. Walter contributed ideas to the script as well, recommending that a prologue showing Evelyn in a mental institution should be dropped because it made subsequent events less surprising, and suggesting that very few details of Evelyn’s private life be spelled out because they would make the character less mysterious. Clint went with her advice on both counts. He cast Donna Mills as Tobie after seeing her (at Burt Reynolds’s suggestion) on the TV soap opera Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, in which she played Laura Donnelly Elliott from the show’s inception in 1967 until 1970. Clint also recruited Don Siegel to play Murphy, the bartender at the tavern – called the Sardine Factory, unappetisingly enough – where Dave hangs out. This ensured that Eastwood’s friend and mentor would be nearby if the neophyte director got to feeling insecure. With first-time producer Robert Daley on board, Clint put together a crew he knew he could trust, including Bruce Surtees as cinematographer, Carl Tingitore as film editor and Alexander Golitzen as art director. Jazz trombonist, drummer and arranger Dee Barton earned his first feature-film credit with the movie’s score, and Clint further indulged his taste for jazz by arranging for a shoot at California’s highly esteemed Monterey Jazz Festival, thereby getting smidgens of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet and the Johnny Otis Show onto the soundtrack. Less successfully employed is Roberta Flack’s rendition of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, penned by Ewan MacColl in 1957 and a smash hit for Flack in 1972; the uncut recording accompanies, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

89

drags out, and ultimately weighs down a too-lyrical sex scene starring Dave, Tobie and some landscape. There is a lot of nature in Play Misty for Me, thanks to its locations in Carmel Valley and Big Sur, and also to Eastwood’s ability to squeeze some helicopter shooting out of his limited budget. Hughes observes in his Eastwood biography that the film’s atmospheric views of the sea-battered coastline, complete with crashing waves and screeching gulls, recall Roger Corman’s moody Monterey Gothics, such as The Terror (1963) and the Edgar Allan Poe knockoff Pit and the Pendulum (1961), which were also partially shot in the region – an apt comparison, remembering that when Evelyn makes her comeback call to Dave after leaving the mental institution, falsely saying she has regained her sanity and is moving to a new life in a faraway place, she closes by paraphrasing a couplet from the 1849 poem ‘Annabel Lee’, one of Poe’s best-known works: ‘And this maiden she lived with no other thought/Than to love and be loved by me,’ concluding with ‘you’ instead of ‘me’ in Evelyn’s version. She then takes the pseudonym Annabel when she signs on as Tobie’s roommate. Dave and McCallum prove insufficiently literate to quickly recognise the (gigantic) clue contained in Evelyn’s poetic reference, and when the light bulb finally goes off in Dave’s mind, it is too late to save the sergeant’s life and almost too late to rescue Tobie from her demented rival. Hughes avers that the screenplay included many more allusions to Poe’s poetry than ended up in the finished film, and notes that ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ has a certain thematic similarity to ‘Annabel Lee’, as in the opening lines: The first time ever I saw your face I thought the sun rose in your eyes And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave To the dark and the endless skies my love To the night and the empty skies. Although this is no more than a pale shadow of Poe’s poem, the resemblance is unmistakable.5 One has to wonder whether it was a decisive factor in making MacColl’s bittersweet song an integral part of the movie, or whether Eastwood or Heims or Riesner or anyone was aware of the likeness at all. Play Misty for Me was budgeted at $950,000 with a five-week shooting schedule. Eastwood brought it in for $900,000 by filming it (in sequence) with such celerity that principal photography ended four days early. Reviews were mixed, but better overall than for many of Eastwood’s actor-only pictures. Less than charmed by the scenery, Variety called it ‘an often fascinating suspenser’ that regrettably ‘suffers from frequent digressions into landscape’.6 Roger Greenspun, the New York Times critic, opined that ‘the circumstance … and the suspense recall other, better movies’, citing Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as films that ‘echo … in the imagination’ more lastingly. Greenspun blamed the picture’s flaws primarily on Eastwood’s filmmaking: the director had been too hasty with decisions about action, atmosphere and performances, and he had asked Eastwood the actor ‘to bear more witness to a quality of inwardness than his better directors have yet had the temerity to 90

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

ask of him’.7 Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris called the film ‘a surprisingly auspicious directorial debut’ and ‘one of the most effectively scary movies of this or any year’, presumably referring to past years, not those to come.8 Jay Cocks wrote in Time that director Eastwood has to ‘chart a course through the holes in the plot’ but generally shows ‘a vigorous talent for sequences of violence and tension’ as well as a good grasp of such exemplary thrillers as Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).9 Roger Ebert generously said Eastwood’s film ‘is not the artistic equal of Psycho, but in the business of collecting an audience into the palm of its hand and then squeezing hard, it is supreme,’ due mostly to its success in making viewers think ‘that the strange woman is capable of anything’.10 The film parlayed its $900,000 cost into a healthy $10,600,000 in domestic box-office earnings.11 In the monster hit Fatal Attraction, a 1987 release directed by Adrian Lyne, Glenn Close plays Alex Forrest, a psychopathic woman who stalks, menaces and almost destroys Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), a man with whom she had a one-night stand. In an interview three years later, Close described her character as a ‘bunny boiler’, referring to the movie’s most notorious scene, wherein Alex kills the pet rabbit belonging to Dan’s little girl, Ellen, and then places its carcass into a pot of water boiling on the stove, where Ellen, already stressed out by her pet’s disappearance, discovers it in a moment of melodramatic horror.12 Play Misty for Me serves up no boiled bunnies or roasted rabbits, but Fatal Attraction is one of many offspring it spawned, all centering on female villains whose disorders have been diagnosed by movie-seat psychologists as de Clérambault’s syndrome, borderline personality disorder and other ailments that can bring about aggression, unchecked impulsivity, emotional instability and the like. The family tree initiated by Eastwood’s thriller includes films ranging from Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) to Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female (1992) and additional offspring from Hollywood and elsewhere, many with conspicuously lower budgets and profit margins. In his first directorial outing, Eastwood made a popular movie, and an influential one as well. Like many of those descendents, Play Misty for Me has drawn fire from feminist critics who see its crazy and unredeemable female killer as an especially blatant manifestation of Hollywood’s perennially sexist treatment of women as threatening, unstable, sometimes downright dangerous creatures. These critics have an excellent point. And so does Schickel, who takes a somewhat different tack, finding parallels between Dave in the 1971 thriller and John McBurney in The Beguiled a year earlier. In both films, Schickel suggests, Eastwood’s performance comments on two driving forces of modern masculinity: fear of entrapment by the female, and the resulting need for mastery over the female, both of which are expressions of a larger trait, male self-absorption. Clint is therefore ‘acting out … the very bill of particulars repeatedly read out against men’ by feminists and women, and doing so without letting himself off the hook in conventional movie-star ways. There is, Schickel writes, ‘no boyish vulnerability waiting to be discovered beneath these self-reflexive surfaces, no subtle plea for sympathy, which is the signal most male movie stars send out’. This is a function of both Clint the actor and Clint the man. ‘His response to Evelyn’s escalating possessiveness is slow and dim,’ Schickel says, ‘precisely because that emotion is as unimaginable to him as c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

91

it is to Clint.’ And conversely, Dave’s ‘withholding nature, his “mystery,” is one of the things driving poor Evelyn crazy’.13 Schickel’s evocation of ‘poor Evelyn’ suggests that the film’s misogyny, as creepy as many of us find it, may not be as monolithic as it first appears. Dirty Harry (1971) Five – count ’em, five – chances to wallow in the shoot-first, ask-questions-later ethos of San Francisco cop Harry Callaghan. … You can’t ask for much more firepower in one box than this. Amazon.com According to film critic Marshall Fine’s so-called Editorial Review of The Dirty Harry Collection for Amazon.com, the Dirty Harry ethos is grounded in straight-shooting fun, and the boxed five-DVD set of his adventures is cause not merely for rejoicing but for wallowing as well. Harry has also sparked a good deal of thinking since his advent in the 1971 thriller that bears his moniker. ‘Dirty Harry’ has become an immediately recognisable catchphrase referring to people who break the rules for reasons they find good, or, in some cases, for no real reasons at all. Harry Callahan is a hard-working police inspector whose weapon of choice is a .44 Magnum revolver, which he calls ‘the most powerful handgun in the world’, living as he does before the arrival of the .500 Smith and Wesson, the .480 Ruger and other present-day champions, not to mention large-caliber hand cannons that shoot rifle cartridges. (After losing his Smith and Wesson M29 during a fistfight in Sudden Impact, his fourth film, Harry switches to an even deadlier .44 Auto Mag pistol.) He starts the picture by thwarting a bank robbery, and then joins Chico, his new partner, in a hunt for one Charles Davis, also known as Scorpio, a psychopath on a murder spree. Harry has been in trouble with the higher-ups, including the mayor and his own lieutenant, for bending police tactics beyond the breaking point. But this does not stop him from collaring Scorpio without benefit of mandatory procedures; had he spent time on bureaucratic details, he reasons, a 14-year-old kidnap victim would have died by suffocation. But she dies anyway, and Chico is badly wounded during the arrest. As for Scorpio, the joke is on Harry: the killer walks, freed on legalities related to the manner in which he was captured. Vowing to catch him again, Harry starts dogging Scorpio’s trail. But he does not know about the psychopath’s appointment

Eastwood as ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan – ‘You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?’ 92

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

with a thug who beats him for a $200 fee, then bleats to the press that blame for his ill treatment rests with the San Francisco police in general and Harry Callaghan in particular. Stealing a fresh gun, Scorpio now kidnaps a whole platoon of kids in a school bus. Harry heads him off, hops on the bus’s roof, flushes Scorpio out and shoots him dead after a final chase. Taking a last look at his badge, Harry throws it disgustedly away. The gospel of healthy-mindedness ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is an ass – an idiot. If that’s the eye of the law … the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience – by experience.’ Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)14 District Attorney: This rifle might make a nice souvenir, but it’s inadmissible as evidence. Harry: And who says that? District Attorney: It’s the law. Harry: Well, then the law is crazy. Dirty Harry The exchange between Mr. Bumble and Mr. Brownlow transpires when the latter tells the former that ‘in the eye of the law’ he is guilty of a peccadillo committed by his wife, since ‘the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction’. Harry’s exchange with District Attorney William T. Rothko comes when Rothko informs him that no matter how solidly the ballistics lab might match a fired bullet to Scorpio’s rifle, the result would be irrelevant to a legal case against the killer, regardless of other factors involved. Upon receiving these impromptu law lessons, both Mr. Callahan and Mr. Bumble are confounded and outraged at what they learn. The law is not merely misguided, misdirected, or mistaken, in their view; according to Bumble it is naïve and fatuous, and according to Callahan it is flat-out insane. Emotions run high when people feel that the prescriptions, proscriptions and binding ideological systems of their time countervail their own ideas and intuitions as to the fundamental qualities of right and wrong. Emotions certainly ran high when Dirty Harry debuted in December 1971, directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay penned by Harry Julian Fink, R. M. Fink and Dean Riesner, based on the Finks’ original story.15 Among critics, the movie’s chief supporter was Time reviewer Jay Cocks, who praised Siegel for the ‘closely calculated, irresistible momentum’ of his films, adding that the director ‘has an explosive talent for violence that turns his action scenes … into set pieces that pummel the senses’. He also lauded Eastwood for ‘his best performance to date – tense, tough, full of implicit identification with his characters.’16 Cocks was an outlier on the film; according to Schickel, his was ‘the only positive review in a major publication’.17 Even the auteur-friendly New York Times critic Roger Greenspun, who started his review with a reference to the ‘honorable and c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

93

slightly anachronistic enterprise of the Don Siegel cops-and-crooks action movies’, went on to say that ‘the grim devotion to duty that has always been the badge of Siegel’s constabulary is here in Clint Eastwood’s tough San Francisco plainclothesman … pushed beyond professionalism into a kind of iron-jawed self-parody’.18 The trade paper Variety called the picture ‘a specious, phony glorification of police and criminal brutality’ that is merely a ‘well-made but shallow running-and-jumping meller’ inflated with ‘philosophical garbage’ and ‘a superhero whose antics become almost satire’.19 A review in Newsweek scorned the ‘lethal ugliness’ of the picture, but added that neither good-spirited nor mean-spirited movies ever have much effect on the real world. ‘There is little chance that this right-wing fantasy will change things,’ the critic wrote, ‘where decades of humanist films have failed.’ In spring of 1972, the New York Times reprinted an essay from the Harvard Crimson, perhaps the most famous student newspaper in America, opining that Dirty Harry has ‘no pretensions to art; it is a simply told story of the Nietzschean superman and his sadomasochistic pleasures’.20 Roger Ebert was also low on the enthusiasm scale, calling the film ‘a very good example of the cops-and-killers genre’ that contains ‘lots of dynamite action and enough wry cynicism to keep the blood from getting too thick’, but going on to say that its ‘moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.’ Explaining and defending his charge of fascist morality, Ebert was direct: The movie clearly and unmistakably gives us a character who understands the Bill of Rights, understands his legal responsibility as a police officer, and nevertheless takes retribution into his own hands. Sure, Scorpio is portrayed as the most vicious, perverted, warped monster we can imagine – but that’s part of the same stacked deck. This said, however, Ebert held back from damning the film outright, holding that movies should not bear the blame for the evils they depict. ‘If there aren’t mentalities like Dirty Harry’s at loose in the land,’ he concluded, ‘then the movie is irrelevant. If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news.’21 Pauline Kael, a critic far more influential than Ebert in the early 1970s, wielded the accusation of fascism more boldly and aggressively, calling Dirty Harry a work of ‘fascist medievalism’, a ‘right-wing fantasy’, and ‘a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values’. Looking back on the film more recently, J. Hoberman articulated a more nuanced view in the Village Voice, likening Dirty Harry to Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) in that ‘it offers a fabulous, multifarious political metaphor’ capable of multiple, and even opposite, interpretations. As happened with the earlier science fiction film, Hoberman continued, ‘Siegel’s own liberal interpretation was trumped by a more forceful hard-right reading that celebrated “the figure of the Legal Vigilante” that would prove so useful to Richard M. Nixon in the upcoming election year. Dirty Harry was a dirty man for a dirty time.’ Although fans of the film included the countercultural Rolling Stone magazine and (it turned out) the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the groundswell of appreciation was led by ‘the new Republicans of America’s northern cities’. The director and star were invited to speak at police gatherings, 94

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

and a craze ensued for ‘the foot-long Smith & Wesson .44 magnum – a weapon whose use value was less practical than magical’.22 The strong feelings roused by Dirty Harry are less interesting in themselves than for the evidence they provide that Siegel and Eastwood struck an especially sensitive and susceptible American nerve. Why does this film stir such passionate responses in so many moviegoers? I think the title provides a major clue. In his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, first published in 1902, the American philosopher William James presents a nuanced and sceptical view of what he calls ‘the gospel of healthy-mindedness’, to which he attributes ‘the interesting notion … of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident – so much “dirt,” as it were, and matter out of place’.23 Dirt may be the key to ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan, who is viewed with partiality or repugnance depending on what version of ‘healthy-mindedness’ a particular moviegoer embraces. The most readily available options are (simplified for the sake of discussion) the healthy-mindedness of liberals, which rejects rogue policing and vigilante justice, and the healthy-mindedness of conservatives, which rejects the idea that vigilantism and violence are unacceptably high prices to pay for the maintenance of social order. Dirty Harry draws much of its appeal from the cleverness with which Siegel and Eastwood scramble these categories: by pitting a ‘sadist-with-badge’ against a ‘sadistwithout badge’, in the Variety critic’s hyperbolic words, they offer an unusually high number of discursive opportunities for spectators to inject the spectacle with the ideological meanings they prefer. In an important extension of James’s remarks on dirt, order and matter out of place, anthropologist Mary Douglas describes dirt as ‘the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements’. Thinking about dirt along these lines ‘takes us straight into the field of symbolism’, Douglas continues. This is because all cultures must devise methods for dealing with anomalous or ambiguous phenomena that seem to contradict its assumptions, and symbols readily serve this function when organised into ritual, poetry and mythology. Douglas does not write about cinema here, but I think it is reasonable to assert that going to movies is among the prime occasions we moderns have for making contact with the social rituals, demotic poetry and (mostly) secular myths of our era. Like symbols of so-called primitive times and places, the ones that flash across our multiplex and plasma screens often use ‘symbols of anomaly’ to ‘incorporate evil and death along with life and goodness … into a single, grand, unifying pattern’.24 It is also true, however, that negating the anomalous or impure is not the same as removing it. This is especially so when the body is taken into account, since the body is ultimately the basis of all symbolic schemes, and the body must be affirmed in both of its essential forms – the physical and the symbolic – if life in the body is to continue. Looking at primitive cultures, therefore, Douglas does not find ‘consistent dirt-rejecting’ but emphatic ‘dirt-affirmation’ as well. Her observation is worth quoting at length: c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

95

In a given culture it seems that some kinds of behavior or natural phenomena are recognized as utterly wrong by all the principles which govern the universe. There are different kinds of impossibilities, anomalies, bad mixings and abominations. Most of the items receive varying degrees of condemnation and avoidance. Then suddenly we find that one of the most abominable or impossible is singled out and put into a very special kind of ritual frame that marks it off from other experience. The frame ensures that the categories which the normal avoidances sustain are not threatened or affected in any way. Within the ritual frame the abomination is then handled as a source of tremendous power.25 The abomination polluting society in Dirty Harry is sadistic violence, so arbitrarily chaotic that it seems as illogical and inescapable as a force of nature. This is the kind of violence that revels in murder and physical affliction, à la Scorpio, whose specialty is tormenting and killing children, or in manslaughter and psychological affliction, à la Harry, who taunts a criminal at gunpoint with arguably the most famous dialogue from any Eastwood film: ‘I know what you’re thinking: “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?’ But if these events are abomination – if they would shock or traumatise most of us were we to run up against them in real life – why do large numbers of moviegoers revel in watching them? The answer is that this abomination has been singled out by skilled practitioners of contemporary mythmaking (Eastwood, Siegel, the Malpaso Company, Warner Bros. Pictures) and placed into a ritual frame known as the heavily publicised mass-audience melodrama.26 Singling out anomalous behaviors (few murderers are as exotically horrific as Scorpio proves to be) and bad mixings (the title character is a law officer and a law breaker, a hothead and a hero, a guardian of society and an antisocial outsider) in this way allows them to be vividly and memorably manifested without threatening the sense of safety, the desire for order, or the impulse toward condemnation and avoidance with which most of us stave off the prospect of confronting such evils in actual experience. This is the sort of paradox that pivotal artistic events occasionally produce: Dirty Harry’s dirt protects and sustains particular kinds of complacent healthy-mindedness that modern societies cultivate as psychological and spiritual survival strategies. The film accomplishes its task by marking what we deem social anomalies – represented by Harry’s self-righteous rage and violence, Scorpio’s psychotic rage and violence – as subject matters out of place, familiar and entertaining on the screen but posing no threat to the systems by which we order and codify our lives. The result is exactly what Douglas describes; a heavily symbolic spectacle weaves evil and death, life and goodness into a grand, unifying pattern that simultaneously thrills, jolts and soothes its audience. The controversies aroused by Dirty Harry also contribute to this effect, allowing different forms of healthy-mindedness (left-wing and right-wing mindsets of varying types and intensities) to fight it out on strictly rhetorical turf. Whether all 96

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

of this contributes to social wellbeing or to the illusion of social wellbeing is another question. To paraphrase another critic in another context, Eastwood and Siegel had a hit on their hands, and perhaps on their consciences as well. Westerns and the West Whether they are set in the wide-open spaces or the violent streets of modern cities, the films of Clint Eastwood are westerns. Like the classic westerns, they define moral stature through the assertion of individual will and the exercise of personal style, and as they pit civilians [sic] and outlaws against each other, they examine the values of civilization. Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin27 I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn’t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. Clint Eastwood28 Eastwood has acted in numerous westerns, beginning with the Rawhide television series and the epochal Dollars trilogy, and many fans (including, it appears, Mast and Kawin, quoted above) think of him as a mainstay of the genre, rather like John Wayne before him. Yet he has made just four westerns as a director, leaving aside Bronco Billy, which I consider more of a screwball-romantic comedy.27 Given the small number of westerns he has chosen to direct, it is reasonable to conclude that Eastwood considers the Old West a suitable setting only for particular kinds of stories – narratives of revenge, of rootlessness, of conflicts between solitude and society and of clashes among natural, unnatural and (in some cases) supernatural forces to which modern environments would be less hospitable. Analysing the politics of westerns around the time High Plains Drifter was released, critic Philip French groups the Eastwood vehicle Joe Kidd with two other 1972 westerns, Daniel Mann’s The Revengers and Michael Winner’s Chato’s Land, and one from 1971, Don Medford’s The Hunting Party, as artistically poor yet culturally revealing imitators of the paradigm created by Sam Peckinpah in his 1969 classic The Wild Bunch. All of these pictures revolve around unprincipled manhunters striving to track down and capture some sympathetic outlaw(s) with the help of a somewhat more ethical character who grows ever more disgusted with his companions and dismayed by their task. ‘The immediate political and allegorical background to these ferociously brutal stories,’ French correctly concludes, ‘is almost certainly the conditions of the Vietnam war and the moral confusion that conflict has engendered.’30 The period that produced this cycle, 1969–1972, was a flourishing one for westerns, with an average of 24 American features each year, and not all of the offbeat or ‘alternative’ productions were followers of The Wild Bunch.31 Slotkin’s breakdown of the western release slate for these years, reflecting his concerns with public myth and ideology, distinguishes among three ‘revisionist’ subgenres.32 Formalist westerns, typified by Joe Kidd and such shot-in-Spain productions as Valdez Is Coming (Edwin Sherin, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

97

1971) and A Town Called Hell (Robert Parrish, 1971), are influenced by Leone’s operatic epics and present ‘abstract, fairy-tale-like plots, gunfighter protagonists who ignore the normative motives of western heroes, and landscapes devoid of historical association’. Neorealist westerns, such as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Abraham Polonsky, 1969) and Monte Walsh (William A. Fraker, 1970), venture ‘behind the façade of western mythology to portray some of the grittier, darker, even meaner sides of cowboy life’. Counterculture westerns, exemplified by ‘New Cult of the Indian’ films on the order of A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein, 1970) and Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), suggest that Native American culture has not only been traduced and trampled by the juggernaut of white ‘civilisation’ but might actually be a ‘morally superior alternative’ thereto.33 Buck and the Preacher (Sidney Poitier, 1972) gave the genre another countercultural twist, foregrounding such forgotten phenomena of African-American history as black cowboys, runaway slaves putting down new roots in the West and cooperation between Native Americans and African-Americans against the onslaught of white violence and hegemony.34 These and similar films tried to revitalise the genre’s formulas and rework any that evinced troubling connections with the ongoing Vietnam disaster or other acute American problems of the day. While much western production stayed on traditional paths, this trend allowed for unusual pictures such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and the moderately offbeat Eastwood vehicle Two Mules for Sister Sara, and manifested a continuing interest in fresh approaches to a genre that was still seen as pliable, serviceable and adaptable. The situation changed markedly in 1973, however, when High Plains Drifter was one of only thirteen feature-length westerns to reach the screen. Since that year also marked the official end of US combat in Southeast Asia, where much had been sacrificed and little had been accomplished, it became an attitudinal tipping point for both political and popular culture, bringing with it a rising tide of public retrospection and malaise. These discontents helped spur the abrupt decline of the western as a preeminent form of mythic and ideological discourse, notwithstanding its reliability as a barometer of American moods and mindsets for most of the twentieth century. The decline continued in 1974, when only seven westerns were released, and after a partial comeback in 1975 and 1976, with thirteen westerns in each year, production slumped to an average of four per year between 1977 and 1982.35 Appearing just as the drop-off started, High Plains Drifter managed a strong showing at the box office, consolidating Eastwood’s position as an actor-director whose future looked bright. But his own prospects were more promising than those of the genre, which he rarely returned to in subsequent years, and only when a particular narrative or thematic idea spurred him in that direction. Joe Kidd (1972) After starring in three films (one of which he directed) in 1971, Eastwood took it easier the following year, just playing the title role in Joe Kidd, directed by John Sturges, the action specialist who made The Magnificent Seven. The film began as a script titled ‘The Sinola Courthouse Raid’, written by Elmore Leonard, who then had several western 98

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

novels and one prior screenplay (The Moonshine War, 1970, a crime comedy directed by Richard Quine) among his credits.36 Although the story takes place at the turn of the twentieth century, Leonard based the major character named Luis Chama on a contemporary figure: Reies Lopez Tijerina, a zealous advocate of Mexican land rights who sometimes affected a chihuahua cowboy hat and was a keen supporter of Robert F. Kennedy at one point. In a widely reported incident on 5 June 1967, Lopez Tijerina and a group of armed associates invaded a courthouse in northern New Mexico, shot up the place, kidnapped a journalist and a deputy and wounded two officers in the process. The aim was to force land-grant concessions on behalf of the state’s Hispanic citizens, long ravaged by poverty.37 Working with Sturges was intimidating for Clint and the others involved with Joe Kidd, according to Leonard, who said they were ‘all in awe’ of the man who had directed The Magnificent Seven and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The awe diminished when they belatedly realised that, in McGilligan’s words, ‘the director was a boozer and in the downhill stages of his career’. Meanwhile, the story underwent changes that were not to the taste of every participant. Leonard’s script focused on Kidd, a frontier scout and bounty hunter hired by Frank Harlan, a coldblooded landowner, to kill the revolutionary rabblerouser Chama, portrayed as an egotist obsessed with fame and power. Harlan was a secondary character until Robert Duvall signed on for the role, whereupon the script was adjusted to make him a properly imposing bad guy for Clint to confront. Chama was de-emphasised accordingly, becoming a thinly developed, two-dimensional character. This was especially distressing for John Saxon, who played Chama, and he blamed Eastwood for the change. ‘Clint needed to be the hero,’ he told McGilligan. ‘This character didn’t need to be smeared, but they smeared him just so it would be clear who the hero was. They tainted him with self-serving and cowardice.’ In a speech to an association of Latin-American actors contesting ethnic stereotypes, Saxon went so far as to apologise for playing the role. Saxon was perhaps protesting too much, since Chama had not been covered with glory in Leonard’s original script. But the production revolved primarily around Kidd and Clint, who left Leonard to fight his own battles over producer Sidney Beckerman’s continual dialogue changes. At one point Eastwood wanted to brandish his gun during a tense moment to make it obvious that Kidd is a gunfighter, and Sturges vetoed the gesture on the grounds that ‘the audience know who you are. They’ve seen all your pictures.’ (Eastwood brandished it anyway.)38 Whatever its vicissitudes behind the camera, Joe Kidd made little impression in theatres, and biographer Eliot calls it ‘a pale-faced imitation of the Leone westerns’ that ‘remains one of Clint’s least-remembered movies’.39 Eastwood would have far more control over his subsequent westerns, all of which he both starred in and directed. The Town Tamer and the Gunfighter The western brought me a certain notoriety; it’s also a film genre that leaves you room for an original analysis of certain subjects or certain moral principles. Clint Eastwood40 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

99

Eastwood’s first western as a director, High Plains Drifter, and its companion piece, Pale Rider, are specimens of two important sub-genres – the town-tamer western and the gunfighter western – that superseded the New Deal outlaw western when Hollywood started taking on ‘more critical questions about the character of the American social compact under conditions of Cold War and [raising] issues of social justice and individual conscience for which meliorative or common-front solutions [common in Indian westerns and cavalry westerns] could not readily be found’, as cultural historian Richard Slotkin writes. These westerns pose three main ideological questions, he continues: ‘What is the proper balance between the rights of the individual citizen and the interests and opinions of the majority? Between the ideal of justice and the practical operation of the laws? Between the property rights of the haves and the legitimate needs of the have-nots?’ Classical town-tamer westerns, such as Dodge City (Michael Curtiz, 1939) and My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), propose ‘progressive’ answers resting on the idea that combative heroes, acting on behalf of ‘decent folks’ and progress, can defeat injustice by subduing the criminals who cause it. Finding the situation a bit more complicated, classical outlaw westerns find progress and injustice to be intertwined with each other and with the institutions, especially railroads, that produce them.41 High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider have their roots in westerns of the early 1950s that popularised the practice of making gunfighters into heroic figures, such as The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950), High Noon and Shane (George Stevens, 1953). As the genre continued to evolve, some westerns took on an emotional depth and darkness influenced by conventions of film noir, while others emphasised the gunfighter’s cold proficiency in his violent line of work. Caring more about genre innovation than historical facts, filmmakers experimented with offbeat storylines, took a nearfetishistic interest in particular weapons and fighting styles and explored, in Slotkin’s words, ‘psychological concepts and complexes’ in ways that made westerns seem ‘more “serious” and worthy of “adult” attention’ at a time when pop-Freudian discourse was a cultural commonplace.42 Over time these trends gathered maturity and momentum, carrying with them a modernist propensity for ‘abstraction and stylization’. And now the sub-genre that became known as the ‘revisionist’ western cantered gradually into view, complete with what Slotkin calls the ‘Revised Outlaw’, once an unruly rebel but now a nascent psychopath. Tracing these developments, one sees ‘the ideological clichés of the historical western give way to a new view of the western myth in which the difference between lawman and outlaw is obscured by their kindred gift for violence and is rendered problematic by their characterological difference or alienation from their communities’.43 It must be added that the communities have changed as well. In earlier years they were well-intentioned gatherings of mostly ‘decent folks’ trying to carve out reasonably stable lives by working hard enough to keep nature’s threats at bay and relying on the force of law to stave off the discordant consequences of unimpeded rivalry, acquisitiveness and lust for power. If films like High Noon and Shane show what can happen when decent folks are not up to the task, the Dollars trilogy throws piercing doubt on the possibility of the task itself, finding cinematic excitement not in the halting emergence 100

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

of something like civilisation but in the universal chaos that surrounds, infiltrates and infests the enterprise. This is the existentially absurd West into which the Stranger of High Plains Drifter and the Preacher of Pale Rider make their way, shrouded in vengeance and equipped for the deadly destruction that will provisionally purge weakwilled, corruptible communities of the evil that has metastasized around and within them. I explore High Plains Drifter now and return to Pale Rider later. High Plains Drifter (1973) That isn’t what the West was all about. That isn’t the American people who settled this country. John Wayne on High Plains Drifter, paraphrased by Clint Eastwood44 High Plains Drifter is … one of the most extreme apocalyptic westerns of recent years; the way it relates to [My Darling Clementine] parallels very strikingly the way Night of the Living Dead relates to Meet Me in St. Louis. Robin Wood45 It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. American military officer in Vietnam, 196846 Eastwood plays a mysterious Stranger who strongly recalls Clint’s laconic, hard-bitten characters in the Sergio Leone trilogy. Arriving in a mining town called Lago, he kills three gunslingers who attack him, and then accepts a job defending the town from outlaw Stacey Bridges and his two henchmen, who (in an echo of High Noon) are returning to take revenge on the citizenry for condemning them to prison after they viciously murdered the marshal. Vested with unchecked authority by the townspeople in return for protecting them from the killers, the Stranger embarks on a series of increasingly odd actions – choosing a lowly dwarf named Mordecai as the new mayor and ordering that the town be painted red, among other things – while a pair of distorted dream-sequence flashbacks suggest that he may be more than an ordinary human being. Whereas moderately offbeat westerns like High Noon and Shane blur the boundaries between hero and villain while sharpening the divisions between gunfighter and community, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider go a major step farther, obscuring the distinction between human and superhuman, natural and non-natural, possible and impossible worlds. These pictures are ‘supernatural westerns featuring archetypal heroes with magical powers’, Jim Kitses argues, and deriving much of their fascination and suspense from the tantalising ‘mystery surrounding the god-like hero’ and his varying relationships with the assortments of people he encounters during his quests.47 The nature of the films’ heroes is an outgrowth of the image created by Eastwood and Leone in their three films together, Dave Kehr correctly notes, manifesting a ‘rigid control of words, gestures, actions and emotions’ that connotes ‘almost supernatural powers’, which, joined to ‘frequent associations with death’, lend Eastwood a ‘mystical otherc h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

101

Eastwood with Billy Curtis in High Plains Drifter (1973): shrouded in vengeance, equipped for destruction

worldly stature. Not just an outsider, he is somehow beyond.’48 Eastwood’s antihero has a ‘devil quality’ for Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter, who see High Plains Drifter as partly an ‘homage to Japanese ghost-revenge melodramas’, especially at the finale ‘when the hero rides out of town and the midget sidekick asks him who he is’.49 The origins of High Plains Drifter were somewhat more mundane. Ernest Tidyman, who had scored major hits with his recent screenplays for Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), submitted the idea to Universal as ‘a nine-page treatment called “Mesa” or something’, Eastwood recalled later.50 Reading it, Eastwood became intrigued by the question it raised: ‘What would have happened if the sheriff of High Noon had been killed? What would have happened afterwards?’51 Besides reconnecting Clint with a western in the classic tradition he admired, this question reflected the temper of the times, which in the United States of 1973 was strongly affected by deleterious effects of the Vietnam conflict. American fighting forces left Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords early that year, but combat continued among the Vietnamese themselves and Americans remained divided and disturbed vis-à-vis the overseas violence and domestic turmoil that their government’s policies had brought about. Tidyman’s treatment had the sheriff’s brother returning to avenge his sibling, anticipating by more than a decade the insanely popular Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985), wherein a combat veteran returns to Vietnam on a secret mission and synecdochically refights the conflict, ridiculing wimpy commanders, succeeding where his predecessors failed and avenging the honor of America’s world-taming military might.52 Beating him to the punch by a dozen years, when Vietnam was still an active and distressing flashpoint, the Stranger similarly refights a conflict, ridicules wimpy citizens, succeeds where his predecessor failed and avenges the honor of a town-taming lawman’s authority.53 John Rambo’s crusade is drenched in xenophobic bloodletting and encapsulated by a question: ‘Sir, do we get to win this time?’ The Stranger’s crusade is driven by commonsense anger and encapsulated by a truism: ‘It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes ’em afraid.’ The question of real-world plausibility – is the Stranger a vengeful brother of the murdered sheriff, or an avenging angel, or perhaps a demon? – is something Eastwood did not settle in his own mind until years after High Plains Drifter debuted. ‘As far as me justifying the role,’ he said in the mid-1970s, ‘he was the brother. But as far as the audience is concerned, if they want to draw him as something a little more than that, that’s fine.’54 When he described the film’s genesis in 1984, however, more ambiguity crept in. In the original treatment, he said, ‘the sheriff’s brother came back to avenge 102

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

the sheriff and the villagers were as contemptible and selfish as in High Noon. But I opted eventually for an appreciably different approach: you would never know whether the brother is question is a diabolic being or a kind of archangel. It’s up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.’55 And in 1997 the story has become still more ambiguous. Many people had come to him in puzzlement about the protagonist, Eastwood told an interviewer. ‘They asked, “Is he the brother of the murdered sheriff … and has come to town to enact some kind of retribution, or is [he] some supernatural demon or an avenging angel or what?” I said, “Well, it could be all three.” … I played it as if he could have been some apparition. … And you never really find out.’56 In a metaphysically informed analysis of High Plains Drifter, film scholar Laurence F. Knapp describes it as a mixture of the Book of Revelation, High Noon and A Fistful of Dollars, with the Stranger embodying an ‘archangel sent by the Lord to punish the wicked town of Lago’ for its craven failure to intervene when three interlopers whipped Jim Duncan, their marshal, to death in public view. On this view, the Stranger has been summoned by Duncan’s dying curse (‘Damn you all to hell’) and by the unholy nature of the town itself, which is an ‘abomination’, an ‘aberration’, and a ‘Petri dish for the Seven Deadly Sins’.57 (Thompson and Hunter detect ‘overtones of Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the place.)58 Seeming to materialise ‘out of … nothingness’, in Knapp’s description, the Stranger rides toward town in an extreme telephoto shot that suggests he is arriving from ‘a netherworld, a threshold [he] must cross to reach … the earth’. His descent from hilly terrain recalls the mountaintops that ‘are frequently the home of God and his celestial court’ in myth and religion, and the town crouches ‘in an elemental realm where air, water, and earth converge’, soon to be joined ‘by God’s fury and the fourth element: fire’. By restaging his entry scene in A Fistful of Dollars as a visitation from beyond, Eastwood refigures his Stranger archetype as ‘an eschatological force, a spiritual entity’ who is ‘truly invincible’ in the face of evil and will ultimately leave the mortal world the way he came, recrossing the threshold and dematerialising into the imperceptibility whence he emerged.59 As we have seen, Eastwood’s view of High Plains Drifter has evolved over the years to put increasing emphasis on the protagonist’s ambiguous ontology; but this undecidability was already built into his directorial concept. When shooting a dream-vision flashback to the lethal bullwhipping of the sheriff, Eastwood had stunt coordinator Buddy Van Horn trade places with him so that the Stranger’s identity, and his connection with this pivotal event, would be enigmatic even beyond the visual ambiguity brought to the scene by Bruce Surtees’s highly expressionistic cinematography. ‘Duncan’s physiognomy is not defined – it is hinted at,’ Knapp accurately notes. What concerns the film is not the marshal’s identity but ‘his death and the moral crisis which caused it’.60 Knapp sees this as a sort of narrative trap sprung by the spiritual trickster on the morally bereft townspeople: ‘The Stranger comes to Lago in a form similar to Duncan’s so that the town can recognize its sins,’ and the fact that only two citizens sense the resemblance is evidence of the ‘moral blindness and ignorance’ prevailing there.61 Dennis Bingham also sees the early Eastwood hero as a trickster,62 a ‘combination of the amorphous and the monolithic’ who is played by Eastwood with ‘movements [that] only suggest rather than delineate character, effacing any individual characterc h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

103

istics and mannerisms’. In a significant post-Leone change, however, the ‘playfulness’ and ‘mischievousness’ of the Man With No Name are absent from the Stranger of High Plains Drifter, replaced by more specific indicators of place and circumstance (the Stranger dresses like a wanderer, no longer seems vaguely ‘Mexican’, and so forth) that interact with the character’s uncanny narrative situation – he has journeyed from beyond to avenge his murder and obtain a properly marked grave – in important ways. ‘By making the seemingly Otherworldly Man With No Name concretely Otherworldly,’ Bingham writes, ‘the American films [starring Eastwood, of which High Plains Drifter is typical in this regard] base spectatorial pleasure in an overwhelmingly imaginary image,’ justifying the maneuver ‘by grounding the action … in elemental symbolic principles of law and justice and language.’63 Sifting through this evidence, Bingham concludes that Clint’s films of the 1960s and 1970s ‘construct a solipsistic order organized around the phallus, and in the service of an imaginary projection of the self ’ – so drastically imaginary that the Italian trilogy is able to ‘defy time’, paying no heed to temporal consistency, and the American films are able to ‘defy death’, centering on ghostly heroes who ‘are more substantial dead than alive’. Pairing the protagonist’s physical elusiveness with a profound moral evasiveness, Bingham argues, Eastwood’s movies of this period are ‘really dangerous’, confusing individual and community values (in High Plains Drifter, community powers must be punished for violating an individual’s rights) with an antisocial gusto that finds its other great outlet in the Dirty Harry films.64 Knapp’s conclusion is more sympathetic to High Plains Drifter as a work of mythopoeia, as when he describes the Stranger riding out of town at the end, gazing ‘with a hard, cautionary stare’ at the ‘bruised and bleeding survivors of the previous night’s Armageddon’, each carrying ‘a mark of some kind to remind them of the Lord’s judgment and their tentative deliverance’. Is this harsh visitant Jim Duncan, or is he Gabriel, or is he Eastwood himself, ‘bravely reshaping a persona into a moral force of divine proportions?’ The enigma lingers ‘as the Stranger returns to the void, vanishing the same way he appeared: a telephoto enigma, an archangel without a name’.65 I have discussed these analyses at length because I find both of them compelling, but they are reductive as well. Bingham draws too much ammunition from standard psychoanalytic theory, ending his study of ‘Men with No Names’ by positing ‘the fundamental Clint Eastwood persona as articulated in his films’ as an unsurpassed manifestation of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, ‘whereby a basically incoherent existence is rendered coherent by an idealized reflection that the subject embraces’.66 This is a reasonable conclusion, and Bingham backs it up with a good deal of film-specific evidence, but his theoretical foundation (relying on Lacan and Christian Metz, among others) is too broad and familiar to produce many fresh insights with respect to the singular qualities of Eastwood’s early performances.67 Knapp illuminates various textual aspects of High Plains Drifter, pointing out the struggles it stages between motion and moral strength on one side, stasis and paralysis on the other, and the ways in which lighting (natural light, backlighting) and camerawork (anamorphosis, foreshortening) inflect the film’s powerfully oneiric vision. He seems most strongly attached to his theological reading, however, and as robust as this generally is, it would be more effec104

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

tive if he did not oscillate so casually between the Old and New Testaments, likening the film’s code of divine justice to that of the Pentateuch and the Book of Job on one page, then calling the Stranger a Christian archangel on another.68 I find the Old Testament connection much stronger than the Christian one; wrath and retribution, not repentance and redemption, are what galvanise the story. This said, I want to cite a reading of High Plains Drifter by Kitses that implicitly links Bingham’s gender-specific interpretation with Knapp’s theological explication. In the film, he writes: Eastwood exploits the genre’s mythic substructure to create a crypto-Calvary fable, an allegory where revenge and resurrection meet, hero as Christ and anti-Christ. Aptly, this noir redeemer’s spiritual force appears vested in a supermasculinity embodied in a supreme physical presence. Authority in various forms – spiritual, moral, legal – and in different guises – corrupt, usurped, butchered – is clearly the film’s subject, but the authority of the Stranger is first and foremost a matter of superior manhood.69 Conceiving of the Stranger as Christ and anti-Christ suits both the letter and the spirit of this intriguingly skewed morality tale, in which even the most grounded interpretations tend to shimmer, fade and slip away as quietly and ineluctably as the Stranger at the end of his story. Remembering that the Stranger instructs his Lago factotums to include ‘especially the church’ when painting the town red, it is worthwhile to pursue theological analysis farther by noting the verses from the Book of Isaiah that appear on a placard in Lago’s house of worship: ‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.’70 If we take literally the idea that the Stranger has been sent by God to eradicate the reign of evil in a City of the Plain, we are free to identify him with the subject of this Scriptural passage; the man of sorrows is ‘the arm of the Lord’ in Isaiah’s messianic prophecy, and that is exactly how the religious reading of High Plains Drifter sees the protagonist.71 In the verse immediately before the one quoted, however, we learn that the man of sorrows ‘hath no form nor comeliness’ and possesses ‘no beauty that we should desire him’, which hardly sounds like an Eastwood character. And while Clint’s laconic silence accords with Isaiah’s statement that the man of sorrows ‘openeth not his mouth’, the prediction that he will be ‘with the rich in his death … because he had done no violence’ surely rules out the Stranger’s candidacy.72 Is the biblical placard a bit of set-decoration flotsam, then, meriting no more than a passing glance? Or an inadvertently ambiguous clue, destined to tantalise and mislead incautious hermenauts? Perhaps, but a simpler possibility beckons as well. The man of sorrows – deficient in form, devoid of beauty, inspiring no desire, drawing little attention when he speaks, and doing violence (shooting Lewis Belden to save the Stranger’s life) only when the cause is just and the action is unavoidable – might c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

105

well be Mordecai, the village dwarf who becomes Lago’s mayor and marshal when the Stranger so appoints him. Mordecai receives his abrupt change of status when the Stranger indulges what appears to be a random impulse, but its ramifications are too great for it to be so easily dismissed.73 The oxymoronic phrase that describes the act – the elevation of the dwarf – points to what cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would call the carnivalistic current of the film, with carnival signifying not the opportunity for casual, fleeting fun but the enduring strain in social and artistic life that is dedicated to questioning, testing, challenging, subverting and overturning the inherited ideas, habits and hierarchies that organise our lives in so-called normal times. Carnivalism is a complex, multifaceted and profoundly relativistic concept, compounded of darkness as well as light. Bakhtin describes carnival as a state of ‘syncretic pageantry … without footlights and without division into performers and spectators’; it is ‘the place for working out, in a … half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals. … Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’. Carnivalistic thought does not hesitate to deal with ‘ultimate questions [about] life and death’, but it plays them out on ‘the concretely sensuous plane of images and events – which are, in keeping with the spirit of carnival, dynamic, diverse and vivid’.74 Carnivalism has an affinity for ‘grotesque realism’, stressing ‘downward movement’ including ‘fights, beatings, and blows’ along with actions that ‘throw the adversary to the ground, trample him into the earth [and] bury their victim’, although in order to be carnivalistic these must also be paradoxically ‘creative’ acts that ‘sow and harvest’.75 Chief among all carnivalistic deeds is the ‘mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king’, which embodies ‘the very core of the carnival sense of the world – the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal. Carnival is the festival of all-annihilating and all-renewing time’.76 Just as a town’s unluckiest outcast might be crowned Lord of Misrule in a medieval feast of fools, Mordecai is named the chief executive of Lago by an outsider whose goal is to expose, deride and overthrow the ruthlessly hierarchical values – based on greed, enabled by cowardice, enforced through lethal thuggery – by which the town has allowed itself, recklessly and spinelessly, to be engulfed. Thus empowered, Mordecai moves through the community with an ease and freedom that were callously denied him before the Stranger turned custom upside down, demonstrating the merits of misrule as opposed to rule by fear and force. Mordecai shows that he is the Stranger’s natural ally by refusing to forget the atrocity of Duncan’s death (hiding low beneath a walkway, he remembers witnessing the killing from the same ground-level vantage point) and by taking on the task of carving Duncan’s gravestone at the end. In their different ways, he and the Stranger are the sorts of marginalised figures (rogues, fools, clowns) that embody, in Bakhtin’s terms, ‘the right to be other in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available’.77 Mordecai and the Stranger take on the trappings of existing categories – the dwarf becomes a mayor and a sheriff, the avenging angel becomes a human gunfighter – but these guises throw their allegorical functions into higher relief. Like other mythic figures, they ‘can exploit any position … as a mask’, and they do so as a 106

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

way of refusing the ‘possessive and selfish’ nature of the ‘bourgeois ego’ represented by the townspeople as a whole.78 Mordecai’s significance notwithstanding, the carnivaliser in chief is of course the Stranger himself. Whereas the Bridges gang’s violence is purely and shamelessly destructive, the Stranger’s violence carries seeds of renewal that may someday yield a restorative harvest for those who survive his apocalyptic acts. When he appropriates merchandise on Main Street in a comical display of dominance, the Stranger carnivalises capitalism as amusingly as he carnivalises the offices of mayor and sheriff. (‘This crazy picnic, two hundred gallons of red paint,’ Belden whines. ‘It couldn’t be worse if the devil himself had ridden right into Lago.’) Bridges and his gang have vowed to burn Lago to the ground, creating a cataclysm of pain, suffering and death; but when the Stranger rechristens the town Hell and allows it to burn with abandon, he produces a carnival underworld blazing with a carnival fire that ‘simultaneously destroys and renews the world’.79 The possibility of Lago’s renewal comes at great cost, and it won’t come at all if the townspeople fail to take advantage of the creative destruction brought about by the Stranger during his sojourn. (Eastwood thought they would fail: ‘As soon as he leaves, they fall back into the error of their ways and their failure is obvious, their disgrace is unpardonable. They’ve learned nothing, but they’re thoroughly traumatized,’ he said in 1984.)80 While carnivalesque experience is liberating, its upheavals and disruptions can be as inescapably daunting as they are potentially productive. The danger of overvaluing the carnivalesque is a recurring theme of Bakhtin’s critics, including psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek, who is troubled by (among other things) the celebration of noncentralised organisation as a carnivalsesque paradigm for social and political progress. In one such commentary, written from his habitual Lacanian perspective, Žižek asks if ‘late capitalist social reality [is] itself not already carnivalesque’, and observes (not for the first time) that ‘carnival’ is ‘also the name for the obscene underside of power – from gang rapes to mass lynchings’ in strife-ravaged parts of the world.81 The implacable anger of High Plains Drifter, directed by an archetypal avenger at a community too pusillanimous for any hope of regeneration without brutal ‘encouragement’, inoculates the movie from any risk of overrating carnivalesque tumult, much less romanticising it. As an adaptation of Leone’s quasichaotic vision to the exigencies of Hollywood production at a time of rapidly shifting mass-audience tastes, Eastwood’s fiery western simultaneously assaulted and revivified a genre already undergoing major metamorphosis.82 It is no wonder that John Wayne, a superannuated star approaching the end of his own all-American trajectory, couldn’t stomach it. A romance, a gun, a heist and a mountain After consolidating his directorial credibility and reconfirming his movie-star charisma with High Plains Drifter, Eastwood made four pictures in three years – one as director only, two as actor only, and one as director and star – all set in the American West at more or less the present day. None is a great movie, but all have points of particular interest. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

107

Breezy is one of the occasional pictures that Eastwood has directed without acting in. Magnum Force (1973) brought Harry Callahan back to the screen with the assistance of trusty Ted Post, a director Clint knew from his Hang ’Em High and Rawhide days. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) paired Eastwood with the affable Jeff Bridges in a heist scenario written and directed by Michael Cimino, who did not yet know that an ambitious western called Heaven’s Gate (1980) would throw his career into reverse half a dozen years later. And The Eiger Sanction returned Eastwood to the director’s chair for an entertainingly far-fetched adventure yarn. It was a busy and productive stretch in the skyrocketing star’s career. Breezy (1973) Eastwood was 43 years old in 1973, the year that brought Breezy, a mild-mannered romantic drama with age very much on its mind. The title character is a teenage flower-child type (Key Lenz) who wheedles a ride from a divorced real-estate agent (William Holden) and soon begins an affair with him, which eventually falls prey to the differences in their outlooks and the 35-year gap between their ages. Jo Heims, who had co-written Play Misty for Me and worked on Dirty Harry, saw her script as a change-of-pace vehicle for Clint and a nice showcase for Sondra Locke, who had earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress when she made her screen debut as 14-year-old Mick in Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968), filmed when Locke herself was 21. Locke’s career had not prospered since her first big success, the unexpectedly high grosses of Daniel Mann’s horrorfest Willard (1971) aside, and Eastwood decided she was too old and too worldly for Breezy without even giving her a screen test. She would later play a substantial role in Eastwood’s personal and professional lives, but now he opted for Lenz, a 20-year-old TV actress recommended by Ferris Webster, the film editor of Joe Kidd and High Plains Drifter as well as many future Eastwood pictures. Turning down Heims’s other casting choice, Eastwood decided not to put himself into the film either; just as Locke was too old for Breezy, he felt he was too young for Frank Harmon, a man who has been around the block more than a few times. William Holden’s last major movie had been Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969, and he was so pleased with Eastwood’s approach that he agreed to star in Breezy for a share of the profits in lieu of a regular fee.83 Universal would rather have seen Eastwood on the screen as well as behind the camera, and approved the production with the proviso that he keep to a modest million-dollar budget. The studio may also have been edgy about the story’s portrayal of romantic partners with an age gap almost as large as that between Humbert Humbert and Lolita. Holden suited the part. He was a reasonably versatile actor, as Hollywood stars go, and Eastwood biographer Marc Eliot perceptively observes that he often embodied ‘the repressed American male lover, constricted by social mores from getting down and dirty with co-stars’, such as Grace Kelly in Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and Jennifer Jones in Henry King’s Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), and prone to delayed bursts of pent-up emotion in such ‘rage-fests’ as Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) 108

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).84 Holden’s pedigree was not nearly enough to energize Breezy at the box office, though. His worn-down demeanor was one of several reasons adduced by critics for the film’s financial failure, along with the absence of a believable spark between him and Lenz, weaknesses in the script and general lack of interest in a movie directed by Clint Eastwood but starring somebody else. Reviews were lacklustre at best. Variety found the film merely an ‘okay contemporary drama’ and New York critic Judith Crist geared up for decades of battle with Eastwood by deeming it ‘so perfectly awful that it’s almost good enough for laughs’.85 Molly Haskell wrote a lengthy analysis in the Village Voice, praising it as ‘a love story in which almost everything works’ and contending that ‘the ego-massaging idea of a teenybopper turned on by a daddy-figure is nicely balanced by the suggestion that she is also making a hefty “score” off him’. Her enthusiasm waned in later paragraphs, where she observed that ‘the male chauvinist fable has its ugly side’ and outed Holden as not twice Breezy’s age, as the movie presents him, but ‘three times her age and too old to be her father’. Haskell would soon publish From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, her path-breaking book of feminist film criticism, and her incisiveness is vividly on display when she describes Frank nastily expelling a woman with whom he has spent the night and then blasts the scene to kingdom come: ‘This is the kind of thing that makes my oversensitive semi-tired skin crawl – the incidental cruelties to women over thirty, all the more brutal for being incidental, and the sexual inequities the movie so casually perpretrates.’86 By contrast, Howard Thompson of the New York Times actually did think that pretty much everything in the film worked; he lauded the acting, dialogue, and directing, and called the story ‘engrossing’ except for its ‘cloyingly naïve’ finale.87 Thompson specialised in short-form reviews, however, and this one was over almost as soon as it began. So were all hopes that Eastwood’s first foray into screen romance would blossom into a long-term relationship. Many years would pass before he ventured into this territory again. Magnum Force (1973) A phenomenon with the impact of Dirty Harry was bound to spawn at least one sequel; there turned out to be four, of which Magnum Force was the first to arrive. The screenplay, penned by John Milius and Michael Cimino from Milius’s story idea, grew from Eastwood’s interest in juxtaposing Harry Callahan with other, more extreme vigilantes whose excesses would make him look almost reasonable by comparison. This was right up Milius’s dark alley. Fond of presenting himself as a gun-loving military buff with a sweet spot for wars and warriors, he espoused a libertarianism not entirely dissimilar to Eastwood’s own. ‘Any true, real right-winger if he goes far enough hates all form of government,’ he told an interviewer in 1999, ‘because government should be done to cattle and not human beings.’88 (One can imagine Eastwood uttering those words, although it is less likely that Clint would ask Milius’s rhetorical question in the same interview, ‘Don’t we want to be just dogs just barely held by the chain?’) Milius later directed The Wind and the Lion (1975), a colonialist adventure yarn, and Red Dawn (1984), a bone-chilling exercise in Cold War paranoia. Cimino was less paranoid but c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

109

more pessimistic, prone to characters who are ‘negative, dreamers, disillusioned with America’, as a French-language profile on his website accurately puts it.89 Directed by Ted Post with the requisite degree of action-movie gumption, Magnum Force takes off from Inspector Callahan’s discovery that an execution squad has arisen within the police department, ‘trying to put the courts out of business’ by slaying mobsters, drug kingpins, corrupt union leaders and the rest of their filthy ilk. New York Times reviewer Nora Sayre wittily contended that ‘certainly policemen shouldn’t see it. The movie merely thickens the soup of confusion about their role.’90 With or without police patronage, the picture cleaned up at the box office, out-grossing Dirty Harry and becoming the sixth-best earner of the year. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) The success of Magnum Force encouraged Eastwood to buy Michael Cimino’s original screenplay for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot– about rebels on the road, a subject in vogue at that moment – and to let Cimino make his directing debut with the project under Malpaso’s auspices. The main characters meet cute when young hit man Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) fails to knock off seasoned crook Thunderbolt (Eastwood) and then teams up with him for an ambitious heist, designed to make up for the swag that got lost after an earlier job. A featherweight entertainment with a bittersweet ending, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is appealingly photographed by Frank Stanley, who had also shot Breezy and Magnum Force, and effectively edited by Ferris Webster, a frequent contributor to Eastwood films. The cast includes George Kennedy, soon to figure importantly in The Eiger Sanction, and Geoffrey Lewis, an energetic character actor who worked with Eastwood many more times in subsequent years. Bridges scored an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, which Eastwood considered unfair to his own stellar performance, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot did well enough at the box office (earning almost $22 million domestically) to propel Cimino toward the golden directorial opportunity of The Deer Hunter in 1978. In the DVD commentary for Year of the Dragon (1985), his failed comeback attempt following the financial calamity of Heaven’s Gate, Cimino said that he owed his filmmaking career to Eastwood’s support when he was getting started. The Eiger Sanction (1975) Named after the mountain atop which some of it takes place, The Eiger Sanction is an odd mixture of movie elements. It starts with a burst of mayhem involving a trio of secret agents and a piece of microfilm, the latter serving as a MacGuffin of the classic type found in, say, The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959) by Alfred Hitchcock, who coined what is now the standard term for a plot device that does not much interest the audience but keeps the characters hopping through the story. The scene then shifts to a classroom, where professor Jonathan Hemlock is delivering a lecture to his students. He is an art professor, and he is played by Clint Eastwood – a 110

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

sublimely ridiculous casting choice, which I likened in my 1975 review to having Muhammad Ali portray a ballerina.91 Additional unexpected touches follow. In a science fictionesque espionage centre, we discover that the versatile Professor Hemlock is also (a) a professional assassin in the employ of the United States government; (b) a collector of criminally acquired masterpieces of world art; and (c) a top-drawer mountaineer. These may sound like rather too many identities for a single character to bear, but the narrative weaves them together in a reasonably logical manner. The professor has decided to retire from the assassination game, but is forced to accept one more assignment by a superspy who blackmails him with the threat of squealing to the IRS about his clandestine painting collection, and the target of the impending hit is about to embark on a perilous climb up the eponymous mountain. Hemlock’s job is to trail, sneak up on and terminate the unsuspecting victim. Although it is a rocky and uneven film, The Eiger Sanction has a fair number of bright and suspenseful moments, many of which are all the more effective for acrophobes (like this writer) who enjoy having their spines chilled by harrowing action on insecure crags and precarious perches. Eastwood’s unsubtle directing hammers the story home effectively, with commendable attention to details of performance, as when secondary character Ben Bowman (George Kennedy) positively squirms with apprehension when gazing at a mountainside plot twist in the distance. Clint’s filmmaking skills were clearly on the rise, outpacing the gradual improvement in his acting, as I acknowledged in 1975 when I credited his visual style with a brash articulateness and sense of proportion that his performances still lacked.92 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) The Outlaw Josey Wales … an army of one Warner Bros. poster, 1976 Josey Wales is a farmer whose home and family are destroyed by Union soldiers as the Civil War draws to a close. Joining a band of Southern guerrillas seeking revenge on the North even though the Confederacy has surrendered, he goes through a number of battles and crises. Then he heads west, on the lam from enemies who want him dead. During his journey he accumulates a motley group of fellow travelers who constitute a small community unto themselves, with Josey as their de-facto leader and guide. The picture got under way soon after Eastwood settled into his new offices on the Warner Bros. lot, only a mile away from the Universal set-up. He had been hired away from Universal by Warner Bros. president Frank Wells, whose faith in Clint’s drawing power had not been shaken by the recent box-office underperformance (to put it mildly) of The Eiger Sanction. Eager to find a project with more dollar signs written on it, Clint became interested in a western novel called The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which Malpaso’s one-person story department, Sonia Chernus, had flagged for his attention.93 The book had arrived at Malpaso over the transom, accompanied by a letter from the author that Eastwood later called ‘a reaching-out kind of thing.’ Published by a miniscule Alabama press in 1973 and reissued by Delacorte Press as Gone to Texas in 1975, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

111

the novel bore the name of one Forrest Carter, who presented himself as ‘a part-blood Cherokee who is Storyteller in Council to the Cherokee Nations’.94 We shall return to Forrest Carter, an unusually fascinating figure, later in this chapter. Aware that westerns were trying for a Hollywood comeback, and encouraged by Eastwood’s enthusiasm for the property, Wells said his studio would back a Josey Wales movie with a modest budget of $4 million. Chernus wrote a treatment and Eastwood hired Philip Kaufman, a San Francisco cineaste who had gone to the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School, to polish the screenplay and direct the picture. Kaufman was fresh from writing and directing The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid in 1972 and directing The White Dawn in 1974; the former was an offbeat western, the latter a whalers-and-Eskimos adventure that impressed Eastwood with its ‘unblinking realism’.95 Three things weighed in favor of Kaufman when Clint decided to give him the job: Clint liked his two recent films; both men were represented by the William Morris Agency; and Kaufman lived considerably north of Hollywood, like Clint himself. Two things weighed against Kaufman when he and Clint actually started work. One was that Kaufman was a deliberate director whose habit of taking his time and thinking things through clashed sharply with Clint’s habit of working spontaneously and shooting from the hip. The other was that Kaufman thought he was directing the picture by himself, not with Clint looking over his shoulder and squirming with impatience at his judicious approach. Clint versus Phil It is possible that Eastwood’s disillusionment with Kaufman was essentially a matter of artistic vision, rooted in Kaufman’s view of the project as a response to Clint’s earlier westerns; this is what Knapp suggests when he writes that Kaufman wanted to ‘demystify the Man With No Name, something Eastwood could not tolerate’.96 But while artistic differences were definitely present, a look at the production’s history shows that Eastwood and Kaufman were fated for collision from the beginning. To see how incompatible these two were, consider the disagreement that opened the first substantial rift between them. Eastwood decided that the character named Laura Lee, a fetching Kansas woman traveling west with her grandmother, should be played by Sondra Locke, who he had ruled out for the title role in Breezy. Kaufman, not certain that Locke was the best choice, wanted to think the matter over. ‘Kaufman hesitated – and hesitated,’ McGilligan writes. ‘It wasn’t that [he] didn’t want Locke for the part, it was that for him rumination was part of the process. Clint waited and waited, sending off his coded signals, which Kaufman didn’t acknowledge, until finally Clint called Locke’s agent on a Saturday, and made the decision himself.’ Soon afterward Kaufman told a confidante that Eastwood’s action was ‘the worst thing that anybody’s ever done to me. He cut my balls off.’ Making matters worse, when shooting began Kaufman took to ‘nursing a crush’ on Locke, according to McGilligan’s biography. Kaufman could not have known that Eastwood and Locke would soon become a steady couple, but Clint’s unusual eagerness to hire her might have given Kaufman a timely clue as to the star’s growing interest in her. In any event, Kaufman asked Locke to dinner (even 112

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

though his wife was on location with him) and then Clint asked her on the same night, and when she turned Clint down, for the excellent reason that she had already said yes to Kaufman’s invitation, Clint sent coded signals expressing his dissatisfaction.97 Other disputes between Kaufman and Eastwood were equally damaging. Photography got under way in October 1975 on locations in Arizona, Utah and Wyoming, and media writer Marc Eliot reports that during the shoot Clint held ‘a script in one hand, so he could study his lines, a stopwatch in the other, so he could bring the film in on or under budget’.98 While efficiency was always Eastwood’s policy, and in this case his agreement with Warner Bros. required it as well, it did not comport well with Kaufman’s more tentative directing style. Tensions kept rising as shooting proceeded. Eastwood did not like some of Kaufman’s footage; the latter’s failure to stand up for himself when criticised struck Clint as a sign of weakness. Filming a shot of Laura Lee being raped, Kaufman irritated Clint by letting the camera run too long and then mistakenly yelling ‘action’ instead of ‘cut’ when the take was finished. By all accounts, the breaking point arrived when Kaufman dreamed up a visually stunning shot wherein Clint would ride over the crest of a sand dune, backlit by the sun during the photographic ‘magic hour’ just before twilight. Kaufman scouted the perfect place to shoot it and marked the spot with a beer can for future reference. When the time arrived to film it a few weeks later, Kaufman and Eastwood drove into the desert with a camera crew and high hopes – whereupon Kaufman could not find the beer can, and refused to stop searching for it even though other suitable spots were all around them. After a while Kaufman drove off to continue the hunt on his own, and Clint ordered assistant director Jim Fargo to set up the camera and grab the shot right there. A few hours later Eastwood called his lawyer to determine what the consequences might be if he fired Kaufman and took over the reins himself, which he felt was his right since he had paid for the story with his own money. Kaufman was canned at the end of the week, but biographers have very different stories of how the sacking occurred. Schickel: ‘[Clint] was, Daley reports, anguished about it, but rejected the producer’s offer to accompany him to the final confrontation. What passed between them no one but Clint and Kaufman knows [sic]. All the former says is, “It’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life”.’99 McGilligan: ‘Typically, someone other than Clint was obliged to execute the dirty deed, and the actual firing was delegated to producer Bob Daley. Clint hid out in his hotel room until Kaufman had been driven to the airport.’100 Whatever the exact circumstances of the firing were, one result of all this was a new regulation by the Directors Guild of America stating that no fired Guild member could be replaced by anyone else working on the same picture. Here again McGilligan has an acerbic view of Eastwood’s place in the action. Pointing out that the DGA contract already contained a clause meant to prevent such occurrences, he says the Guild’s leadership was ‘furious that an actor had been allowed to fire a director, especially a star who was also an executive in the production company [and] especially after the original director had completed all the preproduction and launched photography’. Mere reprimands were not likely to have much impact on a director who sometimes ‘played fast and loose with the unions’, McGilligan alleges, claiming that one of Clint’s c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

113

reasons for shooting his pictures on location was ‘to avoid union add-ons’. Unable to move effectively against Eastwood as long as he was filming in Utah, the Guild eventually settled for imposing a nominal penalty on him (probably paid by Warner Bros. anyway) and placing ‘the Clint Eastwood rule’ into the standard DGA contract.101 Kaufman’s career recovered from the blows it had suffered – he went on to direct such respected movies as The Right Stuff (1983) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) – but he must have nursed wounded feelings after his widely publicised firing, not least because his contributions to The Outlaw Josey Wales were considerable. By his own account he had ‘chosen the cast, picked the locations, determined the look of the film [and] the wardrobe’ before the start of principal photography.102 His writing also determined much of the film’s gestalt. While following Chernus’s adaptation (they share the screenplay credit) and retaining key ingredients of Carter’s novel, he amplified the role of the ‘red legs’ chasing Josey and gave more weight to the treacheries (the killings of Josey’s family and later of his men) that motivate much of the story; he also changed the Old West vernacular into dialogue more familiar to modern ears – ‘ye’ became ‘you’, ‘hoss’ became ‘horse’ and ‘reckin’ and ‘thisaway’ went thataway. (McGilligan insinuates that Kaufman changed the language as a favor to Clint, who would have needed more rehearsal to speak the old-fashioned lingo fluently.)103 The Outlaw Josey Wales is certainly a Clint Eastwood picture, thanks to his own creative input and that of other trusted collaborators (cinematographer Surtees, editor Webster, assistant director Fargo) who had worked with him before and would again in time to come. Yet it is clear that Kaufman’s early participation helped to shape the film’s final form and facilitate its eventual success, and his contributions deserve due recognition. It is ironic that Kaufman’s first movie after the Eastwood debacle was a 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.104 Countercultural mystique Kaufman wanted to demystify the Man With No Name, according to Knapp, who sees the hero of The Outlaw Josey Wales as an inspired variation on the character that made Eastwood a star. Although the finished film reflects Eastwood’s vision more than Kaufman’s, its eponymous outlaw nonetheless rings fascinating changes on Clint’s cowboy persona. Having raised the Leone gunman to mythic heights in High Plains Drifter, Clint now lowers him to earth – literally, by showing him plowing a field as the film begins – and endows him with a name, a history, a psychology and a plausible reason for his wandering ways. This does not mean that traces of the supernatural à la High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider cannot be found in this comparatively matter-offact story. Knapp calls Josey an ‘unwitting Messiah who leads a family of misfits and undesirables … to create a new Jerusalem’, and then ‘loses the Lord’s afflatus’ when his ‘divinely inspired task’ is finished.105 In a similar vein, Eliot finds that Josey’s gathering of marginalised souls puts a ‘light coating of Christian allegory’ onto the film.106 Analysing the picture from Slotkin’s historical perspective brings a more relevant kind of allegory to light. Although it starts as a gunfighter-revenge story, combining frontier history with Leone-style formalism, The Outlaw Josey Wales morphs into a 114

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) rings fascinating changes on Eastwood’s cowboy persona

post-Vietnam redemption allegory via two pivotal moments. One occurs when Josey enters a truce with a Comanche chief that calls for the sort of mutual deterrence and détente that was promoted in East/West diplomacy between 1973 and 1977; the other transpires when Josey, implicitly pictured as a Confederate counterpart of aggrieved Vietnam veterans, symbolically accepts the peace movement by marrying a ‘flower child’ from northern climes. Slotkin adds that the choice of Chief Dan George to play Josey’s sidekick (a decision made by Kaufman, incidentally) brings with it the countercultural, anti-war mystique that was associated with the Indian character he had played in Arthur Penn’s revisionist western Little Big Man six years earlier – a subtle and constructive touch that the film indirectly but regrettably contradicts when Laura Lee is assaulted by a gang of comancheros, most of them non-white.107 The Outlaw Josey Wales had its US premiere on 30 June 1976, arriving (by Slotkin’s timeline) about three-quarters of the way through Hollywood’s unsuccessful 1975–76 effort to revive the western genre by recasting innovations of the 1969–72 revival (seen in Little Big Man, Buck and the Preacher and other films) in less overtly political forms; hence the less direct, more allegorical form of Eastwood’s movie, which nonetheless failed to rejuvenate the genre. Other such attempts, including Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) and Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), were similarly unsuccessful in this ultimately unproductive venture. Shot by Bruce Surtees, who had filmed The Beguiled and many subsequent Eastwood projects, The Outlaw Josey Wales is an early example of the really-remarkably-dark cinematography that Eastwood increasingly gravitated toward from the mid-1970s on, and which reached its expressive apogee with Jack N. Green’s work in Unforgiven. The film also serves as a conceptual bridge between the grotesquerie and ferocity of High Plains Drifter and the similarly stark but ultimately more redemptive brand of violence in Pale Rider. This is most evident when Josey and his nemesis Fletcher have a face-to-face encounter just before the end, each man forestalling violence by declining to acknowledge the other’s identity. Josey is hiding his under the name Wilson, and Fletcher so addresses him, referring to Josey in the third person: Fletcher: I think I’ll go down to Mexico to try to find him. Josey: And then? Fletcher: He’s got the first move. I owe him that. I think I’ll try to tell him the war is over. What do you say, Mr. Wilson? Josey: I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damn war. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

115

There is more to say about the picture’s ideological stance, but first let’s take a detour into the surpassingly strange world of the writer who created the outlaw Josey Wales. Kind of grim and right-wingish Forrest Carter’s novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, a.k.a Gone to Texas, struck Kaufman as ‘kind of grim and right-wingish’ when he read it in preparation for the screenplay.108 And again, even more harshly: ‘“Fascist” is an overworked word, but the first time I looked at that book that’s what I thought: “This was written by a crude fascist.” It was nutty. The man’s hatred of government was insane.’109 Little did he realise how correct his intuitions were. Shortly after the movie version was released, it emerged that Forrest Carter was a pen name for Asa Earl ‘Ace’ Carter, whose extremely checkered past was replete with racism, anti-Semitism, red-baiting radio broadcasting and speechwriting for Alabama governor George Wallace, whose notorious rallying cry – ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’ – apparently came from Carter’s pen. (Carter took his nom de plume from Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessee planter and slave trader who became an early member, and perhaps an early Grand Dragon or Grand Wizard, of the Ku Klux Klan soon after its founding in 1866.) Carter had reinvented himself as an author when he left political affairs in the early 1970s, but not before declaring that every president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been a Jew and a member of ‘the same gang who financed the Russian Communist Revolution’ with New York City money; in 1970 he had also published a polemic against black police officers, warning that ‘you can expect your wife or daughter to be pulled over … by one of these Ubangi or Watusi tribesmen wearing the badge of Anglo-Saxon law enforcement and toting a gun … but [he will be] as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in the jungle’. Not even Klansmen were safe from Carter’s recklessly indulged rage; in 1957 he critically wounded two of them in a shootout over KKK money. (He was indicted for assault with intent to murder, but the charges were eventually dropped, apparently for political reasons.)110 The saga of the movie adaptation began when Carter sent a letter and a copy of the novel to producer Robert Daley, who arranged to meet with Carter on a date when Eastwood was out of town. ‘The letter,’ Daley recalled later, ‘spoke of Clint’s “kind eyes”. I thought, “Who in the world thinks that Clint Eastwood has ‘kind eyes’?” I was curious.’ Carter showed up at the airport so drunk that instead of taking him to the Malpaso offices the company’s driver stashed him in a bar, where Carter proceeded to urinate in the middle of the room. A couple of nights later he got so smashed over dinner that he held a knife to a secretary’s throat and said he would kill her and himself if she wouldn’t marry him. At a subsequent time he decided that Eastwood was exploiting him and demanded more money, which Clint advanced him out of his own salary (as a $15,000 payment due if and when net profits accrued) just to quieten things down. When financial squabbles arose Carter also unloaded viciously anti-Semitic slurs on people in the William Morris Agency, which represented both him and Eastwood.111 116

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Carter’s next two books were published by Delacorte Press in 1976. One was The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, a sequel to the first novel, and the other was The Education of Little Tree, an ecology-minded memoir.112 The latter once more caught Malpaso’s eye (before the author’s past was unveiled) but three other producers had already optioned the rights. It became a surprise bestseller when the University of New Mexico Press reprinted it in paperback ten years later, and such major Hollywood players as Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner and Robert Redford – either ignorant or forgetful of Carter’s scurrilous past – expressed interest in filming it.113 The final chapter of Carter’s bizarre history came to a close when he died in 1979 at age 53; the death certificate gave the probable cause as ‘aspiration of food and clotted blood’ and mentioned a ‘history of fights’ in the decedent’s past.114 A kind of epilogue appeared in 1991, when an Emory University scholar of Southern racial politics named Dan T. Carter exposed his infamous namesake (who may have been a distant cousin) all over again in a New York Times op-ed article, sparking a belated round of Carter commentary by other writers.115 The central question about Asa Carter was whether his comparatively reasonable and responsible book-length works were the result of a genuine change of heart, or whether his newly temperate persona was merely a façade meant to rehabilitate his image. Having witnessed a fair amount of his volatile behavior, which swung from rude and crude to civilised and courteous, Daley decided that the cranky writer was an opportunist who had covered over (but not necessarily abandoned) his hate-based worldview as a way of reconnecting with mainstream society.116 Dan T. Carter struck a similar tone: ‘In the last three years of his life … [Asa] Carter changed course,’ the history professor wrote. ‘But there are threads that stretch from [his] racist pamphlets to his new-age novels of the Native American: We live unto ourselves. We trust no one outside the circle of blood kin and closest comrades. We have no responsibilities outside that closed circle. Government and all its agencies are corrupt. Politics is a lie.’117 And there the matter rests. I relate Carter’s peculiar history for two reasons. One is that the revelation of his past posed a danger to Eastwood’s image (as a savvy professional) and to the bona fides of his movie (as an authentic western yarn) that they were fortunate to escape. ‘It’s a story written by an Indian about the period right after Reconstruction,’ Eastwood had told a journalist during preproduction. ‘The guy’s a poet … wrote Indian poetry … and someone talked him into writing this book … and I just fell in love with it.’118 Wrong on so many counts, these words might have caused Clint acute embarrassment if they had boomeranged on him when Carter’s past emerged. Eastwood could also have suffered guilt by association for having been involved with such a reprehensible character at all, so genuinely evil was Asa Carter’s career in Southern politics. At one point he had gone so far as to organise a hundred-man paramilitary unit, bombastically named the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, whose acts included an assault on musician Nat ‘King’ Cole during a Birmingham concert in 1956 and (without Asa Carter’s participation) the castration of a randomly selected African-American man in a Birmingham suburb in 1957, meant as a warning to ‘uppity’ blacks. It is a safe bet that if Dan T. Carter’s revelations had appeared in the New York Times when The c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

117

Outlaw Josey Wales was opening in theaters, complete with its erroneous statement that Clint was a ‘friend’ of Asa Carter, tabloids and moralists would have had a field day of anti-Eastwood and anti-Hollywood sermonizing. In any event, Clint acquitted himself nicely when word about this article reached him, writing the newspaper a letter: I enjoyed reading ‘The Transformation of a Klansman’ by Dan T. Carter (Op-Ed, Oct. 4), on the metamorphosis of the K.K.K. member Asa Carter into the best-selling writer Forrest Carter. I think Professor Carter in his article seems to be exhibiting some prejudice (or is it envy?) over Forrest Carter’s ability to write sensitive material. As to the accuracy of Professor Carter’s research, I just don’t know. I was never a friend of Forrest Carter; we met only briefly at the purchase of his novel on which my film ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ was based. If Forrest Carter was a racist and a hatemonger who later converted to being a sensitive, understanding human being, that would be most admirable. Clint Eastwood, Burbank, Calif., Oct. 9, 1991119 This calm, concise, constructive response shows Eastwood at his best: engaging with the issue, correcting a factual mistake in the op-ed, standing up for the talent of Asa ‘Forrest’ Carter – whose novel he had, after all, turned into a major motion picture – by way of a minor swipe at Professor Carter, yet maintaining a dispassionate tone and closing with a nod to moral regeneration that might have fit into one of Asa Carter’s books. Every crust of bread My other reason for exploring the Asa Carter story is that Eastwood did not have quite as much emotional and ideological distance from the inventor of Josey Wales as he may have thought or wished; there are ideas in Carter’s novel that spoke to Eastwood in fairly direct ways, which helps explain why he found the story so attractive when Daley and Chernus brought it to him. Schickel’s insights are especially interesting in this area; as both a personal friend and sympathetic biographer, he might be expected to minimise any sociopolitical leanings that Clint and Carter had in common. In fact he manages to be quite thoughtful about them, although his fundamental loyalty to Eastwood is never significantly compromised. A subtext of the novel, Schickel observes, is deep suspicion of government, which betrays and then harasses the hero, enacting the kind of treachery that must have fueled Carter’s own fervent distrust of governing authorities. Also implicit in the novel is the idea that regular folks can effectively resolve the frictions among them if government does not get in the way and muck things up – an opinion that recalls how many Southerners felt about federal enforcement of civil-rights laws in the years before Carter’s novel appeared. Eastwood knew nothing of Carter’s nasty past when he set out to film The Outlaw Josey Wales, and the book’s undertones of intolerance would surely have disturbed him if he had consciously recognised them. Yet he must have had some sense of where the author was coming from, and he evidently felt that Carter’s philosophy resonated 118

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

with his own, especially with regard to wariness about government power. Whenever this movie comes up, Schickel reports, Clint can be counted on to mention that he developed it in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, the era’s ‘two great betrayals of trust by American authority’.120 Perhaps the emotions that Vietnam and Watergate stirred in Eastwood explain why he was ‘unusually angry – and open – in his contempt for statism at this time’, in Schickel’s words. During a promotional visit to the UK shortly after The Outlaw Josey Wales was released, Clint told People that today ‘we live in a welfare-oriented society, and people expect more, more from Big Daddy government, more from Big Daddy charity. That philosophy never got you anywhere. I worked for every crust of bread I ever ate.’ Asked by a Variety reporter why black people often support his work so enthusiastically, Eastwood again alluded to his rejection of the welfare state: ‘I suppose they see me as an outcast. I play a lot of outcasts.’121 The idea of Clint Eastwood as a ragged proletarian, slaving away in the movie trade to earn the crusts of bread that keep him alive, is hilarious; and it is far from clear that African-American fans see him as an outsider or a castaway, however many of those he has portrayed. Interestingly, though, The Outlaw Josey Wales amounts to a spirited critique of precisely the sort of self-sufficient outcast with which Eastwood was associating himself in those remarks. He has described Josey as a ‘reticent-type person [who] doesn’t want relationships’, but the story shows that ‘the more he doesn’t want them, the more they keep imposing themselves on him’.122 Indeed, this movie marks something of an ideological breakthrough for Eastwood, since by the end of the story Josey’s little band of companions has managed to heal his existential wounds. ‘It was the first time [Eastwood’s] radically isolated screen character had come to such a comfortable end,’ Schickel concludes, ‘the first time a film did not leave him as it found him – alone with his self-sufficiency.’123 To be sure, Josey’s group has a communitarian tenor rather than a statist one. But it is also true that Eastwood has long projected a self-sufficient, quasi-loner image when it has suited his purposes, no matter how definitively his fame, fortune and high Hollywood status contradict such claims. Speaking about his politics in a 1997 interview, he said that right and left alike are fond of dictating to others, and that libertarians would be the same if they ‘seized influence’ because everything changes when a group gets into power. Interviewer: That kind of makes you a perpetual outsider then. Eastwood: Maybe. I guess so. The Rojos on one side, the Baxters on the other.124 And the man with more clout in the culture industry than a dozen ordinary starteurs somehow sees himself caught, alone and autonomous, in the middle. The Enforcer (1976), The Gauntlet (1977) Harry Callahan strikes again in The Enforcer, facing off with the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force, a terrorist outfit that behaves more like an ordinary band of thieves, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

119

kidnapping the mayor and saying they will blow San Francisco to smithereens if a multimillion-dollar ransom is not paid. Directed by James Fargo, the picture benefits from the presences of Bradford Dillman as Harry’s new superior, Captain McKay, and Tyne Daly as his new partner, Kate Moore, whose role in the story introduces a feminist perspective that has not figured too importantly in Inspector Callahan’s life or, generally speaking, in Eastwood’s movies. It would take on more importance in future Eastwood vehicles. The perpetual outsider cast himself as a different kind of loner in The Gauntlet, his second cop picture in a row. Here he portrays Ben Shockley, a second-rate detective and practicing drunk alongside whom Dirty Harry seems a powerhouse of initiative and good sense. Shockley works for the Phoenix police department, and so woeful are his professional deficits that Commissioner Blakelock (William Prince) is reluctant to give him any but the least taxing assignments. Such an assignment kicks the narrative into gear: Schockley is to travel to Las Vegas, take custody of a witness named Gus Mally (Sondra Locke), and squire Mally back to Phoenix to take the stand in a mob-related trial. Mally is a ‘nothing witness’ slated for a ‘nothing trial’, according to Blakelock; but Blakelock’s credibility comes into serious question when Shockley learns more about the task at hand. For one thing, Gus Mally turns out to be a woman, and a college-educated prostitute into the bargain. For another, she possesses highly privileged information that makes her a highly desirable target for the evildoers against whom she plans to testify. For still another, Vegas is offering 60-to-1 odds that she will never leave Nevada alive. Shockley is, well, shocked by these discoveries. But he rejects Mally’s suggestion that he slink back to Phoenix without her. Mustering persistence and resourcefulness that he has hitherto been drowning in whiskey, he decides to forge ahead. His determination only escalates when he learns that Blakelock is in cahoots with the criminals who want Mally, and Mally’s escort, dead as soon as possible. The Gauntlet blends elements from various genres – it is a suspense movie, an escape story and a police procedural – but mostly it is an action picture. Action scenes consumed almost twenty percent of the $5.5 million budget, and Mally’s house alone cost about $250,000, some of which paid for seven thousand holes drilled in the walls to hold explosive squibs.125 A car bomb and a chase in a careening ambulance initiate the film’s fast-paced pyrotechnics, followed by a shootout pitting Shockley and Mally against dozens of cops sent by Blakelock with orders to kill; the site is Mally’s house and the gunfire is so exuberant that the building topples clean over in the aftermath. ‘Still ahead of them,’ Roger Ebert wrote in his positive review, ‘are nights in the desert, an encounter with Hell’s Angels, a fight on a moving freight train, a chase in which their motorcycle is pursued by a rifle marksman in a helicopter,’ and finally the set piece that crowns the adventure, ‘in which Eastwood hijacks a passenger bus, armorplates it, and drives himself and his witness through downtown Phoenix against a hail of machine-gun fire,’ going up the steps of city hall for his grand finale.126 That is the story’s eponymous gauntlet, and it certainly is an ordeal. The hostile forces are lined up in awesome numbers along both sides of the street, and they blast what must be thousands of bullets as Shockley pilots the bus down the middle. As more than one pundit has observed, a great many of those bullets would logically pass 120

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

through, behind, or in front of the moving bus and hit the shooters across the way, resulting in piles of shot-up corpses at the conclusion of the scene. The Gauntlet is not particularly logical, however, nor is it remotely as grim as such an ending would have rendered it. It presents its mayhem as ‘a harmless, pop-art type of violence’, in Ebert’s words, ‘often with a comic quality’, and the climactic cataclysm is ‘an extravaganza of sound and action’ in which no one is killed.127 Noting the film’s humor from an academic perspective, Robert Alpert sees The Gauntlet as a comic take on Eastwood’s macho image, ‘premised on [an] unexpected, ironic reversal of the rules’.128 Shockley believes in clichés about obeying rules and regulations – he is an anti-Dirty Harry in this regard – whereas Mally is a sardonic trickster whose worldliness casts a satirical spotlight on his naïveté. Yet even as the film pokes fun at Eastwood’s mildly carnivalised cop, Alpert argues, it reinforces the stereotypical masculinity for which Eastwood stands in the pop-culture imagination: Shockley is mocked for being a conformist, not for being a macho individualist in the patented Eastwood mold. In sum, the action-comedy irreverence of The Gauntlet rests on sexist assumptions and establishmentarian biases of which Eastwood and company must have been aware, and Alpert underscores the film’s self-reflexive nature by cataloging famous films to which it tips its hat, from The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde to Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) and sundry disaster pictures.129 Alpert overplays his hand, however, when he concludes that Eastwood is ‘a kind of Russ Meyer of the action film’, both directors being ‘self-conscious poseurs who are caught in the self-destructive contradictions of their values but who ultimately believe in those values’. Of course Eastwood and his nudie-movie counterpart believe in the basic values of mainstream entertainment (mutatis mutandis, to be sure) and of course those values are fraught with contradictions, incongruities and discrepancies. To complain that Shockley’s passage through the gauntlet is ‘socially useless’ is to state the obvious and to miss the point. Vincent Canby captured the film’s tone more accurately in his New York Times review, declaring that ‘the screenplay … exists to accommodate the mayhem much in the way that the book for a Broadway musical supports the songs’, and adding that Eastwood plays Shockley with a style that is ‘unhurried and self-assured, that of a man who goes through life looking down onto the bald spots of others’.130 Here the critic’s mischief matches the movie’s intentions very well. Every Which Way But Loose (1978), Any Which Way You Can (1980) ‘No modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution.’ Unidentified paleoanthropologists, 1977131 In his second and last Eastwood collaboration, James Fargo directed the star in Every Which Way But Loose, the first of two pictures about Philo Beddoe, a California truck driver and freelance bare-knuckle fighter who is marginally more intelligent than Clyde, the orangutan with whom he shares his house. Philo falls for the perfidious saloon singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Sondra Locke), heads for Denver to woo her, makes enemies of a Los Angeles police officer and a biker gang called the Black Widows while c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

121

en route, narrowly escapes danger with help from best friend Orville Boggs (Geoffrey Lewis) and the latter’s girlfriend Echo (Beverly D’Angelo) and takes a gentlemanly dive in a climactic bout with Tank Murdoch (Walter Barnes), an over-the-hill fighter whose better days are long behind him. Eddie Rabbit’s recording of the title song was released three weeks before the film. Synergy between the movie and the music evidently helped them both, since the disc zoomed to the top of the country-music charts and the picture became a blockbuster hit. Its walloping popularity astonished industry insiders, who had frantically counseled Eastwood against appearing in such a stupid movie, and critics, who frantically chastened him for appearing in such a stupid movie. The two virtues of the film are its vivacious, energetic spirit and its open-hearted recognition that such bedrock human values as friendship, loyalty and resourcefulness thrive (along with their dark opposites) as lustily in working-class society as among more privileged folks who have more available choices in their lives. Two years later, most of the crew reunited for the sequel, Any Which Way You Can, directed this time by Buddy Van Horn, a longtime stunt performer and coordinator for Eastwood and others. The story begins with Philo’s decision to retire from the bare-knuckle circuit, then continues along unsurprising lines: Ms. Halsey-Taylor gets kidnapped again, the Black Widows are still mad from the last movie, Ma Boggs (Ruth Gordon) is still a total ditz and once more the climax is a fight decided less by bruised knuckles than by strength of character. Only poor Clyde, played by a different and less vital orangutan, seems sorry to take part. Reviewers gnashed their teeth, rent their garments, and wailed into the night as before, and the picture earned a fortune almost as large as that of its predecessor. Recognising that the formula would soon wear thin for him, if not for fans, Eastwood then laid Philo and Clyde to rest. Not a moment too soon. Escape from Alcatraz (1979) Eastwood starred in two pictures between the monkey movies, as his vehicles with Clyde became known, and each was refreshingly different in its way. The first was Escape from Alcatraz, one of the last films directed by Don Siegel, who was proud enough of this accomplishment to call himself Donald Siegel in the credits, using his formal first name for the first time since The Beguiled eight years earlier. The title perfectly describes the plot, which is based on real events, and a speech by a hard-boiled prison warden (Patrick McGoohan) to harder-boiled new inmate Frank Morris (Eastwood) kicks it into gear. Prison is for people who break society’s rules, the jailer tells the jailbird, and Alcatraz is for those who break a prison’s rules. The institution ‘was built to keep all the rotten eggs in one basket’, he continues, and I was specially chosen to make sure that the stink from the basket does not escape. Since I’ve been warden, a few people have tried to escape. Most of them have been recaptured; those that haven’t have been killed or drowned in the bay. No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz. And no one ever will. 122

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Frank listens, and Frank squints, and then Eastwood gives the squint an exquisitely precise adjustment that lets us know exactly what’s passing through Frank’s mind. The warden thinks he is being scary, but he is actually issuing the kind of dare that Clint Eastwood characters are delighted to accept. And from here the movie proceeds to its destination with a narrative logic so composed and orderly that it could almost be called serene. Siegel’s pride was justified. Escape from Alcatraz has a few overwrought moments – it is a bit much when old Doc (Roberts Blossom), a gentle artist and flower fancier, responds to the loss of his painting privileges by chopping off his fingers – but in the main it is a meticulously crafted procedural that promptly took its place with the genre’s classics. Such dependable Eastwood cronies as cinematographer Bruce Surtees and editor Ferris Webster lend their talents behind the camera, and the supporting cast (crucial in the close confines of a prison picture) includes Fred Ward, Paul Benjamin and neophyte Danny Glover in addition to those mentioned. The film’s most unexpected quality is the quietness with which it operates; this kind of jailbreak is a stealthy business, and Siegel makes the soundtrack as lean and spare as the bodies of Eastwood, Ward and Jack Thibeau (as a third escapee) when they go over the wall and into San Francisco Bay without benefit of stunt doubles. Richard Tuggle’s screenplay is correspondingly terse, but nonetheless eloquent at times. Amazed to learn that Frank does not know when his own birthday is, fellow inmate Charley Butts asks him what kind of childhood he had. Frank replies with a single word: ‘Short.’ Bronco Billy (1980) The title character of Eastwood’s gentlest western, Bronco Billy, is an amiable entrepreneur who has reinvented himself in a major way: once an ordinary shoe salesman, he is now the star and owner of a Wild West Show featuring a rope-twirling virtuoso (Sam Bottoms) and a snake charmer as well as Billy’s own riding, shooting, and showmanship. He is also an overgrown kid with unlimited faith in the power of positive dreaming. He loves his nomadic life, he is crazy about his fellow performers and above all he dotes on ‘the little cowboys and cowgirls’ who consistute his fan base. They are what buoy him up when difficulties weigh him down; chief among these are a chronic shortage of money and a dearth of female assistants with the gumption to serve as targets in Billy’s trick-shooting act. The latter problem may be solved when Billy meets Lilly – the glamorous and selfish Antoinette Lilly, fresh from being deserted by her husband on their honeymoon. She wants to lie low for a while, and Billy’s entourage is excellent camouflage for her disappearing act, so she joins up. In the real world, her no-good relatives are scheming to get control of her fortune, but inside the tent she discovers that all of the troupe’s members have undergone one kind of tribulation or another, and then found solace and even salvation via Bronco Billy’s show, where childhood dreams and crazy ambitions can come at least partly true. Under its benign influence she slowly grasps the true importance of companionship, friendship and love. The film’s focus on an ad-hoc band of likeminded individualists clearly echoes the conceit at the heart of its predecessor The Outlaw Josey Wales. Billy and the other main c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

123

characters are slightly larger than life – eccentric, sometimes troubled, but ultimately resilient and resourceful – while the minor characters are smaller-than-life personalities pursuing petty ploys that sink under their own weight. In my 1980 review I called Bronco Billy a colorful comic strip of a movie that enacts its own message about the happiness that is possible when one embraces fantasy instead of fending it off. I also noted the film’s major flaws: plot twists that do not fit comfortably into the overall narrative arc and an overly consistent tone, with no real peaks or valleys to vary a landscape that comes to seem timid and bland.132 For me, these judgments still hold up. Yet the picture’s directorial restraint and cheerfully positive attitudes make it a refreshing novelty from the period of Eastwood’s career that also produced such rowdy spectacles as The Gauntlet and Firefox. Dirty Harry turns into Mr. Nice Guy, and he turns out to be good company. Firefox (1982) Few subjects test the ethical standards of a serious filmmaker more effectively than war, and Eastwood has directed two war movies (Firefox and Letters from Iwo Jima) as well as two dramas (Heartbreak Ridge and Flags of Our Fathers) that fit the genre indirectly.133 The first to arrive was Firefox, starring Eastwood as Mitchell Gant, a former Vietnam War flyer who is smuggled into the Soviet Union with orders to steal the eponymous airplane, a superhigh-tech jet that is fabulously fast, invisible to radar and equipped with a thought-controlled weapon system whereby the pilot can fire missiles by force of brain waves alone. Two things make Gant the right man for the job: he speaks Russian well enough to pass for a native, and he has the right physique to sit in the plane’s custom-designed cockpit. But another thing makes him the wrong man for the job: a period of captivity in Vietnam has left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he might well crack under renewed pressure. His mission is to sneak into Moscow, disguised for some reason as an American drug dealer, and then fly away with the plane, which is so advanced that it could alter the balance of power between East and West. Firefox shares the Cold War paranoia that cropped up in a number of movies in the early to mid-1980s, such as Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983), Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983) and John Milius’s Red Dawn. From that perspective, it is a good thing for the West that Eastwood is available for the job. There is a bit of suspense as he slips past the entire Soviet security system – this must be one of the last movies where showing that one’s ‘papers are in order’ is a big deal – and a bit more as he skedaddles with the coveted aircraft. But most of the way, Firefox is quite a talky film, stretching a slim plot into more than two hours of familiar Hollywood maneuvers. Most of the interest comes from contemplating its fearsome version of Soviet/American relations, whereby the Soviets are seen (in a characteristic paradox of paranoid discourse) as simultaneously inept and all-powerful. What is never explained is how a nation with such boobish leaders – a pompous First Secretary is portrayed as an out-and-out clown – managed to invent and deploy the almost supernaturally potent device that Gant so valiantly purloins. In all, the picture is standard stuff, complete with special effects 124

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

that look as if they were filmed off an Atari game cartridge. Who thought it would take Clint Eastwood more than two draggy hours to steal a Russian airplane? Honkytonk Man (1982) Being a family man has never ranked at the top of Clint Eastwood‘s résumé, and his domestic affairs have often been complicated or outright messy, as all of his biographers attest. At least two of his children followed in his footsteps, however. His daughter Alison studied acting at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has appeared in four of her father’s films.134 And his son Kyle studied film for a couple of years at the University of Southern California and then entered a career in music, specialising in jazz, for which he acquired a taste by listening to what his parents played around the house. ‘I grew up surrounded by music,’ he told an interviewer. ‘My father loved jazz, and played the piano a lot, and my mother [Clint’s first wife, Maggie Johnson] was always playing records at home: Motown, R&B and jazz from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.’135 As a child he also met celebrated jazz musicians, thanks to his famous father’s backstage privileges. In addition to doing session work and fronting his own band he has composed music for several of Clint’s films, and at age fourteen he acted alongside his father in Honkytonk Man, perhaps the most lachrymose Eastwood movie. Clint plays Red Stovall, a tubercular country-and-western singer who dreams of achieving glory at the Grand Ole Opry, the celebrated venue in Nashville, Tennessee that has fostered the careers of Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Minnie Pearl, Marty Robbins and many another country, bluegrass and gospel star. Red’s story takes place in the 1930s and begins on a farm in Oklahoma, where the drought and erosion of the horrendous Dust Bowl years are about to destroy everything his family has ever owned. As they prepare to join the Okie migration – the westward journey toward California so stirringly depicted by John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath and John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation – the chronically alcoholic Red, poor and deracinated though he is, heads east for Nashville in his Lincoln convertible, chauffeured by his teenage nephew Whit, since his own driving years are behind him. Whit’s grandpa (John McIntire) is also on board for the first part of the ride. Various adventures transpire in a cathouse, a jailhouse and ultimately at the Opry, where Red’s malevolent tuberculosis threatens to lay him low when he is at the very brink of the success he has longed for all his life. Other characters include Red’s sister Emmy (Verna Bloom) and a singer named Marlene (Alexa Kenin) who hooks up with the travelers along the way. Adapted by Clancy Carlile from his novel of the same title, the project appealed to Eastwood partly because of the opportunity it gave him to ‘recreate the back roads of his boyhood’, in Schickel’s words, including those of the farmland around Sacramento, which doubles for Oklahoma in the early scenes.136 Ebert expands on this insight by quoting from the entry on Eastwood in Ephraim Katz’s film encyclopedia, which begins, ‘A child of the Depression, he spent his early boyhood trailing a father who pumped gas along dusty roads all over the West Coast,’ and lists the odd jobs – c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

125

Family values: Clint plays dying country singer Red Stovall and his son Kyle Eastwood plays Red’s nephew in the drama Honkytonk Man (1982)

logger, steel-furnace stoker, and so on – to which Eastwood and many other aspiring actors have turned as they try to build their careers.137 Norman Mailer carries this line of thinking farther still in his 1983 profile of Eastwood: One has to think of the Depression years of Eastwood’s childhood when his father was looking for work and taking the family up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, out there with a respectable family in a mix of Okies also wandering up and down California searching for work. Those Okies are in Eastwood’s films, as must be the gritty knowledge he gained over the seven years he worked on Rawhide. How many bit players and cowboy stunt men passing through Rawhide’s weekly episodes were also a part of that migrating country culture that was yet going to present itself to us by way of CBs and pickup trucks and western music? ‘You’ve got to outlast yourself ’ was the only way to talk of overcoming fatigue. The words happen to be Eastwood’s, but the language was shared with his characters, brothers in the same family…138 Schickel also cites Eastwood’s interest in ‘the self-destructive ends of … legendary figures’ in the country-music world. ‘You wondered,’ Eastwood mused, ‘why so many of them died on the highway.’139 Eastwood need not have wondered long, since the answer is as readily to hand as the bottles those legendary figures were clutching when they slammed into trees or skidded off bridges during one of their countless, endless drives from one gig to another and another and another… Initial reviews were not very kind to Honkytonk Man, which has subsequently been re-evaluated upward by many critics. ‘The story’s musical angle offers Mr. Eastwood another chance to do something new,’ wrote New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, a former pop music critic with extensive knowledge of that field, ‘and once again it’s 126

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

something that doesn’t quite suit him.’140 Maslin should have known better: singing was hardly a new enterprise for Eastwood, who had cut three singles and an album between 1961 and 1964 and crooned several tunes in Paint Your Wagon in 1969.141 Schickel responds to her and others who disparaged Eastwood’s singing in Honkytonk Man by claiming that ‘he deliberately clouded his usually clear, light baritone in order to suggest the strangling effects of TB on Red’s voice’,142 On this occasion, that is to say, Eastwood used another skill in which he was supposedly weak: acting. Sudden Impact, 1983 Go ahead. Make my day. Inspector Harry Callahan, 1983 Go ahead. Make my day. President Ronald Reagan, 1985 The fourth installment in the Dirty Harry franchise is notable for three reasons. It is the only film of the series that Eastwood directed. It brought in the highest grosses of the five movies, although it slips to fourth when ticket prices are adjusted for inflation.143 And it introduced the most famous catchphrase of the series, uttered by Harry to a criminal holding a hostage in the immediate aftermath of a robbery that Harry has foiled by killing the other crooks. He would love to have a reason for killing this one too. Knowing he cannot win, the evildoer chooses not to make the inspector’s day. Harry’s words thrilled the franchise’s countless fans in 1983, and two years later they acquired even more notoriety when President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to the American Business Conference in which he declared, ‘I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.’144 The line was so effective for Reagan that a year later he congratulated himself for having used it. ‘You know,’ he said in a 1986 speech to the conference, ‘it was last year before this group that I told the tax hikers in Congress that if they wanted to send me a tax increase, well, go ahead, make my day. [Laughter] I got that line from Clint Eastwood [laughter] – although now that the voters of Carmel, California, elected him mayor, I suppose I should say, Mayor Eastwood [laughter]. I have to confess that I’m amazed that a Hollywood actor who co-starred with a monkey could ever make it in politics [laughter].’145 Not surprisingly, Eastwood himself recycled the Sudden Impact tagline in the aforementioned mayoral race, distributing bumper stickers reading ‘Go Ahead – Make Me Mayor,’ notwithstanding his complaint that he ‘must have heard [the endlessly repeated phrase] about 10,000 times’.146 Sudden Impact was originally developed as a vehicle for Locke, who came on the Eastwood scene with The Outlaw Josey Wales and had most recently co-starred in Bronco Billy and Any Which Way You Can. Transformed into a Dirty Harry story with Locke as the vengeance-crazed villain, it allowed both her and Eastwood to exploit the chemistry they had been cultivating on and off the screen. This proved to be Locke’s c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

127

last picture with Eastwood, although their personal relationship lasted until she moved out of their home and filed a palimony suit against him in 1989. Sudden Impact was a high point in neither of their careers. The film’s plot lurches into gear when the San Francisco homicide squad assigns Harry to investigate a string of grisly murders. The killer, whose identity is revealed (to the audience, not the inspector) at the beginning, is one Jennifer Spencer, a sociopath bent on slaying the men who viciously raped her and her younger sister a decade earlier, leaving the sister in a permanently catatonic condition and Jennifer craving revenge. Her modus operandi is to shoot each victim twice, in the genitals and then the forehead. The estimable Vincent Canby complained in his New York Times review that since we know from the start who the murderer is, ‘there’s not … any mystery in the movie’. Canby is wrong to count this as a flaw; the film is hardly a purebred whodunit, and suspense might reside in other particulars, such as the progress of Harry’s sleuthing or Jennifer’s agility in eluding him. Nor is the critic entirely persuasive when he opines that the film portrays Jennifer as ‘a serious painter – sort of neo-Edvard Munch in style’, whereas Locke’s portrayal makes her look ‘as if she should be running a boutique at Big Sur’. Canby is on stronger ground when he notes the film’s strong resemblance to Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974), a vigilante melodrama that tapped into the worst instincts of its increasingly crime-ridden era, making Charles Bronson an international star and spawning several sequels. Released three years after Dirty Harry and one year after Magnum Force, the conspicuously truculent Death Wish escalated Harry’s brand of offthe-books justice from a matter of righteous personal crusading to one of commonsense moral principle. And it is indeed a key intertext for Sudden Impact, playing on the same urban paranoia that drives all of the Dirty Harry films and anticipating – perhaps even inspiring – the story of Sudden Impact, focusing on a liberal-minded New York businessman who becomes a vengeance-obsessed vigilante after muggers kill his wife and leave his daughter in a state of catatonic muteness. Canby detested Death Wish, deeming it ‘a despicable movie … that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers’.147 So it is not surprising that his animus toward Sudden Impact was motivated by greater dissatisfactions than the early revelation of the killer’s identity and the shortcomings of Locke’s boutique-proprietor appearance. ‘The screenplay is ridiculous,’ he concluded, ‘and Mr. Eastwood’s direction of it primitive. … Among other things, the movie never gets a firm hold on its own continuity,’ allowing various ‘scenes of simultaneous action [to] appear to take place weeks or maybe months apart. Not that this makes much difference.’148 Canby intended the last sentence as a putdown of the movie’s irredeemable incoherence, but it proved true in another sense: audiences loved it, implausibilities and all. Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984) Eastwood took another break from directing with his two pictures of 1984. The crime drama Tightrope, directed by Escape from Alcatraz scenarist Richard Tuggle from his own original screenplay, is by far the more interesting and venturesome one, taking the 128

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

star into risky new territory. He plays New Orleans police officer Wes Block, a single dad (his wife has left him) with two little girls to raise. A serial killer is murdering prostitutes at a stunning rate, and Wes gets on the case, assisted by Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold), a rape-prevention expert and serious feminist. The film’s unusual twist is Wes’s own sadomasochistic streak, which is linked with a yen for prostitutes like the ones being slain, some of whom he actually knew; the title refers to the psychological balancing act he must perform to subdue his dark urges and keep the respect of other women in his life, including Beryl and his daughters. The need for a macho Eastwood character to come to grips with a strong, confident woman on her own terms, tentatively handled in The Enforcer, here becomes a central thematic element, thanks to Beryl’s importance in the narrative. Tightrope is hardly an essay in depth psychology, but it delves more deeply into hidden strata of American masculinity than previous Eastwood films, or most previous Hollywood films for that matter. Looking back on the film in 2010, David Denby rightly commended ‘the biggest star in the world [for] implicating himself in the kind of pathologies that his earlier characters had scornfully eliminated’. And the critic attributed high cultural importance to this maneuver. ‘When icons shift ground,’ Denby wrote, ‘the world’s dream life shifts, too.’149 Eastwood starred with Burt Reynolds in the crime comedy City Heat, originally written by the formidable Blake Edwards, who called it ‘Kansas City Jazz’ and planned to direct it. Friction developed between Edwards and Reynolds, and then Eastwood began talking about leaving the project, so Warner Bros. fired Edwards and turned things over to Malpaso, which joined forces with Reynolds’s company and hired Richard Benjamin to direct it on the strength of his recent films My Favorite Year (1982) and Racing with the Moon (1984), both of which are, like City Heat, period comedies. Finding the script too heavy, Eastwood complained to Benjamin about ‘long, complicated psychological speeches which were not in his movie style’, and hired Joseph Stinson, who had scripted Sudden Impact the previous year, to rewrite it. Edwards’s casting choices were retained except for the addition of Madeline Kahn to play the heiress, and Edwards receives his half of the screenplay credit under a pseudonym.150 I cannot improve on Roger Ebert’s plot synopsis: Eastwood plays a police detective who is mild-mannered, and somebody crosses him, and then he turns into a ferocious fighting machine. Reynolds is a former cop who is now a private eye. Early in the film, he goes to his office for consultations with Richard Roundtree and Jane Alexander, and it is a measure of the film’s confusion that when he mentions his partner, we are not quite sure which one he means. There are other loose ends. For example, Reynolds kisses Alexander tenderly, but then she goes on a date with Eastwood. The guys go to a boxing match that has no logical purpose other than to serve as a set-up for a meeting after the match. A criminal gang, headed by Rip Torn, will kill to get its hands on a box that contains … what? Ledger records, I think. Of illegal gambling debts, I think. You know a movie is desperately in trouble when the audience isn’t even sure what the bad guys are after.151 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

129

Indeed. Reviews were generally lukewarm – the Variety critic used that very word, along with ‘amiable’ and ‘lowkeyed’ – and box-office takings were merely acceptable.151 In all, it is a forgettable affair. Fortunately the next Eastwood picture, Pale Rider, would have the ambition and originality so lacking in this one. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

130

Eliot, American Rebel, p. 123. This was the last picture assembled for Eastwood by Malpaso cofounder Irving Leonard before his death in 1970. Eliot, American Rebel, pp. 125. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 248. Hughes, Aim for the Heart, pp. 101, 102–104. Variety Staff, ‘Play Misty for Me,’ Variety (31 December 1970) http://www.variety. com/review/VE1117794037?refcatid=31 (accessed 3 May 2011) and Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 102. Roger Greenspun, ‘Play Misty for Me,’ The New York Times (4 November 1971) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1731E473BC4C53D FB767838A669EDE (accessed 3 May 2011). Stuart M. Kaminsky, ‘Eastwood on Eastwood,’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblenz, eds, Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 7–20, cited at 20. Jay Cocks, ‘Cinema: To the Hilt,’ Time (22 November 1971) http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,905571,00.html (accessed 3 May 2011). Roger Ebert, ‘Play Misty for Me, Chicago Sun-Times (1 January 1971) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19710101/ REVIEWS/101010324 (accessed 3 May 2011). The Numbers http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1971/0PMFM.php (accessed 3 May 2011). The Phrase Finder http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bunny-boiler.html (accessed 3 May 2011). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 251–252. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 436. Jo Heims assisted with the story and John Milius contributed to the script, receiving no screen credit. Jay Cocks, ‘Outside Society,’ Time (3 January 1972) http://www.the-dirtiest.com/ dh%28time%29.htm (accessed 6 May 2011). Quoted in McGilligan, Clint, p. 226. Roger Greenspun,’ ‘Dirty Harry,’ The New York Times (23 December 1971) http:// movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF173CE267BC4B51DFB467 838A669EDE (accessed 2 April 2011). Variety Staff, ‘Dirty Harry,’ Variety (31 December 1970) http://www.variety.com/ review/VE1117790449?refcatid=31 (accessed 2 April 2011). th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

20

21

22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32

The words from Variety, Newsweek, and the Harvard Crimson article reprinted in the New York Times are quoted in Michael Cieply, ‘A Studio With Violence in Its Bones,’ The New York Times (26 July 2012), pp. C1, C5, cited at C5. Roger Ebert, ‘Dirty Harry,’ Chicago Sun-Times (1 January 1971) http://rogerebert. suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19710101/REVIEWS/101010307 (accessed 2 April 2011). J. Hoberman, ‘Dirty Harry,’ The Village Voice (28 March 2006) http://www.villagevoice.com/2006–03–28/film/dirty-harry/ (accessed 4 January 2012). James’s scepticism leads him to add that ‘most philosophers seem either to forget [the gospel of healthy-mindedness] or to disdain it too much ever to mention it’, but concludes that ‘we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth’. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008, p. 104. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 44, 49–50). Douglas, Purity and Danger, 203–4. Eastwood’s association with Warner Bros. extends far beyond this phase of his career, so it is worth noting the studio’s long association with violent pictures. In a New York Times article headlined ‘A Studio With Violence in Its Bones’, journalist Michael Cieply likens Warner Bros.’s relationship with violence to Disney’s focus on family films and Universal’s long romance with monster movies. Warner Bros. forged a link with violence in such 1930s pictures as The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) and reaffirmed it in the 1960s with the hugely influential Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). The studio released Dirty Harry on 23 December 1971, just four days after releasing Stanley Kubrick’s ultraviolent A Clockwork Orange, which also sparked lasting controversy. Michael Cieply adds that by 1974, a Variety writer ‘had speculated on the supposed influence’ of Dirty Harry in ‘a string of brutal incidents involving the San Francisco police’; Cieply, ‘A Studio With Violence in Its Bones,’ p. C5. Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, sixth edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), p. 487. ‘Clint Eastwood.’ Hello! (n.d.) hellomagazine.com, n.p. http://www.hellomagazine. com/profiles/clint-eastwood/ (accessed 1 June 2009). So does Clint: ‘Bronco Billy wasn’t a Western at all. … More Frank Capra than Western.’ Christopher Frayling, ‘Eastwood on Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 130–136, cited at p. 135. Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), p. 42. Nor did they share in the success of Peckinpah’s film. In general, the most politically inventive pictures either underperformed at the box office or failed to inspire successful follow-up films or sequels. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 628, 632. Some of the examples given here are mine, not Slotkin’s. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

131

33 34

35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

132

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 628–630. African-American cultural critics have different degrees of praise for Buck and the Preacher, which stars Poitier and Harry Belafonte as the title characters. Nelson George deems it a ‘breakthrough’ film, whereas Donald Bogle finds it to be ‘solid entertainment’ but only ‘level-headed’ as a popularisation of black history. See Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 53–54; and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 250. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 625, 627. Except for Little House on the Prairie, which is arguably a domestic drama rather than a western per se, television eliminated all of its western series, including such long-running institutions as Gunsmoke and Bonanza, between 1972 and 1975. See Slotkin, pp. 627, 758. Films based on western novels by Leonard include Chris McIntyre’s Border Shootout (1990; novel 1954), Martin Ritt’s Hombre (1967; novel 1961), Edwin Sherin’s Valdez Is Coming (1971; novel 1970) and Dick Lowry’s Last Stand at Saber River (TV movie 1997; novel 1959). McGilligan, Clint, p. 217. McGilligan, Clint, pp. 217–218. Eliot, American Rebel, p. 143. Henri Béhar, ‘Portrait of the Gunslinger as a Wise Old Man: Encounter with Clint Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 187–192, cited at p. 192. Originally published as ‘Portrait du flingueur en vieux sage: rencontre avec Clint Eastwood’ in Le Monde (3 September 1992), p. 28. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 377–79. These tendencies affected television as well as feature films. The enthusiastically acclaimed High Noon inspired the long-running TV series Gunsmoke, ‘adult westerns’ proliferated on the major networks, and programs sought to differentiate themselves from the herd by presenting heroes with unusual, even baroque images and unusual weapons: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp with the hero’s longbarreled Buntline Special pistol, Bat Masterson with his gold-capped cane, The Rifleman with his Model 1892 Winchester enhanced by a rapid-fire trigger device, the black-clad killer for hire of Have Gun – Will Travel with a derringer concealed under his belt. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 379–81. Peter Biskind, ‘Any Which Way He Can,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 193–206, cited at p. 202. Originally published in Premiere (April 1993), pp. 52–60. Biskind writes in this interview article, ‘Even though critics constantly compared him to John Wayne, Eastwood – and the Duke – knew different. Wayne wrote him a letter after he saw High Plains Drifter … “He said, ‘That isn’t what the West was all about. That isn’t the American people who settled this country,’’ Eastwood later recalled.’ Patrick McGilligan writes in his Eastwood biography, ‘Wayne reportedly sent a letter to Clint, focusing on High Plains Drifter and attacking th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

45 46

47

48 49

50 51

52

Clint’s westerns as being the antithesis of what the American frontier – and the American people – represented. … Wayne’s letter would be interesting to quote from, but the text has never been released. And Clint made a point of telling interviewers that he “never answered” it.’ McGilligan, Clint, pp. 267–68. Robin Wood, ‘Images of Childhood,’ in Personal Views: Explorations in Film, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), pp. 189–212, cited at p. 207. The unidentified officer, quoted by reporter Peter Arnett in an Associated Press dispatch, was speaking about the destruction of Ben Tre during the Tet Offensive of 1968. The accuracy of the quotation has been called into question, since Ben Tre was not a village but a provincial capital with a population of fifty thousand; the city was damaged but not leveled; and only a handful of United States soldiers participated in the combat there. Different versions of the statement have also been adduced; in his book Dispatches, for instance, Michael Herr quotes it as, ‘We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it’, and identifies the speaker as an American major making ‘a successful attempt at attaining history’. Despite such uncertainties, Slotkin is correct when he observes that the words ‘came to symbolize the … absurd futility and even “madness’’’ of the Vietnam war. On the accuracy of Arnett’s quotation, see Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), pp. 43–44. See also Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009), p. 66 (originally published in 1977) and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 531. Kitses further observes that ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven humanise their fallen heroes (the titles are again apt), men with names, men who suffer grievously, Job-like. In both films, issues of celebrity and fame, anonymity and retirement figure in their denouements.’ Kitses, Horizons West, pp. 288–289. Dave Kehr, ‘A Fistful of Eastwood,’ American Film (March 1985), pp. 63–67, cited at 64. Quoted in Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 31. Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter, ‘Eastwood Direction,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 42–61, cited at pp. 49, 50–51. Originally published as ‘Clint Eastwood, Auteur’ in Film Comment 14, no. 1 (January/February 1978), pp. 24–32. The interview took place in installments in 1976 and 1977. Thompson and Hunter, ‘Eastwood Direction,’ p. 49. Tidyman cowrote Shaft with John D.F. Black, based on Tidyman’s eponymous novel. Michael Henry Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 96–116, cited at 99–100. Originally published as ‘Entretien avec Clint Eastwood’ in Positif, no. 287 (January 1985), pp. 48–57. The interview took place in 1984. Rambo: First Blood Part II was the centrepiece of a Rambo trilogy, preceded by First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), wherein Rambo has a sanguinary feud with corrupt authorities in small-town America after returning from the war, and followed by Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988), which finds Rambo, now a pacifist, taking up violence once again to rescue his former commanding officer from captivity in Afghanistan and, as long as he is there, fight alongside virtuous Mujahedeen warriors against the Soviet forces attempting to occupy the country. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

133

53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65 66 67

68

69 70 71 72 134

Midway between these pictures, CBS aired a 1980 television movie called High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane, directed by Jerry Jameson from Elmore Leonard’s original screenplay. In it Will and Amy Kane, played by Lee Majors and Katherine Cannon, return to Hadleyville years after Will slew Frank Miller’s gang and threw down his badge in disgust; he soon finds himself squaring off against the town’s current marshal (David Carradine), who’s corrupt to the core. Thompson and Hunter, ‘Eastwood Direction,’ p. 451 Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 100. Ric Gentry, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ in Gerald Duchovnay, ed., Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 63–90, cited at 80–81. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 56. Thompson and Hunter, ‘Eastwood Direction,’ p. 49. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 57, 58. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 61. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 61. As does Christopher Frayling, who writes that the Dollars protagonist set the template for the ‘superman’ figure in Italian westerns – a character that ‘openly leads the life of a super-efficient trickster, and relies on a superhuman endowment of machismo’ to win his many battles. Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 78. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 175, 171, 178. Bingham, Acting Male, pp. 175, 178–79. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 63–64. Bingham, Acting Male, p. 179. Identification with this faux-coherent reflection is known as méconnaissance, or misrecognition, in Lacanian theory. To be fair, Bingham acknowledges that the mirror-stage theory of identification, à la Metz and Lacan, has become such a commonplace in film analysis that applying it to individual cases might seem naïve; he then defends his use of it vis-à-vis early Eastwood by explaining that the films ‘so foreground the spectator’s ego as having a stake in the fantasy’, and so limit the persona’s attributes to monolithic phallic power, that no alternative theory would serve his purposes so well. As indicated in the text, I respect this reasoning but am not quite persuaded by it. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 59, 61. He also calls the Stranger ‘a western version of Michael the messenger and Gabriel the warrior’, referring to angels who appear in both the Old and New Testaments. Kitses, Horizons West, p. 296. Isaiah 53:3–4. I quote it from the King James Version of the Bible; on the church wall it is insignificantly different. Isaiah 53:1. Isaiah 53:2, 7, 9. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81

82

83

84 85

86

87

88

Random or not, it is certainly playful and mischievous enough to cast doubt on Bingham’s claim that play is lacking in Eastwood’s post-Leone persona. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 122–23, 134. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 370. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 124. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,’ in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258, cited at 159. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 436, 448–49. Morson and Emerson also quote the words from ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ cited in the previous note. Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 126. Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 100. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,’ Lacan dot com (2005), n.p. http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude. htm (accessed 11 September 2009). Žižek writes this in an essay critiquing Multitude, a book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that explores the potential for radical forms of democracy (anarchistic forms, although Žižek does not explicitly mention this) in a coming stage of deterritorialized ‘rule of everyone by everyone … without ifs or buts’. American westerns of the early 1970s with revisionist approaches include Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), Bad Company (Robert Benton, 1972), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973) and many others. O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, pp. 119–120. Since the financially unsuccessful film returned no profits at all, Eastwood eventually had to pay Holden the minimum Screen Actors Guild fee of $4,000. Eliot, American Rebel, pp. 146–147. Variety, ‘Review: Breezy,’ (31 December 1972) http://variety.com/1972/film/ reviews/breezy-1200423067/ (accessed 3 October 2013). Judith Crist cited in Eliot, American Rebel, p. 148. Molly Haskell, ‘A long, long way from May,’ The Village Voice (29 November 1973), 87. See also Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974). Revised edition published by the University of Chicago Press in 1987. Howard Thompson, ‘Breezy Breezes In,’ The New York Times (19 November 1973). http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E06E0DB133DE03AA1575AC1A 9679D946290D6CF (accessed 3 October 2013). Allen White, ‘Joy in the Struggle: A Look at John Milius,’ Film Threat (8 March 1999) http://www.filmthreat.com/interviews/49/ (accessed 15 October 2013). c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

135

89 90

91 92 93

94

95 96 97 98 99 100 102 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112

136

‘Portrait: Michael Cimino, déçu de l’Amérique,’ http://www.michaelcimino.fr/ portrait-michael-cimino-3.php (accessed 15 October 2013). My translation. Nora Sayre, ‘Magnum Force: Police Story is Sequel to Dirty Harry,’ The New York Times (26 December 1973) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9803E4 D71731E63BBC4E51DFB4678388669EDE&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes (accessed 15 October 2013). David Sterritt, ‘Eiger Sanction’ is Clint Eastwood’s latest,’ The Christian Science Monitor (2 July 1975), p. 25. Sterritt, ‘Eiger Sanction, p. 25. Forrest Carter, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (Gantt, AL: Whippoorwill Publishing, 1973). Republished by Delacorte Press as Gone to Texas in 1975 and by Dell as The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1980. Marc Eliot misreports the original title as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wells, perhaps thinking the eponymous hero was a Wild West version of Warner’s president. Forrest Carter, Two Westerns by Forrest Carter: Gone to Texas [and] The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (University of New Mexico Press, 1989), back cover. Also see McGilligan, Clint, p. 257. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 325. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 76. McGilligan, Clint, pp. 261–262. Marc Eliot, American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), p. 166. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 327. McGilligan, Clint, p. 264. McGilligan, Clint, p. 264. Ralph Appelbaum, ‘Are We Pods … Yet?’ Films and Filming (April 1979). Quoted in McGilligan, Clint, p. 258. McGilligan, Clint, p. 258. Eliot, American Rebel, p. 167. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 76, 85. Eliot, American Rebel, p. 165. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 632, 760. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 326. Schickel calls this description ‘not entirely inaccurate’. Allen Barra, ‘The education of Little Fraud,’ Salon (20 December 2001) http:// www.salon.com/2001/12/20/carter_6/ (accessed 23 November 2013). Dan T. Carter, ‘The Transformation of a Klansman,’ The New York Times (4 October 1991), p. A31. Asa Carter eventually broke with Wallace because the governor had become ‘too liberal on the race issue.’ Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 321. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 320–321, 323. Forrest Carter, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976) and Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976). Carter claimed that Little Tree was his Native American name. The Vengeth e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

113

114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127 128

ance Trail of Josey Wales was eventually paired with the first Josey Wales novel in Forrest Carter, Josey Wales: Two Westerns (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). See also Forrest Carter, Watch for Me on the Mountain (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), the author’s only other book, republished by Dell as Cry Geronimo! in 1980; this novel also has an emotional Indian theme. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, 322. According to Allen Barra, ‘many think Little Tree helped shape the depiction of Indians in Costner’s Dances With Wolves’. See Barra, ‘Education of Little Fraud.’ Barra, ‘Education of Little Fraud.’ Commentaries that have appeared after Dan T. Carter’s article include Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘“Authenticity,” or the Lesson of Little Tree,’ The New York Times Book Review (24 November 1991); Dana Rubin, ‘The Real Education of Little Tree,’ Texas Monthly (February 1992); Mark McGurl, ‘Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture,’ The Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 18 no. 2 (Fall 2005); and David Treuer, ‘Going Native: Why do writers pretend to be Indians?’ Slate (7 March 2008) http://www.slate.com/id/2185856/pagenum/ all/#page_start (accessed 4 February 2009). One of the issues explored was Asa Carter’s claim in The Education of Little Tree that he was an orphan raised by his Native American grandparents; research showed that his Indian grandmother had died before he was born and that while he did have a grandfather of Cherokee descent, he had never lived with him. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 322–323. Carter, ‘Transformation of a Klansman,’ p. A31. Larry Cole, ‘Clint’s Not Cute When He’s Angry,’ The Village Voice (24 May 1976). Quoted in Eliot, American Rebel, p. 164. Clint Eastwood, ‘Happy Transformation,’ The New York Times (16 October 1991), p. A24. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 323. ‘we live in…’: ‘Self-Made Man,’ Item in ‘Chatter’ column. People, vol. 6 no. 10 (6 September 1976), p. 74. ‘I suppose they…’: ‘Portrait of a Mean B.O. Winner.’ Variety (15 September 1976). Both remarks are quoted in Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 323. Clint Eastwood and Richard Schickel, ‘Director’s Dialogue,’ Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, 5 September 1990. Quoted in Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 324. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 324. Gentry, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ p. 84. The allusion, of course, is to characters in A Fistful of Dollars. Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 63. Munn, Clint Eastwood, p. 161. Munn adds that the bus was equipped with 8,000 squibs. Roger Ebert, ‘The Gauntlet,’ RogerEbert.com (1 January 1977) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gauntlet-1977 (accessed 3 October 2013). Ebert, ‘The Gauntlet.’ Robert Alpert, ‘The Gauntlet: Eastwood plays dumb cop.’ Jump Cut 20 (May 1979), pp. 3–5. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

137

129

130

131

132 133 134

135

136 137

138 139 140

141

142

143

138

I stated that the film is populated with ‘stock characters making all the stock moves’ in my review. See David Sterritt, ‘New Movies from Hollywood, Europe, Israel,’ The Christian Science Monitor (2 February 1978), p. 18. Vincent Canby, ‘Eastwood Gauntlet,’ The New York Times (22 December 1977) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E00E3DB1E3AE03BBC4A51DF B467838C669EDE (accessed 3 October 2013). Perhaps the good paleoanthropologists should look at the Black Widows motorcycle gang in Eastwood’s two monkey movies, who present a persuasive facsimile of what early hominids might have been like. The scientists are quoted in John Noble Wilford, ‘Predating Lucy, Fossil Skeleton Pushes Back Human Ancestry.’ The New York Times vol. 159 no. 54,816 (2 October 2009), pp. A1, A6; cited at A1. David Sterritt, ‘Clint Eastwood as Mr. Nice Guy,’ The Christian Science Monitor (27 June 1980), p. 19. Eastwood also acted in several war films and TV shows directed by others, all (like the westerns and TV shows in the previous note) in the early stages of his career. Her films directed by Eastwood are Bronco Billy, Tightrope, Absolute Power and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; her most substantial part was in Tightrope, made when she was eleven. She has acted in numerous movies directed by others as well. Nick Duerden, ‘Kyle Eastwood: Honkytonk man and boy,’ The Independent (10 March 2013) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/kyle-eastwoodhonkytonk-man-and-boy-8527829.html (accessed 4 October 2013). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 381. Roger Ebert, ‘Honkytonk Man,’ RogerEbert.com (17 December 1982) http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/honkytonk-man-1982 (accessed 4 October 2013). See also Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia (New York: Crowell, 1979). Norman Mailer, ‘All the Pirates and People,’ Parade Magazine (23 October 1983), pp. 4–7, cited at 6. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 381–382. Janet Maslin, ‘Eastwood’s Honkytonk Man,’ The New York Times (15 December 1982) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F00E7DA143BF936A2575 1C1A964948260&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes (accessed 4 October 2013). He also recorded a song from the 1970 film Kelly’s Heroes, scoring what his website describes as a ‘minor hit’ with ‘Burning Bridges’ and the B-side, ‘When I Loved Her’. See ‘Eastwood Recordings.’ ClintEastwood.net (n.d.) http://www.clinteastwood.net/recording (accessed 6 July 2013). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 383. Variety opined that Eastwood’s ambitions for the film were defeated by ‘the predictability of the script … and his own limitations as a warbler’. See Variety Staff, ‘Honkytonk Man,’ Variety.com (31 December 1981) http://variety.com/1981/film/reviews/honkytonk-man-1200425193/ (accessed 5 October 2013). In inflation-adjusted dollars, Sudden Impact comes in fourth, exceeding only The Dead Pool in ticket sales. Magnum Force leads the pack, followed by Dirty Harry in second place and The Enforcer in third. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

144

145

146 147

148

149

150 151 152

George J. Church, ‘Go Ahead – Make My Day,’ Time (25 March 1985) http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964091,00.html (accessed 22 October 2013). Reagan concluded this part of his statement with an extension of his Eastwood citation: ‘Of course, the American Business Conference has helped make our year a – well, you’ve helped make more than my day – make it a banner year of entrepreneurship and innovation, laying the foundation for what I’m convinced can become a decade of vibrant economic growth.’ His mention of ‘a Hollywood actor who co-starred with a monkey’ refers to his own role in Frederick de Cordova’s 1951 comedy Bedtime for Bonzo, where he played a scientist experimenting with a chimpanzee, and to Eastwood’s roles in two comedies with an orangutan. See Ronald Reagan, ‘Remarks at a White House Meeting with Members of the American Business Conference’ (15 April 1986) http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/ archives/speeches/1986/41586c.htm (accessed 22 October 2013). Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 69. Vincent Canby, ‘Death Wish Hunts Muggers,’ The New York Times (25 July 1974) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9804E3DB1131EF34BC4D51DFB 166838F669EDE (accessed 3 October 2013). Vincent Canby, ‘Impact, with Clint Eastwood,’ The New York Times (9 December 1983) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9404EFD61F39F93AA357 51C1A965948260 (accessed 3 October 2013). David Denby, ‘Out of the West,’ The New Yorker (8 March 2010) http://www. newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/08/100308fa_fact_denby?currentPage=all (accessed 3 October 2013). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 397. Roger Ebert, ‘City Heat,’ Chicago Sun-Times (1 January 1984) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/city-heat-1984 (accessed 3 October 2013). ‘City Heat,’ Variety (31 December 1983) http://variety.com/1983/film/reviews/ city-heat-1200426120/ (accessed 3 October 2013).

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

139

CHAPTER FIVE

Portrait of the Artist as a Major Player: From Pale Rider to Bird

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death. The Revelation of St. John the Divine1 The biblical implications and the mythology in Pale Rider are just something that I wanted to explore, and I don’t to this day know why. … Maybe I felt I hadn’t explored it enough in High Plains Drifter. Clint Eastwood2 Pale Rider (1985) A gunfighter known only as the Preacher rides into a California mining camp that is besieged (like the endangered homestead in George Stevens’s classic Shane) by an avaricious landowner, who has enlisted a corrupt sheriff in his campaign to seize the miners’ claims by force. Intervening on behalf of the miners, the Preacher proves superhumanly proficient at the protective mission he has undertaken, and the likelihood that he is superhuman soars when the camera reveals scars on his body representing manifestly deadly wounds. His departure at the end is no less enigmatic than was his arrival at the beginning. Pale Rider is in dialogue with Shane much as High Plains Drifter is in dialogue with High Noon. Films resembling Shane are ‘an old, old game’, Eastwood has acknowledged, adding that in Pale Rider there is ‘nothing new storywise’ except a difference in the hero’s persona: ‘Their guy is more of a real guy, and our guy is an out-and-out 140

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Pale Rider (1985): Michael Moriarty as virtuous gold miner Hull Barret and Eastwood as the Preacher, an archangelical hero who loves the land

ghost.’3 On another occasion Eastwood promoted the protagonist from ghost to ‘archangel’,4 further raising the supernatural stakes and making Shane (Alan Ladd), who is a distinctly human mystery man, appear downright ordinary by comparison. This said, it seems to me that the tasks undertaken by the pale rider are more mundane than the missions with which divinely sent intercessors generally occupy themselves; in Eastwood’s words, he ‘helps a small community of miners to organize themselves like a trust [and] inspires them with the courage to resist and defend their rights’.5 This makes for odd theology, but it is quite a premise for a movie: an angelic leader, at once authentically spiritual and heavily armed, shows a group of laborers how to reject exploitation, stand up for their interests, and modernise their finances to boot. Something for everyone. Warner Bros. released Pale Rider in June 1985, a month after its premiere at the Cannes festival.6 It arrived at a quiescent time for westerns; only two of any consequence had opened in 1984 and only three or four the year before that.7 For western buffs, the appeal of Eastwood’s picture lay partly in its semi-original iteration of Eastwood’s western persona and partly in the film’s intertextual conversation with Shane and also with High Plains Drifter, which it obviously echoes. (It echoes another film too; in my 1985 review I wrote that viewing the climactic shootout is ‘like watching Rambo in the Old West’.)8 For general audiences, its blend of old-movie nostalgia (recognisable characters, eye-catching scenery, ‘traditional values’ of right and wrong) and 1980s-style explicitness (more onscreen mayhem than Alan Ladd ever saw) made it one of the period’s rare high-grossing westerns. Moviegoers evidently weren’t bothered by Eastwood’s decision to trade the bucolic atmosphere of homesteader stories à la Shane for the gritty, grating locales of a countryside being aggressively degraded by the brand of predatory techno-rape called hydraulic mining. The landscapes may have been a selling point, for that matter, so dramatically and expressively were they photographed by Bruce Surtees in the last of the seven films that he shot for director Eastwood. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

141

The dark heart In a speech last March, James Watt, one-time Secretary of the Interior, encouraged members of the Green River Cattlemen’s Association in Pinedale, Wyoming, to pick up a gun when dealing with Earth First!-type environmentalists. … Watt said, ‘If the trouble from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.’ Phoenix New Times, 19919 Environmental concerns were on the American public’s mind in 1985, which marked the halfway point (or rather the dark heart) of Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency from 1981 to 1989. Environmental awareness had risen considerably in the 1960s and 1970s, but many found the Reagan years to be a decade-long hiatus in environmental progress during which, in the words of philosopher George Sessions, a conservative Republican president did everything in his power to obstruct environmental protection: from neutralizing the efforts of the [Environmental Protection Agency] and suppressing acid rain studies, appointing anti-ecological pro-developmental people as heads of the Department of Interior and the Forest Service, promoting the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’ aimed at selling off public lands in the West to private developers for commercial exploitation, to refusing to allow money to be spent for the acquisition of additional parks and protected wildlife habitat.10 As grim as this sounds, and actually was, environmentalists took some comfort from a widespread reaction against Reagan’s actions and attitudes, which had the paradoxical effect of strengthening support for environmental organisations, leading to expanded membership and resources on state, regional and national levels. Environmental groups became more intensely involved with electoral politics, moreover, so that by 1984 environmentalists ‘played a role in one-third of the nation’s congressional races’, according to historian Samuel P. Hays, ‘as well as gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and state-legislative contests’. Hays adds that it made no difference to these political players ‘whether the candidates they backed were Republicans or Democrats; their environmental record was the crucial test’.11 Eastwood considered himself a Republican and a libertarian, as we have seen, but he often had a solid sense of where the public’s thoughts were roaming at a given time, and the ecological interests of Pale Rider point to a degree of sympathy for advocates of environmental responsibility. Perhaps his early years in Carmel, and his many acting experiences on location in the West, had also planted some green shoots in his imagination. It is even possible that he felt some personal discomfort with the more bizarre excesses of Reagan’s administration, which occasionally betrayed a shaky perception of the line between observable reality and faith-based fantasy. Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, the conservative lawyer and activist James G. Watt, was gone by 1985, but statements he had made during his tenure (from early 1981 to late 1983) were still 142

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

vividly remembered. ‘I do not know,’ he said in testifying before the House Interior Committee in February 1981, ‘how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.’12 Still more striking was his assertion a few months later that his duty as a public figure was ‘to follow the scriptures, which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns’.13 With fresh memories of an Interior secretary who apparently thought more about the end of the environment than about its current state of health, even a Republican like Eastwood may have felt prompted to put a more authentically conservative view of things into the cinematic record. Physicality, ghostliness Now I think it’s time to analyze the classic western. You can still talk about sweat and hard work, about the spirit, about love for the land and ecology. And I think you can say all these things in the western, in the classic mythological form. Clint Eastwood, 198514 It was a sign of Clint’s growing maturity as a filmmaker that he took the environmental aspects of the Pale Rider story quite seriously, not relegating them to the background as he might have done but elevating the spoilage of the land into one of the movie’s central themes. In a sign that his directorial skills were expanding as well, he handled the sharp physicality of the environmental imagery – which could easily have produced a cognitive clash against the film’s ghostly components – in formally integrated ways that allow the natural and the supernatural to resonate with and mutually enhance each other. The seeds for all this were in the screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, who had written The Gauntlet together several years earlier. They said later that their script was filmed almost exactly as they wrote it, although executive producer Fritz Manes refuted this, according to McGilligan, claiming that ‘chunks of dialogue and continuity were tossed out when Clint grew impatient on location and announced, “Action speaks louder than words”’.15 Manes ended his long association with Eastwood and Malpaso not long after Pale Rider was finished, when escalating tensions between him and Clint reached a boiling point, so his account is not necessarily more credible than that of Butler and Shryack, who had their own stake in the authorship of a very successful film. We can be certain of what the film does contain, however, and its environmental concerns are unmistakable in its imagery and dialogue alike. The populist side of this issue is voiced by Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty), one of the ‘little guy’ miners in Carbon Canyon who have developed a personal relationship with the land and its resources. Hull is convinced that a particular rock in a creek bed overlies a hidden vein of gold. Hull: I thought of drilling and blasting the son of a gun, but you know, uh, that would… Preacher: That would wreck the stream, wouldn’t it? c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

143

Hull: Yeah, the stream would be dammed up … be the end of everything. This exchange stands in revealing contrast to another one later in the film, between Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny), a prospector’s teenage daughter, and Josh LaHood (Christopher Penn), the son of the rapacious mining company’s chief. Josh: About three-quarters of a mile upstream we divert half of Cobalt Creek … By the time the water reaches the [hydraulic] monitor, I’ve got about two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. I can blast that gravel out of that cliff and then it washes into the bed and then it travels right through the sluice. Megan: It looks like hell. Josh: You know, I can get twenty tons of gravel a day in this river. Taking a break from raping the terrain, Josh then brutally tries to rape Megan, who is rescued by the Preacher, her unfailing guardian in the film.16 Sunk roots [Hydraulic mining] was outlawed way back, even before ecological concerns were as prevalent as they are today. So we play on that in the film. It’s kind of an ecological statement. Clint Eastwood on Pale Rider17 An environmentalist analysis of Pale Rider by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray calls attention to the exchanges just quoted and distinguishes Eastwood’s western from others – such as the Anthony Mann films Bend of the River (1952) and The Far Country (1954) and Delmer Daves’s generally admirable The Badlanders (1958) – that look askance at corporate mining’s ill effects on individualistic entrepreneurs but do not condemn the impact of environmental degradation.18 Taking a holistic approach that operates on both of these levels, Pale Rider begins with Coy LaHood’s (Richard Dysart) thugs rampaging through the prospectors’ village, killing animals and trashing homes, while some distance away the prospectors pan for gold in peaceful harmony with the natural world. This serves to foreground the corporation’s brutality toward communal values and the riches of nature. At the same time, the fact that the prospectors are also miners adds a complicating layer to what might have been a simplistic face-off between sympathetically portrayed little guys (prima facie innocent) and harshly depicted business interests (prima facie culpable) with the Preacher’s unimpeachable qualities of right and might (prima facie angelic) automatically aligned with the forces of nature and of the natural law that emanates from them. This mildly complex ideological structure notwithstanding, however, the film’s positions are never ambivalent or ambiguous. Coy and company are determined to exploit the land without respite until it is stripped bare of the gold they seek; to consolidate their hold on the region by prodding California’s legislature into invalidating the pros144

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

pectors’ claims; and to pursue their depredations as rapidly and ruthlessly as possible, lest the government’s misgivings and other winds of change turn against them before they have extracted every last ounce of ore. The prospectors, meanwhile, live and work in a spirit of peace and cooperation so all-embracing that they show no manifestations of envy or jealousy, much less hostility or resentment, when one of them makes a strike that has eluded the others; along similar lines, they reject the notion of greed-driven ‘progress’ that Coy espouses and they refuse the $1,000 settlement that he offers in an effort to buy them out. ‘If any of us turned up a thousand dollars worth of nuggets,’ Hull asks his fellow prospectors when they talk over LaHood’s proposition, ‘would he quit? Hell, no. He’d build his family a better house and … build a school or church … Gold ain’t what we’re about. … This is my home. This is my dream. I sunk roots here.’ The climax and conclusion of Pale Rider, which involve the Preacher’s payback to both LaHood’s outfit and Marshal Stockburn (John Russell), have as much to do with the imperatives of action movie emotional gratification as with the historically real (if hyperbolically rendered) environmental issues that underlie the plot. In the vein of High Plains Drifter and Dirty Harry before it, Pale Rider is ultimately a tale of vigilante violence. Heumann and Murray note the logic of vigilante justice in this narrative: since the environment is being ruined at too fast a pace for legal action to stop it in time, those who recognise the urgency of the crisis must deal with it with ‘extra-legally’ by any means necessary. These critics focus so keenly on environmentalism, however, that they lose sight of other important issues that are equally grounded in frontier history, such as the indispensable struggle being waged by humanistic citizens to free the Western territories of precisely the self-righteous, personalised aggression represented by the Preacher and his pistols. Commenting on the finale, when the Preacher vanishes back into the mountains while Hull and Megan return to their newly peaceful town, Heumann and Murray write that ‘vigilante justice has been achieved. Yet something new emerges in Pale Rider: a call to action that serves not only violent ends but also environmental conservation.’19 This passes too glibly over the film’s ritual reliance on violent means that function less problematically in the movies than in life, resolving the story with predictable Hollywood pyrotechnics that afford the audience a high-octane psychological thrill but cast a shadow over the picture’s credibility as a conveyor of socially constructive ideas. The film’s climax also presents a structural difficulty, in that the Preacher’s personal feud with the marshal and his pro bono defense of the mining community are never satisfactorily linked, as William Beard appears to recognise when he describes the Preacher as acting ‘disconnectedly’ on these two fronts.20 I point out this problem not merely because I think Heumann and Murray give the film’s violent resolution too easy a pass, but because this shortcoming in their argument suggests that they have been snookered by the visceral appeal of the movie’s climax, demonstrating once again the spell that western movie mayhem continues to exert, even at times when the genre seems all but moribund, when it is taken in hand by a filmmaker with the powerful skills that Eastwood had developed by this period in his career. Indeed, the makers of Pale Rider cleverly anticipate the objections that anti-violence viewers might raise, and attempt to inoculate the film by providing a psychological escape route for those who feel ethical qualms. At dawn of the story’s c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

145

final day, the Preacher and Hull ride to the corporate mining camp and blast it apart with dynamite, destroying Coy’s operation without killing any of his men or causing further damage to the land. Hull is now ready to accompany the Preacher as he proceeds to a decisive face-off with Coy himself, but the Preacher leaves him behind without a horse, creating the clear impression that Coy and Stockburn will now receive their just desserts from the superhuman agency represented by the archangelic hero, leaving human consciences – in the story and in the audience – unblemished and at ease. Lest spectators feel too removed from the self-righteous shootout that follows, however, Hull makes his way to town after all, just in time to save the Preacher (who has dispatched Stockburn with six bullets, at once actual and symbolic, planted in the very spots where Stockburn previously shot him) from being slain by Coy, who has managed to sneak up on him. With this action the most stalwart representative of the prospector community takes an active part in cutting away the cancer of capitalism gone berserk and metaphorically expunging the human avarice that has blighted the spiritual landscape, allowing him and Megan to return home and presumably live happily ever after.21 Heumann and Murray acknowledge the dynamics and the effectiveness of this resolution, but their concluding words point up the inconclusiveness that lurks within the film’s finale. When the virtuous miner Hull kills the corporate predator Coy, they write, ‘he also eradicates [Coy’s] fair use politics that destroy the environment that [Hull] and his community wish to sustain’.22 While this is true as far as it goes, it does not go far enough. Justice that emerges from a gun barrel can eliminate only the injustice that is directly in front of it, not the intricate networks of power and desire that will surely regenerate the same dysfunctions, or their morbidly similar counterparts, again and again until their ultimate causes are rooted out and abolished in some utopian, perhaps impossible, future. Pale Rider ends with allegorical victories over allegorical evils, not with grounded ideas about how actual political and economic blights might be obliterated by nonviolent and prosocial means. Eastwood has never made such a movie, but he has come tantalisingly close on at least two occasions. The first is Unforgiven, in which the wages of transgression are seen to be evenly distributed among those who practice evil by design and those who blunder into it through recklessness, impulsiveness or obliviousness. The other is Gran Torino, a greatly flawed movie but a genuinely ethical testament from a filmmaker whose moral imagination eventually grew way beyond the halfway measures of Pale Rider. Alchemy and allegory Eastwood as Jesus Christ is not a thought that comes easily to anyone’s mind. Sociologist Albert J. Bergesen23 The differences between Pale Rider and Shane – between the demonic and the canonic, to paraphrase William Beard – are initially signalled by the first appearances of the title characters. The blond, mild-mannered Shane is bracketed by a deer’s antlers as he rides across a grassy plain with mountains towering behind; by contrast, the Preacher’s dark, 146

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

distant profile materialises from ‘the harsh snowy monochrome of a hostile landscape’, as Beard describes the scene, which he takes as the marker of a transformation ‘from a soft organic world in Shane to a hard mineral one in Pale Rider’, most clearly represented by the metamorphosis of the earlier film’s farmers, ‘who are seeking to make the earth produce a rich bounty of food’, into the later film’s miners, ‘who are merely attempting to dig material wealth … out of the rock’. Beard finds this to be ‘a deliberate movement of the western’s centrally important community values from the quasi-spiritual one of making fruitful what was barren to the nakedly materialist one of the search for an innately useless substance with a high exchange value’. Since the prospectors are as culpable as the mining company in the essential nature of their work, Pale Rider bodies forth a ‘disconcerting and deflating … harshening and problematizing’ of the classical genre prototype represented by Shane.24 Elemental Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equivalents in history. Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns them … there is a major movement of clandestine exploitation, and of miners’ alliances either with nomad and barbarian incursions or peasant revolts. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari25 Leaving aside the implication that it was immoral not to be a farmer in nineteenthcentury California, or at least a miner of innately useful stuff, I experience the ambience of Pale Rider in ways that Beard’s account does not encompass. In my view, Eastwood shifts the sympathetic characters from sod-busting to prospecting because he is making a zestfully elemental film – the hero comes out of snow and ice to help people of stone and gold – that is grounded as much in alchemy as in Judeo-Christian fable. Having said this, I agree with Beard’s basic analytical idea that Clint typically embodies a hero who is to some degree impossible – too heroic, authentic and powerful to be believed – while simultaneously calling that persona into question, revealing its contradictions and using its impossibilities to fuel the character’s mysterious allure. With regard to Pale Rider, however, I want to emphasise that the hero is more impossible than usual, and so is everything else about the movie; it is mythical in the grand old sense of not just larger than life but other than life. This returns us to the film’s Christian-allegorical content, whose robustness refutes any claim that Pale Rider endorses materialist values over quasi-spiritual ones. For instance: In a narrative moment that most critics have skimmed over, LaHood’s son rides up to the prospectors’ work area accompanied by a gigantic man named Club (Richard Kiel), who radiates an air of sheer, mindless muscle calculated to intimidate everyone in sight and scare the Preacher into vacating the territory. Hull and the Preacher have been laboring over a boulder in a creek bed, trying and failing to break it with their sledgehammers. To demonstrate his overwhelming strength, Club raises his hammer, smashes the rock with one mighty blow, and turns to smash the Preacher next. Observing that Club’s upraised hands have left his midsection undefended, the c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

147

Preacher hefts his own sledgehammer, takes aim at the giant’s groin, and momentarily castrates him with a solid upward swing. All of this has the magic-realist aura (accent on the magic) of an old-fashioned fairy tale. Far from demoralising the Preacher and his mates, Club’s breaking of the rock revitalises their mood with a hint of Sword in the Stone wonderment. On top of this, Club rides meekly away after the Preacher helps him back onto his horse, and later in the film we find that his humiliating experience has somehow turned him into a sweet, helpful guy. This episode combines the elemental and the biblical, using the rough-hewn milieu as background for a dark comedy version of the David and Goliath story, except that instead of a smooth stone to the forehead the Preacher uses a smooth blow to the stones. One can appreciate this scene’s mystico-comic ironies without subscribing to the literalist notions of sociologist Albert J. Bergesen, who sees Club and the apostle Paul as spiritual doppelgängers: ‘Two brutes who persecuted others, two epiphanies, two changed men who came to work the other side of the street.’ Although he acknowledges that not all religious imagery in film is ‘graceful and sacramental’, Bergesen’s hermeneutics tend more toward faith-based hyperbole than grounded film criticism – he wrote God in the Movies with Andrew M. Greeley, who is both a social scientist and a Roman Catholic priest – and he reveres the Preacher even more than Megan does, declaring that ‘worldly motives do not interest the Pale Rider at all’ because he is virtually ‘the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, a Christ-like figure who has come to judge the conduct of humanity on judgment day’. Scenes where the Preacher observes the actions of Megan, Sarah, Hull, Coy, Josh and Wheeler (Carrie Snodgress) amount to a ‘visual structure of moral judgment’ in which the arbiter looks on from higher ground, assumes a contemplative gaze, and makes a decision on the rights and wrongs of the situation, ‘not an instantaneous judgment based on emotion’ but a ‘dispassionate’ verdict representing ‘the gaze of God on … the rape of the land, the brutality of man to man and men to women’, followed by actions that deal either ignominious death or reinvigorated life to the characters involved.26 In a subtler and more film-savvy analysis, critic Henry Sheehan points out that the Preacher is seen from many vantage points throughout Pale Rider, generally corresponding with the physical logic of a scene – if he is coming to rescue a miner, for instance, he is photographed from the low angle of the endangered person – until a reversal near the end, when a confrontation between the Preacher and a killer ‘brings us right into the messy side of accomplished vengeance’ and brings out Eastwood’s implied assessment of moral relativism. ‘A gunfighter’s ascendancy extends to the height others are willing to give him,’ Sheehan writes, ‘or he is able to compel. Preacher towers over the tin-panners because they need his lethal talent; he dwarfs the hired gun because he’s forced him to his knees. And over this scramble for relative advantage loom gigantic mountains, into which the Preacher disappears under the end credits: true giants, throwing individual struggles into diminished relief.’27 And allowing the film’s alchemical substrate, I will add, to emerge from the background of the action to the foreground of the film’s rich figurative structure. The views of Pale Rider that I have set forth and cited constitute an analytical montage in which different perspectives contrast, conflict, contradict, and carom off 148

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

one another like shots in an Eisenstein sequence. What lends the film its urgency, immediacy, and unity is its canny placement of unorthodox content within a conspicuously hard-edged locale; by anchoring the story in rock, metal, harsh weather, and white-hot emotion, Eastwood energises not only the thrust of the narrative and the psychology of the characters but the entire gestalt of the picture, which I find more excitingly alive than the comparatively well-behaved melodramatics of Shane. Bringing out bedrock meanings in characters and landscapes alike, Eastwood’s variation on Shane puts the natural back into naturalism, and I believe its success in doing so will make it a more keenly appreciated western than its antecedent in the long run of genre history. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) The second war movie directed by Eastwood is a minor affair by any measure, but its connection with real historical events arguably makes it more substantial than the fantastical Firefox and points toward the filmmaker’s vastly more sophisticated treatments of warfare in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Although the story is set in the present day, the title comes from the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge, a month-long clash in the Korean War that produced notably high casualties among the American, French, Chinese, and North Korean troops who fought it. Eastwood plays Thomas Highway, an old-fashioned soldier who fought with the army in Korea and earned a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. Later he switched over to the Marines, served with distinction in Vietnam, became a hard-boiled gunnery sergeant, and did not learn in all that time how to get along with the system. Returning at his own request to a unit he was kicked out of years ago, he assumes the thankless task of turning a bunch of Reagan-era slackers into an ace reconnaissance unit, whupping other alpha males and pining for his ex-wife, Aggie (Marsha Mason), all the while. Things take a turn when the United States invades Grenada – as indeed happened in 1983 – and Gunny gets one last crack at the battlefield glory that has hitherto eluded him. Heartbreak Ridge was written by James Carabatsos, who fought with a cavalry division in Vietnam in the late 1960s.28 Two other writers altered and polished the script, and what started as an army tale changed into a Marines tale when the army refused assistance to the production, which contained too many negative stereotypes – the boozing, the brawling, the cussing – for the brass to endorse with an official stamp of approval. The main stereotype, of course, was Highway himself; more precisely, it was the notion ‘that a guy Clint’s age, a Korean veteran, was still in the Marines and drilling a recon. platoon’, to quote McGilligan, who further observes that the script’s predilection for raucous Animal House-type humor, designed ‘to leaven the serious drama about a man at a critical crossroads in his life and career’, brought about ridiculous scenes of raw trainees defying their superior as if he had no authority at all.29 The project gained its hoped-for military imprimatur when Eastwood submitted it to the Marines, a branch of the armed forces known to be relatively permissive in this area. (Highway is a Marine in the film, but a brief mention of prior service in the army was shoehorned into the dialogue when the filmmakers realised that the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge was fought primarily by army troops.) The imprimatur c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

149

then slipped away when the Department of Defense overrode the Marines and vetoed cooperation with what they feared would be a potentially offensive depiction of military life. Eastwood conferred with the brass, made some adjustments, failed to make other adjustments, and rejected the very idea of deleting the Granada invasion, which officials felt was entirely too real and recent to be spliced into such a hokey entertainment. An entourage from the Pentagon attended a screening of the completed film, and according to McGilligan they ‘never recovered from the first scene’, a Dirty Harry-esque episode showing Highway in a jail cell after a bender, declaring, ‘I’ve been pumping pussy since Christ was a corporal and I’m here to tell you the best goddamn poontang I ever paid for was in a place on Duc Lop Street in the beautiful city of Da Nang…’. The film struck one member of the delegation as ‘blasphemous pornography’, and everything about Grenada was deemed inaccurate.30 The best defense of Heartbreak Ridge is to propose that its one-dimensional characters are not worn-out clichés but tried-and-true archetypes: hard-as-nails Major Powers (Everett McGill), who does everything by the book; belligerent Swede (Peter Koch), the musclebound oaf whom Gunny dispatches in a trice; rock’n’rolling Corporal Jones (Mario Van Peebles), the black guy who starts as the baddest big-mouthed loafer and winds up as one of the unit’s trustiest soldiers; and others, from the brainy GI wearing heavy-framed glasses to the craggy old barmaid with a heart of gold. A similar argument might be made for the film’s trite depictions of military bonding; a riotous water-polo match, for instance, can be taken as Hollywood-style manly horseplay or a biting parody thereof. It is also possible to read the Grenada scenes against the grain of kneejerk nationalist rhetoric, observing that unlike a typical jingoistic war movie, Heartbreak Ridge expends no effort to build suspense, to hype the strength or deadliness of the enemy, or even to specify who the enemy is with any clarity. And one can hear some of the heroically profane dialogue as surreal mélanges bordering on outright palilalia; for just one example, listen to Sergeant Major Choozoo (Arlen Dean Snyder) greet his old pal Highway as ‘Skunk Stool’ or describe a Heartbreak Ridge leader as the ‘best Goddamn platoon sergeant two mewling, short-pricked, piss-ant baby-soldier little fuckers ever went to war with’. This verbiage is almost worthy of another gunnery sergeant, Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), in Stanley Kubrick’s linguistically extravagant Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket (1987). All of this notwithstanding, I find Heartbreak Ridge the least interesting of Eastwood’s war pictures. It is not merely innocuous, moreover; it is made actively offensive by its guts-and-glory portrayal of the Grenada invasion, which was in fact a piddling adventure cooked up by President Reagan and his conservative minions in an effort to overcome the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, that term referring to the inferiority feelings supposedly aroused in Americans by their nation’s defeat in the misbegotten Southeast Asian conflict. Although he applauded the rest of the film, even the New York Times critic Vincent Canby pulled back when he came to the climax, pointing out that the invasion ‘is treated more or less at it was reported in official communiqués – quick, clean, efficient’ and adding that ‘the dimmest moviegoer is likely to find that the aircraft carrier transporting the marines to their objective looks bigger than Grenada itself ’.31 150

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Roger Ebert, who also admired the film, noted in his review that the Marine Corps had intended to use it at benefit screenings for its ‘Toys for Tots’ program but scuttled the plan after seeing the picture.32 Heartbreak Ridge and Toys for Tots! The mind reels. Bird (1988) ‘Every musician I know hated Bird.’ So said Spike Lee in the companion book to Mo’ Better Blues, his 1990 movie starring Denzel Washington as a gifted but troubled jazz trumpeter. ‘Not only was the tone grim, but the film was so dark you couldn’t see a damn thing. … On all fronts, Bird just rang false.’35 Many critics disagreed, finding considerable merit in Eastwood’s biopic about Charlie Parker, the legendary alto-sax player known as Yardbird or just Bird to his contemporaneous fans. Jay Scott of the Toronto Globe and Mail called the film ‘a hypnotic, darkly photographed, loosely constructed marvel that avoids every cliché of the self-destructive-celebrity biography, a particularly remarkable achievement in that Parker played out every cliché of the self-destructive-celebrity life’. Striking a similar note closer to home, the Los Angeles Times carried Jack Mathews’ view that Bird is ‘as faithful to its subject as perhaps any film biography has been. … Parker was a paradoxical character, both self-destructive and full of life, and the movie, simultaneously dark and exhilarating, takes that as its theme.’ In my Christian Science Monitor review I described its tone as brooding and contemplative, calling it ‘a movie that demands your full attention, refusing to yield all its meanings if you sit back and let it wash over you’, and adding, ‘it rewards that attention with a rich and poignant study of a man who was never less than fascinating’.36 Bird originated with Joel Oliansky, a director and Emmy Award-winning writer who worked mostly in television. He had modest success in 1980 with The Competition, a theatrical feature starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving as classical pianists who are both rivals and lovers, and next he wanted to direct a Parker biopic with comedian and actor Richard Pryor in the leading role. He completed a screenplay but Pryor eventually demurred; several directors (and studios) later, Eastwood acquired the project.37 Oliansky said of the finished film, ‘Eastwood knows as much about jazz as I do, if not more. He has as much passion for jazz as I do, if not more. Where we may differ is in how much we know about screenplays. Eastwood cut 20 pages from my script and did a wonderful job. But what I saw was a film of my first draft.’38 Jonathan Rosenbaum, a jazz aficionado as well as a film critic, expressed a slightly different view, suggesting that Eastwood’s directing and Oliansky’s screenplay serve each other well. Bird, he wrote in 1988, ‘clearly surpasses everything else [Eastwood] has done – even if no small part of this is due to Joel Oliansky’s script, and most likely to Chan Parker’s unpublished memoir, Life in E-Flat [sic], which served as its principal source’.39 (The correct title of Parker’s book is My Life in E-flat.) Parker had a woefully short life, dying in 1955 at 34 years of age, so wasted by cirrhosis, a bleeding ulcer and heart disease (all linked to his alcoholism and heroin addiction) that the physician who conducted the autopsy initially thought his age was c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

151

between fifty and sixty. Bird dramatises his experiences without sensationalising or sanitising them, and it offers a condensed but plausible picture of his musical development, from his tentative beginnings to his eventual stardom. Eastwood and Oliansky echo the complexity of Parker’s music and the thorniness of his life by giving the film a somewhat complicated structure, opening it with an expressionistic episode that uses a cymbal as a symbol and a synecdoche for the vicissitudes of his career. And therein lies a tale, since the scene – presented by Eastwood in a nonlinear, almost oneiric manner – is based on a formative event in Parker’s life. The year was 1937, the place was the Reno Club in Kansas City, and Parker was sixteen, with a brand-new Selmer saxophone in his hands. Local musicians were taking turns jamming with Jo Jones, a drummer with a rapidly rising reputation, and Parker was invited to play a number with them. Eager to put a personal stamp on his solo – the tune was George Gershwin’s aptly named ‘I Got Rhythm’ – he interpolated a chord and then a scale that steered him to a new key and then another one. Suddenly he was stuck in harmonic waters he was not nearly deft enough to navigate. ‘He missed a phrase,’ according to biographer Ross Russell’s account. ‘Then he lost his grip on the time, the worst sin of all. The beat and the line went surging ahead.’ Jones was known for his prowess with the cymbals, and now he rode them ‘like an angry demon’. In front of the audience and the other musicians in the club, Jones then stopped cold. ‘Charlie stood there, rigid, frightened, holding the saxophone. … And a cymbal came sailing through the air. Jo Jones had snatched it from the cymbal ring and thrown it at Charlie’s feet.’ It landed ‘with a ‘shattering crash’, followed by laughs and jeers from the crowd. This sort of thing had happened to Parker before, but not in a situation so totally exposed. ‘They’re laughing at me now,’ he told Gene Ramey, a close friend (and gifted bassist) who tried to comfort him. ‘I’ll be back.’40 He was, and therein lies the rest of Eastwood’s movie. Forest Whitaker plays Parker, nimbly accomplishing the central task of plausibly impersonating the well-known figure while also managing the complementary task of investing him with a degree of three-dimensional psychology. The supporting cast includes Diane Venora as Chan Parker, the saxophone star’s common-law wife, and Michael Zelniker and Samuel E. Wright as trumpeters Red Rodney and Dizzy Gillespie, respectively. Roger Ebert’s favorable Chicago Sun-Times review includes a concise description of the narrative: The film follows the general drift of Parker’s life, but does not pay much attention to specific details (it glosses over all but his last marriage, for example). It shows the kid growing up in love with jazz, and sneaking in to hear his heroes play. It shows the almost overnight acceptance given to Parker’s talent. It shows him joining bands, forming bands, taking delight in stunts like the time he toured the South with a band including Red Rodney, a white trumpeter who was passed off as ‘Albino Red’ because integrated bands were forbidden. It shows him touring the West Coast and hearing some simple truths one night from Gillespie, who told him that the difference between them was that Diz took care of business, and Charlie took care of screwing up. 152

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

And it shows his relationship with Chan Parker, a white woman who loved jazz and understood Parker enough to be the best of his enablers – all of those who cared so much for Parker that they were willing to co-exist with his drugs.41 Not stressed in this synopsis is the fact that Bird also presents a portrait of the time and place in which Parker lived – the late 1940s and early 1950s, when New York City was the world capital of jazz – and of the new sound called bop or bebop, which transfixed 52nd Street hipsters even as it puzzled many connoisseurs of traditional blues, Dixieland and swing. Bebop got its name from its syncopated rhythms; for a standard example of the style, listen to Gillespie’s classic number ‘Salt Peanuts’, where the interjected words ‘salt peanuts, salt peanuts’ refuse to follow the usual formulas for falling on and off the beat. Audiences were slow to embrace bop, and even some musicians were confounded by it for a while: ‘That’s not jazz, that’s Chinese music!’ expostulated bandleader Cab Calloway when he first encountered it. But an increasing number of jazz artists were excited by the opportunity it gave them to move away from big bands and play in small, tightly-knit combos. Big bands, which dominated jazz from the middle 1930s through the end of World War II, are modeled on the European orchestra, with brass, woodwinds and rhythm instruments (bass, piano, percussion) arrayed in sections; because of their large size, these ensembles play from through-composed arrangements or ‘charts’ that set up designated spots for soloists to improvise along the way. By contrast, an intimate bop combo – anything from a duo or trio to an octet or even a nonet – allows space for every player to improvise at will. To keep things intelligible, pieces are often organised around the chords, and sometimes the melody, of a popular song that all of the players – and most of the listeners – already know, providing a framework for improvisations that can then exfoliate in all directions. (The next development was so-called free or ‘outside’ jazz that dispenses with prearranged chord progressions so soloists can do anything that comes to mind.) The key to bebop and its progeny is laissez-faire spontaneity, and Parker stood with its boldest pioneers, arguably greater and more daring than even such trailblazing peers as trumpeter Gillespie, drummer Max Roach and pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Like most bop, Parker’s music is speedy in tempo, formidable in technique and jampacked with notes. It is also very dense, using implied extensions of a piece’s chords and scales as the basis for extemporised flights that soar way beyond the harmonies, progressions and modulations one would have expected in pre-bebop times. A controversial aspect of Bird is the method Eastwood chose for injecting the authenticity and immediacy of Parker’s playing into the soundtrack. The film’s music supervisor and composer, Lennie Niehaus, had worked on occasional Eastwood projects going back to The Enforcer in 1976. The way he and Clint saw things, they had to find a Parker sound-alike or sonic clone, or else use Parker’s own recordings, which tend to present solos that have the expansiveness of studio showpieces rather than the tightness and concision of live performances in clubs or auditoriums. Eastwood and Niehaus swung in the direction of original Parker recordings when they found a cache of unreleased c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

153

Parker tapes, but their technical quality – most notably the sounds of piano, bass and drums – was often poor. They then took the unusual step of enlisting a studio engineer to erase everything from the tapes except Parker’s alto sax, and next they laid down new back-up tracks with a rhythm section including alto sax player Charles McPherson, trumpeters Red Rodney and Jon Faddis, bassists Ron Carter and Ray Brown, pianist Monty Alexander, vibes player Charlie Shoemake and drummer John Guerin, as well as a string section. The results were solid, but the technique employed raised ethical questions. One you began fiddling with historic recordings, one journalist wrote, ‘there could be no end to such tampering, and … the artists in question have no control over it’.42 Different commentators have expressed different views on the matter. Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins, whose books include Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, called it ‘a brilliant touch in the movie’ and judged that no serious artistic infringement was involved: ‘It’s just another way of hearing Bird,’ he said; ‘it doesn’t replace anything.’ He became a self-identified ‘purist’, however, when it came to the Columbia soundtrack album. ‘On record I don’t mind scratchiness,’ he explained. ‘I don’t mind the fact that there are abrupt cuts, or whatever, because it’s Bird; it’s Max Roach. It’s the way it was done that day.’ By contrast, the trumpeter and professor Herb Pomeroy, who played and recorded with Parker, complained that taking Parker’s solos out of context ‘is totally untruthful’ and ‘lacking in artistic integrity’ on screen and disc alike.43 I see merits in the arguments of both Giddins and Pomeroy, but while I too am uncomfortable with the mongrel nature of the performances – they are sort-of-Parker sessions, neither authentic nor counterfeit – I come down with Giddins on the distinction between movie and record, and I agree that whatever their pluses and minuses as music, the studio-crafted recordings do not somehow do away with the genuine articles cut by Parker in his own day, sometimes with rhythm sections inferior to the one Eastwood and Niehaus put together. As the critic Richard Lehnert wittily wrote in Stereophile, which proclaimed the soundtrack disc its Recording of the Month, we can ‘get so caught up in the techno/timewarp glitz of this project that we overlook the fact that, beyond the grave or no, some entirely convincing jazz is happening here. … Really, as a jazz album, it works. Incredulously recommended, sort of.’44 More than one critic called Bird a labor of love, not the most original phrase that might be applied, reflexively linking the movie to Eastwood’s musical enthusiasm. The picture is ‘less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and as a labor of love’, wrote the second-string New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, whose background as a pop music critic reinforced her praise of the ‘superb soundtrack’ as well as her less complimentary judgment that ‘the more complex side of [Parker’s] nature, the musical side that emerges in his collaborations with giants like Dizzy Gillespie … is better heard on the soundtrack than seen’.45 Using the terminology to a slightly different purpose, Washington Post reviewer Desson Howe asserted in his opening paragraph that there is ‘one problem with … Clint Eastwood’s labor-of-love portrait of jazz legend Charlie Parker. It feels like a labor of love.’ The director’s ‘respect for the renowned saxophonist runs so deep’, Howe continued by way of explanation, ‘it disappears underground: and only the faintest signature arises from those devotional depths.’ Rating the film 154

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

‘a scale above Hollywood’s average road-to-ruin drama’, Howe credited it with having ‘the freeform air of a jazz improvisation’ but chastised it for ‘accompanying imperfections – expositional false notes that head nowhere, self-conscious artistic moves (Bird is dedicated to “musicians everywhere”) and rather lightweight backup’ from secondary characters. The sum total is a ‘great auk’ of a movie, ‘fascinating in its own peculiar way but incapable of flight’.46 If that review reached Spike Lee’s quarters in jazz-savvy Brooklyn, its critical take surely pleased him. Perhaps the most persuasive encomium for Bird comes from Rosenbaum, whose expertise in both film and jazz lends weight to his placement of Bird in the Number 5 position on his 1999 list of ten movies ‘in which the aesthetics of jazz and the aesthetics of film find some happy and mutually supportive meeting ground’, thereby becoming the best films in a ‘special and rarified’ category. Of the Parker biopic he writes: ‘For all the legitimate quibbles that must be made – about substituting new accompanists, short-shrifting the issues of racism, and muddling certain musical and biographical facts – the man and his music almost get the canvas they deserve.’47 I concur. The Dead Pool (1988) and Pink Cadillac (1989) One might easily have lost faith in Eastwood once the glow of Bird wore off, so fainthearted and flatfooted were its immediate successors, both directed by Buddy Van Horn in his last such assignments before returning to the world of stunts. The Dead Pool marked the final gasp of Harry Callahan, still a crusading cop who never lets the law get in his way. This time he has an Asian-American partner skilled in the martial arts, and they are investigating a string of murders connected with the sinister game known as ‘dead pool’; this diversion involves wagering on when a given individual will die, leading to temptations for evildoers too obvious to need elaboration here. In my 1988 review I saluted Van Horn’s technically proficient filmmaking, and I observed that while the screenplay (the only one Steve Sharon has written) drags in all manner of nastiness, from drugs to devil worship, Van Horn makes most of it look unglamorous. The film also suggests that ‘violent movies may beget violence’, I added, ‘which is an odd message to find in a violent movie like this’.33 The most noteworthy aspect of The Dead Pool is its lively cast, which includes Patricia Clarkson, in her second theatrical film; Liam Neeson, still a rising young actor; and Jim Carrey, then known more formally as James Carrey. Sadly, the combined abilities of these performers are not enough to make The Dead Pool a game worth playing – unless the alternative is watching Pink Cadillac, my leading candidate for Eastwood’s worst picture since he played the First Saxon in Lady Godiva of Coventry back in 1955. Bernadette Peters plays the wife of a felonious white supremacist; arrested for possession of her husband’s counterfeit money, she jumps bail and flees in the eponymous automobile, pursued by a jaded skip tracer (Eastwood) who catches her in Reno, then agrees to a side trip so she can see her baby one more time. There is no hint of chemistry between Eastwood and Peters, and the dialogue (by John Eskow, in his screenwriting debut) is extremely leaden. On the positive side, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

155

there are a handful of perky lines (Flasher: ‘What do you think?’ Lou Ann: ‘Looks like a penis to me, only smaller.’) and Eastwood works up occasional moments of effective comedy, most of them involving disguises. To be entirely fair about the picture, I will add that the first-rate critic Jonathan Rosenbaum admired Pink Cadillac as much as I disliked it. Even though Eastwood did not direct it, Rosenbaum wrote, it is ‘very much an Eastwood movie, full of his cranky personality and quirky intelligence, and brimming with ideas’. Not everything in the picture works, he continued, ‘but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities [it] has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster’, with Eastwood and Peters both ‘interesting and unpredictable throughout’.34 I disagree, to put it mildly, but Rosenbaum’s reaction is certainly worth pondering. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

156

Revelation 6:7–8, quoted in Pale Rider. Verse 8 in its entirety reads, ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth’ (King James Version of the Bible.) Clint Eastwood audio clip. Eastwood Filmography: Pale Rider (n.d.) http://www. clinteastwood.net/welcome/alt/ (accessed 12 September 2009). Clint Eastwood audio clip. Eastwood Filmography: Pale Rider (n.d.) http://www. clinteastwood.net/welcome/alt/ (accessed 12 September 2009). Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 100. Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 100. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the highest prize, but at this festival a miss is as good as a mile. According to Slotkin’s structural analyses, the years between 1970 and the early 1990s brought four distinct efforts to revise, repair or at least revive the western. As noted earlier, the first of these new waves, from 1970 to 1972, tried to revitalise the genre’s formulas, especially those that evinced connections with the ongoing Vietnam disaster; this produced emphatically revisionist westerns on the order of Little Big Man and McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buck and the Preacher as well as the Eastwood vehicles Two Mules for Sister Sara, which is moderately offbeat, and Joe Kidd, which is quite traditional. The second new wave (1975 to 1976) and the third (1980 to 1981) had basically the same agenda as the first; results ranged from Hearts of the West (Howard Zieff, 1975) and The Return of a Man Called Horse (Irvin Kershner, 1976) to Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) and Death Hunt (Peter R. Hunt, 1981), plus Eastwood’s quietly innovative The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bronco Billy, if one considers the latter a true western. The last of these attempts at revival began in the late 1980s with the likes of Young Guns (Christopher Cain, 1988) and Old Gringo (Luis Puenzo, 1989) and continued with such varied productions as Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) and the animated film An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (Phil Nibbelink, Simon Welles, 1991), th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 15 16

reaching its unarguable high point with Eastwood’s own Unforgiven in 1992. This places Pale Rider in the interstice between the 1980–1981 revival, which produced at least a few pictures in which I find continuing value, and the attempted revival that commenced in the late 1980s, which I see as a failure at virtually all levels, Unforgiven being the grand exception. (The films named in this note are my examples, although some of them appear in Slotkin’s text. See Slotkin, p. 628.) For context, here are the preceding sentences: ‘The villain fears the hero’s preaching more than his guns, and admits that his wicked designs will fail if the victims arm themselves with faith instead of weapons. Like many an action picture, though, ‘Pale Rider’ forgets its own sermon when the climax rolls around. The preacher takes off his collar and straps on his six-shooters, resolving the story in an explosion of shooting and killing. Good triumphs over bad, but the means are disappointingly primitive. For all the talk we’ve heard, might means right after all.’ David Sterritt, ‘‘Pale Rider’: black hats against white hats, and no shades of gray,’ The Christian Science Monitor (28 June 1985) http://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0628/ lpale-f.html (accessed 4 June 2008). Michael Lacey, ‘The Earth’s Storm Troopers,’ Phoenix New Times (7 August 1991), n.p. http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1991–08–07/news/the-earth-s-stormtroopers. See also ‘Feedback,’ New Scientist 1787 (21 September 1991), reprinted on newscientist.com http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117875.900-feedback.html (both accessed 16 June 2009). George Sessions, ‘Ecocentrism, Wilderness, and Global Ecosystem Protection,’ in Max Oelschlaeger, ed., The Wilderness Condition: Essays on Environment and Civilization (Washington: Island Press, 1992), pp. 90–130, cited at p. 123. Samuel P. Hays, ‘Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 505–506. Watt quotes himself in James Watt, ‘The Religious Left’s Lies,’ The Washington Post (21 May 2005). Reprinted on washingtonpost.com (2005), n.p. http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/20/AR2005052001333. html (accessed 14 June 2009). Colman McCarthy, ‘James Watt’s battle against nature,’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (25 May 1981): 8. McCarthy attributes these words to The Wall Street Journal; other sources attribute them to The Washington Post (24 May 1981), e.g., Dale D. Goble, Paul Hirt, and Susan J. Kilgore, ‘Environmental Cartoons,’ Environmental History vol. 10 no. 4 (October 2005), pp. 776–793; reprinted by History Cooperative (27 Oct. 2009), n.p. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.4/ goble.html and Wikiquote (n.d.) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_G._Watt (all accessed 16 June 2009). Tim Cahill, ‘Clint Eastwood: The Rolling Stone Interview,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 117–129, cited at 127. McGilligan, Clint, p. 376. Eastwood’s reworking of Shane replaces ten-year-old Joey Starrett, the son of homesteaders Joe and Marian Starrett, with 14-year-old Megan Wheeler, the daughter c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

157

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27

28

29 30 31

32

158

of Hull’s girlfriend Sarah Wheeler, a single mother. Joey expresses his love for Shane verbally, through body language, and in his behavior, but it is a childish and formless love that is rendered cloying and often annoying by Brandon De Wilde’s syrupy, monotonous delivery. By contrast, when Megan voices her attraction to the Preacher, the young actress Sydney Penny makes her a confident and assertive girl on the verge of womanhood, adding a sexual dimension that deepens the film’s emotional dynamics, as critic John H. Foote points out. See John H. Foote, Clint Eastwood: Evolution of a Filmmaker (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), p. 63. Christopher Frayling, ‘Eastwood on Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblenz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 130–136, cited at 135. Originally published as chapter 6 in Christopher Frayling, Clint Eastwood (London: Virgin, 1992), pp. 61–67. The interview took place in 1985. Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray, ‘Pale Rider: Environmental politics, Eastwood style,’ Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 47 (Winter 2005), n.p. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/palerider/index.html (accessed 14 June 2009). Heumann and Murray, ‘Pale Rider,’ n.p. William Beard, Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2000), p. 49. Heumann and Murray, ‘Pale Rider,’ n.p. Heumann and Murray, ‘Pale Rider,’ n.p. Albert J. Bergesen and Andrew M. Greeley, God in the Movies (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), p. 72. Bergesen wrote this book’s Pale Rider chapter. Beard, Persistence of Double Vision, pp. 30–31. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 412–413. Bergesen and Greeley, God in the Movies, pp. 75–77, 71. Henry Sheehan, ‘Clint Eastwood – ‘Scraps of Hope,’’ HenrySheehan.com, n.p. http://www.henrysheehan.com/essays/def/eastwood.html (accessed 30 March 2008). Originally published as ‘Scraps of Hope’ in Film Comment (September/ October 1992). His other screenwriting credits include the Vietnam War picture Hamburger Hill, a 1987 release directed by John Irvin, and the crime drama No Mercy, directed by Richard Pearce and released the same month as the Eastwood film. McGilligan, Clint, pp. 396, 398. McGilligan, Clint, 398–399, 402, 406. The exceedingly shocked delegation member was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Simms. Vincent Canby, ‘Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge,’ The New York Times (5 December 1986). http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9a0de4db113af93 6a35751c1a960948260 (accessed 5 October 2013). Roger Ebert, ‘Heartbreak Ridge,’ RogerEbert.com (5 December 1986) http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/heartbreak-ridge-1986 (accessed 6 October 2013). th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

33 34

35

36

37

38

39

40 41 42

43

44

David Sterritt, ‘Freeze Frames,’ The Christian Science Monitor (15 July 1988) http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0715/lff15.html (accessed 6 October 2013). Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Pink Cadillac,’ Chicago Reader (nd) http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/pink-cadillac/Film?oid=1060144 (accessed 6 October 2013). Spike Lee with Lisa Jones, Mo’ Better Blues: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Fireside, 1990), 39. Universal gave Lee a smaller budget than he requested for Mo’ Better Blues because of the poor box-office showings by Bird and Bertrand Tavernier’s similarly jazzy ‘Round Midnight (1986). See also Kaleem Aftab, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 109. Jay Scott in the Toronto Globe and Mail (14 October 1988), C1. Jack Mathews in the Los Angeles Times (22 September 1988), 1. David Sterritt in The Christian Science Monitor (21 October 1988) http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1021/lbir. html (accessed 4 October 2013). Oliansky drew some of his material from reminiscences shared with him by tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards, who had roomed, performed, and played chess with Parker in the 1940s. Edwards found Eastwood’s film too dark, saying that while Parker was certainly dependent on drugs, so were such musicians as the nineteenth-century composer Frédéric Chopin and the contemporary sax players Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. See Maarten de Haan, ‘Teddy Edwards: A True Citizen of Los Angeles,’ Artist Interviews (December 1999). http://www.artistinterviews. eu/?page_id=7&parent_id=22 (Accessed 4 March 2013). Myrna Oliver, ‘Joel Oliansky, 66; TV and Film Writer Won Emmy for The Law,’ Los Angeles Times (1 August 2002) http://articles.latimes.com/2002/aug/01/local/ me-oliansky1 (accessed 4 March 2013). Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Bird Watching,’ Chicago Reader (21 October 1988) http:// www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1988/10/bird-watching/ (accessed 4 March 2013). See also Chan Parker, My Life in E-flat (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). Ross Russell, Bird Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 85. Roger Ebert, ‘Bird,’ Chicago Sun-Times (14 October 1988) http://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/bird-1988 (accessed 6 October 2013). Amy Duncan, ‘How Bird’s solos were given new settings for film,’ The Christian Science Monitor (21 October 1988) http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/ r14/1988/1021/lpark.html/%28page%29/2 (accessed 9 October 2013). My discussion of the Bird soundtrack draws on this informative article. Giddins and Pomeroy quoted in Duncan, ‘How Bird’s solos were given new settings for film,’ See also Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, revised edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Richard Lehnert, ‘Recording of December 1988: Bird (Original Soundtrack),’ Stereophile (1 December 1988) http://www.stereophile.com/content/recordingdecember-1988-ibird-original-soundtracki (accessed 6 September 2012). Lehnert is mistaken when he writes that Ray Brown is ‘the only musician in these sessions c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

159

45

46

47

160

to have actually played with the living Parker,’ since Red Rodney was also a Parker sideman. Janet Maslin, ‘Film Festival: Charlie Parker’s Tempestuous Life and Music,’ The New York Times (26 September 1988) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res =940DE0DA1E3BF935A1575AC0A96E948260 (accessed 9 October 2013). Desson Howe, ‘Bird,’ Washington Post (14 October 1988) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/birdrhowe_a0b1cc.htm (accessed 6 October 2013). Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Ten Best Jazz Films (1999 List),’ JonathanRosenbaum. net (4 June 1999) http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1999/06/the-ten-best-jazzfilms-1999-list/ (accessed 9 October 2013). Rosenbaum compiled his ranking for Joseph McBride, The Book of Movie Lists (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1999). Number 1 is Dudley Murphy’s Black and Tan (1929) and Number Ten is a tie between Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1962) and Thomas Reichman’s Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968 (1968).

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

CHAPTER SIX

Invictus: From John Huston to Jersey Boys

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works. Oscar Wilde1 White Hunter Black Heart (1990) In his next picture, Eastwood set himself a task similar to the one he set for Forest Whitaker in Bird – to impersonate a famous figure with verisimilitude and conviction while charging the character with enough psychological depth to give a plausible sense of what made the person tick. Although the protagonist of White Hunter Black Heart is named John Wilson, his personality and exploits are unabashedly based on those of John Huston, a multiple-threat filmmaker not unlike Eastwood himself. Huston had directed a prodigious number of movies, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to The Dead in 1987, the year he died. He was also a prolific screenwriter, penning scripts for such Hollywood auteurs as William Wyler and Howard Hawks in addition to many of his own pictures, including such widely hailed productions as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). And he was a busy screen actor, playing Cardinal Glennon in Otto Preminger’s epic The Cardinal (1963), Noah in his own epic The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966), Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s crime drama Chinatown (1974) and Pa Kegan in William Richert’s conspiracy thriller Winter Kills (1979), among many other roles. Huston was never an A-list star, but he was an internationally known character actor, and his voice was as familiar as his face, thanks to his sonorous voiceovers and narrations in various films and TV shows. Huston had been dead for only two years when White Hunter Black Heart went into production with two months of principal photography in Zimbabwe and envic h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

161

Hunting the big tusker: Eastwood channels John Huston in White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

rons. The screenplay by Peter Viertel, James Bridges, and Burt Kennedy was based on Viertel’s eponymous 1953 novel, itself based on his experiences while working with Huston on The African Queen in Uganda and what was then the Belgian Congo in 1951.2 Huston directed The African Queen from a screenplay he wrote with the critic and novelist James Agee, based on C. S. Forester’s 1935 novel.3 Humphrey Bogart plays a rugged boat captain who helps a missionary (Katharine Hepburn) escape from German East Africa after the death of her brother (Robert Morley) just as World War I is breaking out. In the course of events the captain and the churchwoman tangle with nature, cope with mechanical breakdowns, dodge German fire, torpedo an enemy craft and fall in love. During the classical studio era, American movies were usually filmed on Hollywood soundstages or in locations where casts, crews and equipment could be put in place without undue logistical hassles. Huston had shot much of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, however, and he liked the idea of shooting The African Queen in the East African region where the story takes place, even though the production called for bulky Technicolor cameras that could be hard to handle in such an environment. It was indeed a demanding experience. ‘We lived in a camp hacked out of the jungle,’ a crew member recalled years later. ‘You had to leap into bed at night before the mosquitoes could get you, and shake your boots in the morning to make sure there were no centipedes. You washed with red water from the river, and you had a bucket with a string for a shower.’4 Hepburn was moved to write a book about the expedition, giving it an amusingly candid title: The Making of The African Queen: How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.5 The conceit of White Hunter Black Heart is that Huston, here renamed Wilson, regarded the venture as an occasion for hunting big game as well as filming big scenes. No sooner do the cast and crew set up shop in the jungle than Wilson starts pursuing his dearly held dream of killing an elephant in the wild, and before long this becomes his top priority, reducing the film production almost to an afterthought. Others wait, fret, and squirm while he putters around in the bush looking for a target, undeterred by objections from his writer friend Pete Verrill (played by Jeff Fahey), who protests that killing such a noble beast for sport would be immoral. ‘They’re so majestic,’ Verrill says to Hodkins (Timothy Spall), the pilot of a bush plane. ‘So indestructible. They’re part of the earth. They make us feel like perverse little creatures from another planet. Without any dignity. Makes one believe in God. In the miracle of creation. Fantastic. They’re part of a world that no longer exists. … Feeling of unconquerable time.’ 162

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Wilson appears to hold the same view, stating that it is not merely a crime to shoot an elephant, it is actually a sin. But his yen to slay a ‘tusker’ proves persistent. When the longed-for opportunity does eventually arrive, he finds himself unable to pull the trigger, for reasons that are not entirely clear, either to us or to him. The encounter brings about the death of the expert guide Kivu (Boy Mathias Chuma) but appears to leave Wilson as bewildered about his nature as he is repentant about what he has caused, which is a step in the right ethical direction. His camera is finally ready to start rolling just as Eastwood’s film fades to black, and Wilson’s last line – delivered with a spot-on mixture of hesitancy, insecurity and perplexity – is a director’s most familiar command, now loaded with dark-toned nuance: ‘Action.’ According to Huston’s daughter, actress Anjelica Huston, the account of her father’s exploits given by Viertel in White Hunter Black Heart should not be taken too literally: ‘I think, for the purposes of novelisation,’ she remarked, ‘you have to pump up the volume a bit.’ While the gun room in her family’s home in Ireland contained a few stuffed heads, moreover, she averred that Huston never shot an elephant. Yet she did acknowledge his fondness for subjecting his actors to challenges above and beyond the usual. ‘Basically, the one thing you had to do was take it well,’ she said. ‘My father admired anyone who actually survived it all. Usually, it was a test to see if you had: a) any bravery; or b) a sense of humour. Somehow, if you came out with either of those intact, you graduated.’6 Eastwood’s challenge was to portray Wilson in a manner that would render him real and recognisable as Huston without lapsing into simple mimicry. ‘The main trap,’ he said, would definitely have been to do a sort of imitation like the kind you see in nightclubs. What I wanted to do was to think like him, to seize on the very particular development that was his, sometimes a little condescending but deliberately so. … Being tall myself, pretty much Huston’s height, observing his behavior and his diction in the movies, striving to reconstruct his turns of thought, after that things came very naturally. I wanted to seize the interior feeling, the philosophy, to share the same attitude with respect to the world. I didn’t really try to imitate his gestures, though I often acted with a cigarette in my hand because he was a chain smoker. But also … there is a fictional side, and I didn’t want the spectator to be overwhelmed by the resemblances.7 This rationale did not persuade many critics when the picture debuted at Cannes in 1990. Indeed, it proved highly unpopular, and the most unpopular element of all was Eastwood’s grinning, speechifying, chain-smoking imitation of a film-world celebrity whose actual voice and mannerisms had been well known to moviegoers for years. I felt then, and I still believe now, that White Hunter Black Heart in general and Eastwood’s performance in particular have been misread by many commentators. It is better understood if one thinks along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s remark about putting his genius – which I take to mean his greatest inspirations and strongest abilities – not into his works but into his life. This is what Wilson is trying to do, wittingly or not, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

163

Marisa Berenson as movie star Kay Gibson in White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

and the richly sardonic humor of White Hunter Black Heart comes from the fact that he’s thoroughly botching the job, putting his life and his art at perilous risk of falling apart. Eastwood’s performance metaphorically echoes this theme. Huston had many distinctive mannerisms as an actor, from a ‘low-throated growl and … over-gesticulating hand motions’ to an across-the-board projection of ‘swagger and physical bravado’, to quote a couple of critics.8 His resonant vocal tones were his most immediately recognisable trait, and Eastwood was steeped in them, having taken in Huston’s documentary short The Battle of San Pietro (1945; aka San Pietro) some fifty times when he was a projectionist of training films during his military service.9 As well as he knew Huston’s vocal and gestural characteristics, however, any attempt to ape them would have been doomed to fail, and Eastwood’s strategy in White Hunter Black Heart – his decision to suggest the depths rather than replicate the surfaces – is wise and successful, simultaneously evoking Huston’s demeanor, satirising Huston’s superfluities and limning Wilson’s semi-autonomous personality as a Huston-like grandstander who is ultimately not Huston but himself. It is anyone’s guess whether Huston would have approved of Eastwood’s performance or of the film that contains it. He too was capable of irreverent portraiture, as witness his eccentric biopic Freud (1962) or his quixotic western The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) or his angst-ridden adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s unhinged autobiographical novel Under the Volcano (film 1984; novel 1947). But a certain scepticism about self-reflexive cinema glimmers through a comment he made about directors prone to artistic ‘cannibalism’ in modern film. ‘If you make movies about movies, about characters instead of people,’ he said, ‘the echoes get thinner and thinner until they’re reduced to mechanical sounds.’10 Huston might conceivably have applied that judgment (which was aimed at the generation of filmmakers younger than either Eastwood or himself ) to White Hunter Black Heart, but I suspect that the director of such cosmically ironic films as Beat the Devil (1953), Wise Blood (1979), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985) would have taken John Wilson in stride. Clever concoction that it is, White Hunter Black Heart does not even fit the categories that Huston set up in his remark: while it is a movie about a movie, the latter film almost does not get made, and while Wilson is a fictional character, he is a true-life person as well. Perhaps the verdict can rest with Anjelica Huston, who cheerfully endorsed the depiction. Eastwood, she said, ‘did quite a good job on my dad’.11 164

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

The Rookie (1990) It is safe to assume that Eastwood made The Rookie, a conventional and impersonal venture, to recoup his box-office credibility after the damage it sustained from the weak performances of Bird and White Hunter Black Heart.12 Rushed to theatres during the Christmas season, it grossed $43 million domestically, proving ‘good enough to stop the [box-office] slide’ but hardly ‘a great film or even a very good one’, in Marc Eliot’s widely shared opinion. Calling it a ‘simpleton’s exercise’, Washington Post critic Hal Hinson wrote that Eastwood ‘couldn’t be more naked in his attempts to connect with a younger generation of moviegoers if he laced up a pair of Reebok Pumps’.13 Eastwood plays Nick Pulovski, a longtime cop trying to solve a string of auto thefts connected with the evil Strom (Raul Julia), a German mob boss. Early in the film Pulovski’s black partner, Powell (Hal Williams), is killed in a confrontation with Strom, whereupon Pulovski is pulled off the case and white neophyte David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) is assigned as his new partner. Ackerman is perilously weak in policing skills and he is also psychologically fragile, suffering unassuageable guilt over his brother’s death, for which he feels he was responsible even though he was a child at the time. As film scholar Walter Metz points out, The Rookie recycles a very familiar trope – a veteran shows a newbie the ropes – in a very familiar way, recycling very familiar stereotypes of masculinity in the process. While combing a saloon for clues, for instance, Ackerman has his police badge stolen by a crook who then ‘taunts [his] impotence’ by walking out with the ID in his hand; meanwhile Pulovski has extracted information from a snitch by passing talcum powder off as cocaine. Like many Eastwood procedurals of the 1970s and 1980s, Metz writes, the film revolves around Eastwood’s character ‘teaching his ill-matched partner … how to act like a vigilante’.14 Press attention to The Rookie was attracted in large part by the stunt scenes, overseen by second-unit supervisor Buddy Van Horn, who had directed Eastwood in three pictures over the past several years and was back in his usual stunt-department role.15 The stunts in The Rookie involved real explosions and collisions that American Cinematographer found impressive enough to warrant a flattering headline – ‘Rookie Stunts, Effects Dazzle Viewer’ – and extroverted enough to merit a second one reading, ‘Slam, Bang, Crash, Boom for the Rookie’. Some discussions of the cast turned to the question of why the filmmakers thought ‘that the Puerto Rican Julia and the Brazilian [Sonia] Braga would make convincing German schweinehund’, as Daniel O’Brien phrased it. Not even The Psychotronic Video Guide found the casting credible, referring to ‘the German (?!) villains’ and deeming The Rookie a ‘low point’ in Eastwood’s filmography.16 The off-centre casting is symptomatic, Knapp suggests, of multiple deep failings in a film where Eastwood, fed up with the Dirty Harry game and rejecting ‘the very elements and principles of his cinema’, capitulates to the ‘pyrotechnic overkill’ of the Die Hard franchise.17 Driving this surrender, Knapp theorises, was Eastwood’s desire to stop being ‘the on-screen gist of his films’, at least in the sense of following worn-out formulas; as he would do again in Unforgiven, he seeks to marginalise and retire his tough-protagonist persona, ceding (some of ) the spotlight to others. This is a reasonable hypothesis, and Knapp supports it with a remark that Eastwood made to Rolling c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

165

Stone a couple of years later: ‘I think the days of me doing what I have done in the past are gone. … To be saying smart lines and wiping out tons of people – I’ll leave that for the newer guys on the scene.’18 Knapp does not quote what Eastwood said next in the same interview: ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing now; I’d have a hard time concentrating on it. … You need something better.’19 This is a good auto-analysis by the bored, boring Eastwood who evidently saw The Rookie as the run-of-the-mill genre exercise it is. Unforgiven (1992) Writing in the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound, the American critic Amy Taubin said that Unforgiven was ‘the first film of Eastwood’s old age’.20 This was clearly a premature call, given the fact that he has continued to direct, produce and act in movies for more than two decades thereafter. But this western was definitely among the first films of Eastwood’s full maturity as a filmmaker, performer and explorer of the American frontier myth. As noted earlier, I agree with critics who argue that his creative personality has mellowed and matured in his late-career movies, and I give qualified assent to the claim that his key pictures from Unforgiven on represent efforts to atone for stances exemplified by his earlier films, or at least to replace their more simplistic notions with richer, more textured views of life, love, society and his own persona. Easy generalisations can be deceptive, however, since movies like Absolute Power and True Crime centre on versions of Eastwood’s action-thriller persona that are just slightly altered from previous norms; and even morally and emotionally charged projects like Unforgiven, the World War II movies and Million Dollar Baby, which can be read as boldly revisionist takes on standard conservative positions, can also be seen instead as essentially traditional pictures with unusual twists. In any case, Eastwood’s late films show continued evolution in his acting style, most notably in The Bridges of Madison County and the sombre Million Dollar Baby, as well as growth in his filmmaking skills, particularly in such demanding projects as Unforgiven and Mystic River. The aging Eastwood, more invested than ever in the resonance of myth and the indeterminacy of the past, is the most interesting Eastwood of all. Although it is a complex and resonant film, Unforgiven has a straightforward story. William Munny gave up gunfighting for farming in order to please his wife and give their kids a peaceful home. But after his wife’s death he decides to join two companions – an aspiring gunslinger called the Schofield Kid, whom he has just met, and a neighbor named Ned Logan, who is his closest friend – and collect the reward being offered by the prostitutes of Big Whisky to whomever will wreak vengeance on a malicious cowboy who brutally assaulted one of their number. Among the colorfully named people whom Munny and his partners encounter in the town are English Bob, an untalented British gunman who travels with a biographer to chronicle his exploits, and Little Bill Daggett, an unscrupulous and sadistic sheriff. Much blood flows. The film’s original title was ‘The Cut-Whore Killings’, an accurate phrase – the story’s deadly events stem from the mutilation of a prostitute by a drunken cowboy 166

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

with a straight razor – but also a harsh and disturbing one, pointing to the insistently grim overtones of nearly all the major scenes. It is hard to imagine a studio releasing a picture with such a marquee-unfriendly moniker, and screenwriter David Webb Peoples must have known it would be changed if and when it went into production. He completed the first draft in 1976 and sent it to Francis Ford Coppola, who might have filmed it in the early 1980s if westerns had not become too unfashionable for studio backing to materialise. Malpaso optioned the screenplay in 1983 and contracted to produce it in 1985, despite the objections of Sonia Chernus in the story department, who fulminated that she could not think of ‘one good thing to say about it.’21 Eastwood then shelved the project for several years. One reason was that it ‘called for a lot of preparation’ and he ‘wanted to do it right’.22 Another reason was his feeling that he would better suit the leading role if he were older; the script described Munny as thirty-five or forty, but he was a man with a difficult life who might look older than his years. (Eastwood was sixty-one when Unforgiven was filmed.) Since the picture was a western, the postponement made for better timing, too: Clint and Coppola had both optioned the property in the wake of Michael Cimino’s financially disastrous Heaven’s Gate, but following Kevin Costner’s financially triumphant Dances with Wolves, which earned seven Academy Awards including best picture, the climate for westerns was much improved. Along with all this, Clint was in the market for a hit. The Rookie had done reasonably good business in 1990, but White Hunter Black Heart had flopped earlier that year and Pink Cadillac had crashed in 1989. Eastwood’s intuition said that Peoples’s script could be a winner, and he decided not to skimp on resources, as he sometimes had with other projects that resonated for him personally. He secured a comfortable $14.4 million for the budget and set a schedule twice as long as that of Pale Rider even though the scale of the production was slightly smaller. The set for Big Whisky had no false fronts – all of the buildings were solidly built, fully functioning structures – and the cast included more star power than any previous Eastwood picture, with Gene Hackman as Little Bill, the corrupt sheriff; Morgan Freeman as Ned Logan, the hero’s ill-starred companion; and Richard Harris as English Bob, the egomaniacal interloper in town. Eastwood also changed the title, first to ‘The William Munny Killings’ and then to Unforgiven.23 Principal photography took place over 52 days in September and October 1991. Much of the shooting was done in Alberta, Canada, where Big Whisky was built. Landscapes were filmed elsewhere in Alberta, and a second unit shot the railroad scenes using a narrow-gauge line on a California ranch. Aiming for an infernal ambience that would be battered by storm and draped in even more darkness than other Eastwood films, cinematographer Jack N. Green set sprinklers swirling to drench the location and arranged for uninhibited atmospherics using mud, lanterns and torchlight.24 The latter effects grow steadily more oppressive as Unforgiven unfolds. Three thunderous storms break out during the course of the story, intensifying the mood of incipient chaos and looming insanity that hovers over almost every aspect of the film, from Munny’s messy-funny struggle with pigs in a sty through the cataclysmic bloodbath c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

167

at the end. (In addition to sounding like ‘money’, the name Munny merges ‘messy’ and ‘funny’, and as critic Henry Sheehan points out, Will Munny is a sound-alike for William Bonney, which was Billy the Kid’s real name.) 25 The investments of time and money proved very worthwhile. Few things in Unforgiven work the way they would in a movie graced with the historical logic of a traditional western or fraught with the purposeful ironies of a revisionist western. Will, the hero, begins the story as a hog farmer who can hardly climb onto his horse or hit a target with anything less subtle than a shotgun; then he embarks on a dangerous mission about which he is wildly misinformed; and ultimately he regresses to the savagery that he has labored for years to expunge from his formerly violent life, ending up more wracked than ever by futility and hopelessness. Ned, his companion, is a gentle householder who gets beaten to death despite his own inability to murder. The Schofield Kid, their fellow traveler, is an aspiring gunslinger so unsuited to that profession that his first killing plunges him into a slough of guilt and shame. Little Bill, the lawman, is a lawless concatenation of psychotic impulses and vicious behaviors. English Bob, the self-important writer, is a charlatan, a windbag and a fraud. Beauchamp, his biographer, is a hired hack who does not hesitate to torture truth and switch allegiances. The prostitutes are driven more by wrath than reason; the cowboy who slashed one of them is unrepentant while a friend who tried to stop him is tormented by remorse; the townspeople are cowardly, ineffectual and irrelevant by turns. Big Whisky, we realize, is aptly named: the people who live or visit there seem to lose whatever wits they have. Inside and outside Greely’s saloon, this town keeps the toxic in intoxication. Eastwood’s reasons for portraying such a pit of malice and cruelty were partly political, stemming from his view of Little Bill as a symbol of the failings of the American criminal-justice system. At first Hackman hesitated to take the role, apparently feeling he had committed enough screen mayhem in the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and his two French Connection pictures (1971, 1975).26 When he approached Hackman about the part, Eastwood recalled shortly before the film’s release, the actor said, ‘“Well, I don’t want to do anything with any violence in it.” I said, “Really? … I know exactly where you’re coming from. I’ve been involved in a lot of violent films and action dramas and what have you, but … I think there’s a spin on this that’s different. I don’t think this is a tribute to violence, and if we do it right, it’s not exploiting it, in fact, it’s kind of stating that it doesn’t solve anything.”’27 Film scholar Jim Kitses takes a similar tack, regarding Unforgiven as an oblique allegory on the subject of capital punishment and aligning this with a ‘growing conviction that, like Will Munny, the state is a killer of innocents’. In support of his contention Kitses cites ‘the numerous executions in Texas – the Big Whisky of our day – including minorities in disproportionate numbers [and] the young and retarded’, which he juxtaposes with the rising use of DNA evidence to establish the innocence of persons who have been convicted of crimes and even condemned to die. Kitses finds important similarities between Unforgiven and Errol Morris’s classic documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988), a vivid account of ‘the bloodthirstiness that is aroused by events that can finally override questions of guilt and innocence’.28 168

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

I share Kitses’s opposition to the death penalty, a barbarous practice that has been abandoned by developed nations around the globe, and I appreciate the interesting perspective on Unforgiven opened up by his remarks. That said, I find the film itself less enlightened than he suggests. Capital punishment is indeed more controversial today than in the past, but it was a flourishing enterprise around the time Unforgiven was released. In that very year, presidential candidate Bill Clinton interrupted his campaign to ‘supervise’ the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally challenged that he saved the dessert from his last meal so he could enjoy it later on. Three years earlier, in 1989, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the Constitution does not prohibit the execution of mentally retarded individuals or of 16-year-olds convicted of murder; and in 1994, when a Gallup Poll showed nationwide approval of capital punishment at an all-time high of eighty percent, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control Act, authorising death sentences for scores of new federal offenses.29 It is unlikely that Eastwood meant Unforgiven as a shot across the bow of this death-dealing juggernaut, as Kitses himself eventually acknowledges, writing that the film ‘nowhere highlights or … even seems aware of ’ the parallels that he has posited.30 In an interview with the Guardian in 2008, deep into his famously mellow late period, Eastwood discussed the fate of the villain in Changeling (2008). ‘I get a kick out of it,’ he said, because the judge convicts the killer to two years in solitary confinement, and then to be hanged. In 1928 they said: ‘You can spend two years thinking about it and then we’re going to kill you.’ Nowadays they’re sitting there worrying about how putting a needle in is a cruel and unusual punishment, the same needle you would have if you had a blood test.31 A kick. The same needle, just like a blood test. It is advisable not to read Unforgiven as a sceptical commentary on capital punishment.32 PTSD On a deeper level of allusion, Unforgiven can be taken as Eastwood’s first serious meditation on the theme of death, strongly contrasting with the casual treatment of mayhem and killing in many of his earlier films. After finishing the western, Eastwood spoke of Munny in the language of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.33 The character begins ‘philosophizing’ about death, Eastwood said, when he’s reminiscing about killing … the guy whose teeth he shot through the back of his head, he’s kind of morose about it. He’s haunted by the memory of this guy who didn’t do anything to deserve to get shot. And then when he has fever, he starts hallucinating and he sees a guy with maggots crawling out of his head. He’s constantly pursued by the visual image of what he’s done in the past. Or images he’s seen. Like for a guy who’s been to war. Like for a guy who’s seen the Lt. [William] Calley massacre [the My Lai massacre] in Vietnam. There are certain things you’d like to put out of your mind. 34 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

169

Eastwood also saw Unforgiven as an implicit commentary on violence in the American street, exemplified by the case of Rodney King, a black man who was dragged from his car and severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991. King became a nationally known figure when a video of the beating was shown repeatedly on television, and riots erupted when four of the officers were cleared of wrongdoing in a state court. (A federal trial for civil-rights violations later resulted in acquittals for two defendants and prison terms for the others.) When he decided to produce Unforgiven in 1992, Eastwood said, he found it relevant to ‘a lot of the stuff that has gone on this last year and a half, where, a decision is made that is maybe not the right decision – where force was used to the extreme. Like the Rodney King incident. Where force was used, beyond reason, maybe. It’s like Hackman in Unforgiven.’35 The parallels are heightened by the choice of an African-American actor to play Ned, the character most atrociously tortured by Little Bill, who is the film’s doppelgänger for Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates. Lest we start thinking of Eastwood as a closet liberal, we should remember that elements in Unforgiven that appear to be progressive may be interpreted just as easily in regressive ways compatible with Eastwood’s right-wing libertarianism. Consider the comparison he draws between Little Bill and the out-of-control LA cops, for instance. Eastwood was happy to tell interviewer David Breskin that in Unforgiven as in the Rodney King incident, the use of unreasonable force is at issue. In the same year, however, he told interviewers Thierry Jousse and Camille Nevers that Little Bill is ‘a good sort, at least in appearance. He has a certain charm. … He’s the representative of the law, and so he’s on the side of the Good … and he believes that the acts of violence he commits for the sake of setting an example are a lesson that will discourage everyone else from coming to town to make trouble.’ To be fair, Clint acknowledges in this conversation that Little Bill is ‘a sadist at heart’, and that his violence only gives rise to more violence. In the end, though, the lawless lawman ‘considers himself to be a worthy human being’ who would ‘like to live a good life, a quiet life’. That strikes me as a strange thing to say; does it really represent Eastwood’s bottom-line attitude toward this clearly reprehensible character? Would he say the same thing about Lt. Calley of My Lai, or about the LA cops, for that matter? Perhaps he would, because for him, kismet trumps personal responsibility in the end: Little Bill, like the rest of us, ‘has no way of stopping the wheel of destiny’.36 Leaving aside the justificatory tone of Eastwood’s remark about Little Bill’s charm and benign intentions, the sheriff’s combination of a positive self-image and a sadistic heart make him one of the film’s most complex and interesting characters. Munny is the holiest and unholiest, however, at once similar to and different from the traditional Eastwood protagonist. To begin the climactic shootout, he raises his rifle in a conspicuously phallic manner (when he means business he does not merely ‘use his hand’, to paraphrase Ned on the subject of masturbation) worthy of many a valiant Eastwood hero. But to complete it he guns down a bevy of unarmed people, an act that is not valiant, heroic, or defensible on any but crudely emotional grounds. Or perhaps on grounds of a higher order, if we look at Unforgiven from a more radical perspective. The mystical currents of High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider are not 170

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

absent from this film, nor are they ironised or interrogated; instead they are transmuted and hyperbolised into their most ruthless, anarchic and apocalyptic forms. In this film, Knapp observes, ‘God’s existence is suspect. Absolutes do not exist,’ and Munny is a Christ in reverse, evil as well as good, transformed by suffering into ‘an abstract and indefinite entity, a mythic-daemonic force in human form’.37 True enough, except that to say absolutes do not exist is too absolute a statement. Unforgiven is about God in the way that Ingmar Bergman’s so-called trilogy of faith is about God, recognising His unreality to be the single absolute on which abject humanity can confidently rely. The story’s supernatural forces do not radiate from heaven or hell; they are literally and precisely super-natural, compounded of and acting through the physical world that they simultaneously galvanise and transcend. They reach their pinnacle of strength when Munny succumbs to the witchery of Big Whisky’s whisky, throwing back an anti-sacrimental shot so as to numb his traumatised mind, deaden his despairing soul and replace his enfeebled powers with a compassionless (inhuman) body fueled exclusively by outrage, revulsion, and hate. Viewed in this light, Munny is a supreme instrument of judgment and vengeance. The boundlessness of his wrath is evident in the Old Testament scope of his ultimatum at the end: ‘Any sumbitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down.’ And when he issues his final warning – ‘You better bury old Ned right. You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores. Or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches’ – the transpersonal, political implications of his righteous fury are signaled by the American flag that Eastwood places on the screen with him. Of the many meanings threaded through the dense semiotic fabric of Unforgiven, none is more grimly true than the one that emerges in Munny’s conversation with the would-be sidekick who embarks with him on the fateful mission. ‘I guess they had it coming,’ the Schofield Kid says, vainly trying to quiet the heaving waters of his conscience after killing for the first time. And quietly Munny replies, ‘We all got it coming, kid.’ In the Line of Fire (1983) The line of Eastwood pictures that met with diverging critical and commercial responses – good ones that did weak business, like Bird and White Hunter Black Heart, and weak ones that did good-enough business, like Heartbreak Ridge and The Rookie – ended with Unforgiven, a triumph on all counts. With grosses of more than $100 million, it is the third-highest earner of Eastwood’s career. Perhaps more important to the filmmaker, it won high honors from his film-industry peers, including Academy Awards for best picture and best director as well as prizes to Gene Hackman for best supporting actor and Joel Cox for best film editing. Academy Award nominations also went to Eastwood for best actor, Peoples for best original screenplay, Green for best cinematography, Henry Bumstead and Janice Blackie-Goodine for best art directing and set decoration, and a team of four technicians for best sound. On a long list of additional prizes were BAFTA Awards for best film, director, supporting actor and cinematography; the Directors Guild of America Award for Eastwood and sundry c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

171

assistants; awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for best picture, director, actor, supporting actor and screenplay; Golden Globes for best director and supporting actor; and National Society of Film Critics Awards for best film, director, supporting actor and screenplay. Reviews were enthusiastic as well. It was a stunning reception for a deserving achievement, and evidently this came as a surprise to Eastwood, who thought during production that it would prove an unsuccessful venture. ‘It wasn’t a shoot ’em up like The Wild Bunch or the Sergio Leone westerns,’ he told an interviewer. ‘It departed from the traditions I was part of. Gunplay was sad. You saw kids being killed for nothing. I thought the picture would be rejected for all those reasons.’38 What to do for an encore? Never prone to sitting around, Eastwood returned the following year with two pictures: July brought In the Line of Fire, in which he starred for director Wolfgang Petersen, and November brought A Perfect World, in which he starred for himself. The first of these again won multiple Academy Award and BAFTA nominations, although none of them resulted in wins, and again the earnings exceeded $100 million, making this Eastwood’s second-highest-grossing vehicle. His character is Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan, less over the hill than Will Munny at the start of Unforgiven but nowhere near the vigorous young enforcer he was before the heart-stopping moment in 1963 when he and his colleagues failed to save President John F. Kennedy from death in the fateful Texas motorcade. Although he has stuck to his job in the subsequent years, Horrigan has never overcome a sense of guilt over this defining episode in his life, and nasty memories still haunt him as he trudges through the remainder of a moderately satisfactory yet sadly regretful career. Now the current president is being threatened by the blandly-named Mitch Leary, an aspiring assassin who, like stalkers in many films and stories, sees his vicious machinations as a sinister game, with himself setting the rules and the forces of order and normality as his opponents. As crazy as he is dangerous, the killer pulls Horrigan into the contest by teasing him with clues and taunting him about his past, daring him to take on the challenge and try to measure up this time around. Its sombre backstory and historical tones notwithstanding, In the Line of Fire gets considerable zing from Eastwood’s decision to play Horrigan in a mildly ironic manner, making him a self-consciously macho guy who can no longer pull off the posturing customarily employed on that turf. Eastwood had taken himself with less than complete seriousness before (in some of the Sondra Locke films, for instance) and was now learning to do it better, especially in scenes with Rene Russo as a female Secret Service officer who serves as a strong, good-humored foil when Horrigan’s wisecracks fall flat and his charm offensive wears thin. ‘Time flies,’ she says at one point, ‘when you’re being annoyed.’ The mood is naturally darker when Horrigan duels with Leary, played with a sinister glow by John Malkovich, who gives this contemporary thriller the sort of baleful spine that Hackman provides in the western that preceded it. In an especially astute analysis, Amy Taubin limned In the Line of Fire as a sort of acting duel between Eastwood and Malkovich, with the former pitting his ‘body that’s terrified to give way’ against the latter’s ‘narcissistic involvement with his image’, which has ‘something feminine’ about 172

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

it and therefore stands in sharp contrast with Eastwood’s bodily ‘metaphor for the psychological and moral struggle to be an upright man’.39 In my 1993 review I noted an occasional resemblance between Leary’s demented villainy and that of the central psychopaths in Jonathan Demme’s then-recent shocker The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and that still seems reasonable to me, although In the Line of Fire has obviously not entered the pantheon of pop culture mythopoeia the way Demme’s picture did immediately upon arrival. I also pointed to slack moments in the last half-hour or so, partly due to shortcomings in Jeff McGuire’s screenplay; and I suggested that the film might have had a deeper pull if Eastwood had directed it instead of Petersen, a versatile but not particularly inspired German filmmaker whose best-known picture was (and is) the claustrophobic World War II adventure Das Boot of 1981. That too still sounds fair to me. I was not bothered by the film’s use of the Kennedy assassination, which exercised some critics who were otherwise kind to it. One such was Gene Siskel, who praised the movie for dramatically ‘pitting against each other two men who share a common attribute: Each is willing to give up his life to affect the presidency’, but complained that it ‘truly exploits the Kennedy assassination for entertainment value, even placing Eastwood, Zelig-like, into photographs of that fateful day’. Two rhetorical questions followed: ‘Is that necessary? And do we have to see the Zapruder scene where the president’s skull is assaulted?’ Those gambits, Siskel concluded, ‘make us feel cheap’.40 He was not alone in that sentiment, but for me the Kennedy material is itself so fully woven into the American mythos that its appropriation by a tolerably serious Hollywood fable seems a venial sin at worst. And the film provides the requisite seriousness – it offers a glimmer of true insight, for that matter – by implicitly presenting hero and villain, cop and killer, president protector and president hater as two sides of a single all-American coin. A Perfect World (1993) There was another Kennedy connection in Eastwood’s second release of 1993, which begins with a Texas jailbreak in November 1963, shortly before the president’s arrival in Dallas, and features a rookie criminologist tracking the villain in a camper scheduled for use by the Kennedy entourage during the impending visit. These ingredients were present in John Lee Hancock’s screenplay before Eastwood and Malpaso got hold of it, and Eastwood retained them while seeming uncertain as to their importance. ‘You don’t really know where this [Kennedy] element has its place in the picture, or if there is a place for it directly,’ he told a French journalist. He then spoke as if it had a definite purpose, however, calling it an echo of the hero’s ‘disenchantment and … rebellion with regard to the political system’, and finally he spun around to the view that it serves mainly as an atmospheric touch, situating the story in a historical time that ‘was a bit strange and as though in a state of suspense’.41 Whatever individual viewers may think, few are likely to find this one of the film’s most memorable aspects. Not surprisingly, Eastwood plays the disenchanted, politically rebellious good guy. His name is Red Garnett, and he is a Texas Ranger chasing escaped jailbird Butch c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

173

Haynes, who takes a little boy as a hostage on his flight from the law. Eastwood would rather have played Butch Haynes, the uncommonly complex bad guy, but he was about two decades too old. Mark Johnson, a producer interested in the project, showed Hancock’s script to Kevin Costner, who was the right age and also a major star, with credits ranging from Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) and Ray Kinsella in Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989) to Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1992) and Lieutenant Dunbar in his own Dances with Wolves. Costner liked the role, but it took some face-to-face discussion to convince Eastwood that the younger actor, who usually fared best as ‘a sort of beleaguered rationalist’, in Schickel’s words, could whip up the necessary ‘dangerous, near-psychotic edge’. When shooting was under way, A Perfect World became one of the rare Malpaso productions to fall behind schedule, partly because the seven-year-old boy playing kidnapped Phillip Perry had a seven-year-old’s attention span, and also because Eastwood’s no-fuss filmmaking methods clashed with Costner’s finely tuned attention to details of staging and gesture.42 The film turned out well notwithstanding and was warmly received by many critics, although not by the huge audiences that had greeted his two previous pictures. After the jailbreak and killing that get the story going, the story follows Butch on the lam with his young hostage, pursued by Red, criminologist Sally Gerber (Laura Dern) and an assortment of other law-enforcement types. After an hour of cops-androbbers chasing and fleeing, the film becomes more resonant, leaving the cops in order to focus on Butch and his eight-year-old traveling companion. Butch is highly intelligent, we discover, with a streak of independent thinking that could have made him an exceptional citizen. But during his formative years he was trapped between two dismal alternatives: home life with a brutally abusive father or life in the school for felons known as the American penal system. It is little wonder that Butch went bad, or that he still resents the supposedly decent society that set him on this path. Phillip reminds him of his boyhood self, especially when he learns that the boy’s father has absconded and his mother is raising him in accord with the kind of strict religious principles that Butch regards as sorry excuses for rigidity, confinement and oppression. The boy himself cannot be sure whether Butch is a valuable friend or a dangerous foe, and the moment when he is forced to make an irreversible decision provides one of the film’s most striking scenes. A Perfect World presents compelling evidence that the actual world is anything but. Subtly but unmistakably, the film criticises not only the cruelty and irrationality in Butch’s make-up but also the self-same ills that lurk in ordinary households like those that produced Butch and his pre-adolescent captive. The theme reaches a culmination in a sharply filmed encounter between the runaways and a family that shows them hospitality without realising that the law is after them. Casual violence and selfishness co-exist in this household with genuine love and caring, and Butch’s volatile reaction to the mixture is at once sadly understandable and deeply disturbing. Bearing out the wisdom of the most important casting choice, Costner is strong and steady as Butch, and Eastwood is savvy enough to let him carry much of the film, relegating Red to secondary status. Dern works hard with an underwritten part, and 174

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

T. J. Lowther is commendably expressive as the youngest character. Wayne Dehart, Mary Alice and Kevin Woods are excellent as the family that takes in Butch and Phillip without guessing what awaits. The cinematography by Eastwood regular Jack N. Green makes the world of the movie look almost as perfect as the title ironically suggests; one wishes, however, that film editors Joel Cox and Ron Spang had trimmed and tightened the picture more (two-hour-plus running times have long been an Eastwood trademark, but that does not mean they are always a good idea). In all, A Perfect World is thoughtful and smartly crafted entertainment, rightly regarded as one of Eastwood’s more interesting treatments of the missing-father motif that crops up frequently in his films. As for the picture’s wan box-office performance, various commentators have put the blame on Chris Columbus’s Mrs. Doubtfire, which opened the same day, parleying a $25 million budget into domestic grosses of almost $220 million. A world where Eastwood and Costner are swamped by Robin Williams in drag is exceedingly imperfect indeed. The Bridges of Madison County (1995) ‘Cast against type,’ critic James Berardinelli wrote at the beginning of his review, Clint Eastwood plays Robert Kincaid, the male protagonist. … As good as Eastwood is, however, it’s his co-star, Meryl Streep, who really shines. … Streep is Francesca Johnson, a lonely housewife whose eyes and heart are opened to true love when Robert arrives in Iowa to take pictures of Madison County’s covered bridges. Francesca’s husband and children are away for four days at the Illinois State Fair, leaving her home alone when Robert stops for directions to the Roseman Bridge. Since the roads are unmarked, she guides him there in person, and the pair end up spending the rest of the day – into the evening – together. They start as friends with an endless capacity for conversation, but less than 24 hours later, they are in love.43 Richard LaGravenese wrote the screen adaptation of Robert James Waller’s novel, and Eastwood filmed it with trusty collaborators including cinematographer Green, composer Niehaus, editor Cox and himself as co-producer, director, and star. Waller had written the novel (his first) in two weeks, illustrated it with photographs he took while traveling around Iowa, and sent it to friends who might enjoy it. One of them connected him with an agent in the UK, where it was published as Love in Black and White in 1992.44 Warner Books then published it in the United States as The Bridges of Madison County, promoting it to independent booksellers (and even giving away copies) when the large chains declined to pre-order or stock it.45 A review in the Washington Post called the narrative ‘trite’ and Library Journal complained about ‘contrived, unrealistic dialog’.46 Frank Rich of the New York Times observed in 1993 that the novel had been ‘trashed for its Hallmark prose by some of the few critics who have deigned to open it’, and offered his own opinion that it ‘appeals to men by c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

175

reviving the most retro of narcissistic male fantasies. … Like its hero, it presents itself as God’s gift to women even as it furthers their subjugation.’47 Jon Margolis, a Chicago Tribune columnist, described it as ‘an insipid, fatuous, mealy-mouthed third-rate soap opera with a semi-fascist point of view’, and a woman writing in the Los Angeles Times dismissed it as ‘porn for yuppie women.’48 Other assessments were very different, to be sure. Entertainment Weekly called Waller’s novel ‘a short, poignant story, moving precisely because it has the rough edges of reality’, and predicted that it would ‘melt all but the most determined cynics’.49 Publishers Weekly deemed it an ‘erotic, bittersweet tale of lingering memories and forsaken possibilities’, while Irene Nolan of the Louisville Courier-Journal called it ‘a haunting … deeply moving story that is cleverly told’ and Judith Kelman described it as ‘a memorable, magical read’.50 Reviews, in sum, were mixed. Yet as early as July 1992, Warner’s numbers showed that independent booksellers were retailing the book in ‘astounding numbers’. A month later it hit the Publishers Weekly bestseller list. A week after that it debuted on the New York Times list at number 12, a remarkable feat for a first novel; it stayed on the list for ages, reaching number 1 in January 1993. That year the novel was named Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association, and in the spring Waller appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show – his host called the novel her ‘favorite book of the year’, even though it was only May – in a segment filmed on location at the Iowa bridge ‘where the fictional Robert Kincaid and Francesca first met’. The book was atop the New York Times bestseller list again when Eastwood’s movie version premiered in June 1995. By autumn it had sold more than six million copies in America and more than ten million worldwide, all in the clothbound edition; not until June 1997 did Warner finally issue a paperback, with a first printing of a whopping one and a half million copies.51 One did not have to love Waller’s book to see that hitching one’s wagon to it could result in very big bucks – a prospect spelled out early by Kirkus Reviews, which stated in January 1992 that ‘as fake and pretentious as it is, this first novel is based on hardnosed commercial calculations’, adding that the publisher ‘clearly expects its silly goose to lay a golden egg’.52 The first serious egg hunt from the movie world came by way of Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, where Kathleen Kennedy – a producer with such runaway hits as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993) notched into her belt – took immediately to its ‘moving’ story and ‘mature’ characters. Spielberg bought the rights, planning to direct the picture (with Eastwood his first-choice star) until he decided to take a year off after completing Jurassic Park and his Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993) almost simultaneously. Bruce Beresford then signed on as director, but left because of disagreements over some of Spielberg’s screenplay ideas, whereupon Eastwood stepped in.53 (It is worth noting that Warner Books is kin to the Hollywood studio where he has regularly plied his trade.) He reportedly selected Streep over Anjelica Huston, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, and other contenders, including such Europeans as Isabella Rossellini, Catherine Deneuve, Emma Thompson and Lena Olin, taking into consideration that Francesca is a 45-year-old Italian woman who met her Midwestern husband when he 176

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

was a soldier in World War II.54 Streep, as famous for her accents as for anything else, was a marvelous pick. Robert Kincaid is ‘a simple narcissistic projection’ of Robert James Waller, according to literary scholar David Willbern, who observes that the character and his author ‘share name, profession, costume, and Irish ethnicity’. Eastwood shares some of those traits as well, and while he has never smoked Camels, one can readily imagine his attraction to a character described by Willbern as ‘his own man’ and ‘a man’s man’ who has ‘opted out of the system, returning unopened any mail he received from the Social Security or Veterans administrations’.55 Kincaid is a photographer rather than a filmmaker, but one might also see shades of Eastwood in Willbern’s idea that for this character ‘camera lenses are extensions of his virility, “shooting” is the operative term’.56 Asked if he thought Kincaid contained aspects of his own personality, Eastwood answered, ‘A long time ago, I used to travel around like Kincaid in a pickup truck. In my early days as a director … I’d get in a pickup truck by myself, drive up to the Sierras, come upon a location I’d like, make some arrangements to use it later for the production. … I didn’t run across any Italian housewives, but I could have. I will admit there’s certainly a bit of myself in Kincaid.’57 And, one presumes, vice versa. In addition to identifying with the character, Eastwood liked the minimalist nature of the project, which had a ‘brilliant simplicity of theme’ despite the overly ‘flowery’ prose in which Waller couched it. ‘There was no soap opera,’ he said, ‘no incurable disease, no deus ex machina,’ only ‘the encounter of two outsiders.’ It was also amenable to the change of focus that he brought to it when he and LaGravenese changed the main character to that of the woman (the novel is primarily Kincaid’s story) and ‘simplified considerably the protagonists and their aspirations’.58 The decision to privilege Francesca’s point of view aligns intelligently with the literature scholar Lauren Berlant’s insight that notwithstanding the novel’s fundamentally male outlook, its readers can and do ‘read into it a text of liberation from the silences around a quotidian death-inlife – here, of heterosexual intimacy, for Bridges is a female complaint’.59 Explaining the necessity of unfolding the story at a leisurely pace, Eastwood said that a speedier tempo would efface ‘the inner conflict of the married woman, her hesitations, her contradictory yearnings, and there would be nothing left of what had interested me initially as an actor and a director’.60 For him, The Bridges of Madison County is a feminist fable in ways that Waller’s novel could not be. This is the way Eastwood played it in both his directing and his acting. The film allows Streep to occupy the spotlight gracefully and organically, and Eastwood does not so much match her performance as partner her, much as a male partners a female in a ballet pas de deux. Janet Maslin shows full understanding of his accomplishment in her perceptive New York Times review, which combines praise for the movie with contempt for the novel, which she says may be ‘the world’s longest greeting card’, written in prose ‘that curdles milk’. Hacking away the novel’s vapid excesses and ‘selfcongratulatory overkill’, Maslin argues, Eastwood uncovers a ‘moving, elegiac love story’ at its heart, and he tells this story in a manner that ‘respects long silences and pays attention to small details’, evoking ‘a European flavor’ while sustaining an ‘austere c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

177

tone’ and staving off sentimentality until the final reel. Streep appears to have arisen from Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting ‘Christina’s World’, at once sturdy, voluptuous, an embodiment of loneliness and a distillation of profound longing. Opposite her, Eastwood makes Robert a ‘mercifully laconic and at times even charming’ figure despite the ‘soggy Wallerese and … occasional wild howler’ that made their way into the dialogue; it takes some adjustment for the viewer, Maslin notes, to watch the star ‘adopt his “Make my day” squint and declare: “I don’t want to need you if I can’t have you” or “This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime”.’61 Maslin’s review is not entirely persuasive; it isn’t clear what a European flavor is, for instance, and ‘austere’ is much too strong an adjective for the film’s decorous, quietly beautiful look. But she makes a strong case for Eastwood’s drastic transformation of a dreadful novel into an authentically heartfelt screen romance. Some reviewers were more grudging in their praise, and some had little patience with the film. The smooching that Maslin found not torrid or frankly sexual but ‘fond, cuddly and warmly affectionate’ struck Peter Travers of Rolling Stone as ‘huggy-kissy Hallmark goo’. And that is from a critic who liked aspects of the movie and was exactly right about the climactic close-up of Robert standing in a drenching downpour, calling it ‘the most passionately unguarded acting of Eastwood’s career’.62 I give some credit to the rain machine, but this is in fact a truly stunning image. Eastwood’s film is one of many tie-ins and spin-offs that Warner Books, owned by Time Warner Inc., attached to Waller’s phenomenally hot property. Among the others were two audio book editions, one read by Waller himself and the other voiced by such celebrities as Ben Kingsley, Isabella Rossellini and Curtis Mayfield; a CD titled The Ballads of Madison County, comprising pieces sung and/or written by Waller, described in his liner notes as the kind of music Robert and Francesca might have heard on his truck radio or in her kitchen; and a novel called A Thousand Country Roads, published in 2002 as an epilogue to the first book. The movie then produced its own ancillary products, including The Bridges of Madison County: The Film, a large-format photo book, and The Bridges of Madison County Memory Book, a journal-style volume with quotations from William Butler Yeats and photos taken by Eastwood with a camera he carried while playing Kincaid. Eastwood also assembled a movie soundtrack CD with music by the illustrious likes of Dinah Washington and Johnny Hartman. Joining these items on the market were tote bags, polo shirts, picture frames, a cookbook, a fragrance line, a scented-candle line, and bath and body products, launched with a $2 million marketing campaign hooked directly to the film.63 A musical version of Waller’s novel, starring Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale, opened on Broadway in February 2014 and ran for a hundred performances before closing three months later.64 Among these diversified commodities, it is probable that the only long-term cultural keeper will prove to be Eastwood’s film. It lacks the sweep of Bird, the emotional power of Unforgiven, the psychological complexity of Mystic River, and the moral resonance of Million Dollar Baby and the two World War II films, but it stands with his gentlest, most humane achievements.

178

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Absolute Power (1997) Like the tale that inspired The Bridges of Madison County, David Baldacci’s Absolute Power was a first novel published (in 1996) by Warner Books.65 Baldacci’s book is a cut above Waller’s novel – not all that far above, actually, but it supplies a solid moviethriller premise. I summarised the plot in my review: Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a soft-spoken old guy who enjoys working with his hands and admiring beautiful things. By day, this means drawing and sketching as a hobby. By night, it means stealing jewels as a livelihood, sneaking past carefully rigged security systems to indulge his felonious habit. The story begins with one of these crimes, as Luther ends a long dry spell by breaking into a Washington mansion and scooping up jewels collected by the woman who lives there. Caught by surprise when she returns for a latenight tryst, Luther scurries into a closet and watches as the woman’s lover turns unexpectedly nasty, transforming their rendezvous into a brutal assault, and this part of the movie into a very ugly experience. She tries to fight the pervert off, but two gunmen suddenly appear, killing her on the spot. Luther has clearly observed an awful crime, but he has also witnessed a political event of seismic proportions. The woman was the wife of an elderly power broker whose influence extends to the highest places. The gunmen were Secret Service agents on active duty. And the sadistic sex partner was none other than the president of the United States. That’s only the first act of this tangled yarn. President Richmond’s chief of staff orders a clean-up of the crime and a cover-up of the facts. Luther would like to blow the whistle, but his line of work requires anonymity. Meanwhile, a sharp-eyed detective learns the incident had a secret witness, and he puts Luther high on his list of people who might know more than they’re telling.66 Sounds a bit complicated, but Baldacci’s back-to-basics prose keeps the action as clear as the mirror through which Luther sees the event that kick-starts the story. The movie’s orderly syntax does the same, although William Goldman’s screenplay departs from its source in some respects; among other changes, the novel’s main character – Jack Graham, a high-octane corporate lawyer who used to be a public defender – is nowhere to be found in the film, and the adaptation’s Hollywood ending dishes out considerably different consequences to several key characters. Along with Eastwood as the endangered burglar, the movie features Laura Linney as his daughter Kate and Gene Hackman as Allen Richmond, ‘the sociopathic president … lurking at the novel’s center like a venomous spider’, in the well-chosen words of Publishers Weekly, which called the novel a ‘sizzler’.67 The impressive cast also includes E. G. Marshall as the cuckolded billionaire, Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert as the Secret Service guys, Judy Davis as Richmond’s chief of staff, Ed Harris as a detective investigating the nastiness and Richard Jenkins as a hit man hired to rub Luther out.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

179

Eastwood was attracted to the story and characters of Baldacci’s bestseller, with one major reservation: ‘all those great characters were killed in the book,’ he observed, ‘so my question was, how can we make a screenplay where everyone that the audience likes doesn’t get killed off?’68 The solution that he and Goldman agreed on was to foreground the relationship between lawbreaker Luther and Kate, his district-attorney daughter; this adjustment made the project even more suited to Clint’s current interests, since now it explored a conflicted family situation not entirely unlike one he had experienced a few years earlier, when his relationship with his own daughter was strained.69 More broadly, Absolute Power allowed him to carry on his engagement with aging, emotionally deprived heroes such as Red in A Perfect World and Robert in The Bridges of Madison County.70 This string would continue in films to come. Absolute Power rambles at times, and its plot twists are not always plausible. A more important point that I made in my original review is even more pertinent in the twenty-first-century climate of political polarisation in America than it was in 1997: ‘Portraying the president as a sadistic moron is hardly a constructive contribution to present-day dialogues on Washington power. No hint of scepticism is shown regarding the elderly power broker, moreover, although it’s unlikely he amassed his money and influence without bending a law in his entire life.’71 The film also contains a throwback to Eastwood’s magnum force persona of old, at a climactic moment when he takes revenge on a man who has inflicted harm on his daughter; he has insistently maintained that while he may be a thief he would never cause a person to be killed, but as soon as killing becomes a true temptation, he does it as cold-bloodedly as anyone else. Once again, violence prevails on Eastwood’s turf. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) Truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. Jim Williams, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Eastwood’s second movie of 1997 was again based on a bestselling book, but a nonfiction book this time, written by John Berendt, an Esquire columnist and former editor of New York magazine. It recounts the trials for murder undergone by one Jim Williams, a wealthy antiques dealer in Savannah, Georgia, who had acquired considerable cultural clout via his business success, his restoration of a beautiful and historic Savannah house, and his generosity as the host of a Christmas party he threw therein each year. Berendt surrounds the story with an enormous number of sociological details and anthropological anecdotes that he picked up during eight years of part-time Savannah residency. The volume’s impact on Savannah has been ‘greater than that of any other book in the city’s history’, reports the New Georgia Encyclopedia, adding that it quickly became known there as simply ‘the Book’. It has sold more than three million copies in more than a hundred printings, has been translated into 23 languages and has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to visit the scene of the crime.72 Eastwood liked the title and the setting. He also liked a screen adaptation penned by John Lee Hancock, the writer of A Perfect World, who sent it to Eastwood in the 180

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) features Jack Thompson as attorney Sonny Seiler, the real Sonny Seiler as Judge White, and drag entertainer The Lady Chablis as drag entertainer Chablis Deveau

hope that he would resist studio pressure to turn it into a flat-out comedy. There was no part that Eastwood wanted to play, but the project aligned with his growing sense that plot-driven films centering on aggressive action, movement and colour had become less exciting for him as a director than what he thought of as ‘character studies’.73 Like the book, Hancock’s script teemed with ever-so-quirky figures, and Eastwood recruited another first-rate cast to portray them, headed by Kevin Spacey as Williams and John Cusack as journalist John Kelso, a stranger-in-town New Yorker who lends flesh-andblood presence to Berendt’s detached, observational voice in the book (and has a timid romance with Mandy Nichols, a Savannah woman played by Alison Eastwood, the director’s daughter). Other characters include Billy Hanson (Jude Law), the druggy, bisexual murder victim; Sonny Seiler (Jack Thompson), the defense attorney; Joe Odom (Paul Hipp), a house-sitter who is more of a house-squatter and party-giver; Minerva (Irma P. Hall), a voodoo priestess whom the real-life Williams considered more effective than his high-priced legal team; and Lady Chablis, a drag queen played by… Lady Chablis. Eastwood also worked with Hancock to replace material from the book that the first-draft screenplay omitted, such as an alternative account of the slaying, which contradicted the initial account that Williams gave while in custody. This reminded Eastwood of the elusiveness of truth famously explored in Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashômon (1950), and that elusiveness emerges as the most intriguing theme of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. ‘We’ll never know the truth,’ Eastwood remarked about the murder case, ‘and I like that ambiguity. Williams tells us two different scenarios [for the crime] with the same conviction. It leaves Kelso in a quandary, but life is like that. One of the detectives who conducted the initial investigation told me that he didn’t believe either scenario to be true. … You are free to choose your version of the crime.’ The other main theme is that of open-mindedness and acceptance, a rising tide in Eastwood’s thinking. The movie is about ‘tolerating other lifestyles,’ he said in 1998, referring to Kelso’s education in the ways of a peculiar Southern city, ‘learning to be less judgmental. It’s an important aspect of the film, but surprisingly it was hardly mentioned by the reviewers.’74 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil opened on the very same day as Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version of John Grisham’s novel The Rainmaker (1997), about a novice attorney who faces off against a corporate foe in a Tennessee lawsuit. Although the two c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

181

John Cusack and Kevin Spacey in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: ‘We’ll never know the truth,’ Eastwood said, ‘and I like that ambiguity’

films are very different, both take viewers into Southern courtrooms, and they competed for the same general audience. Coppola’s picture won, earning almost twice as much in domestic rentals.75 Eastwood’s biggest miscalculation was to condense the multiple trials that Williams actually underwent – bizarre circumstances and legal loopholes allowed the authorities to try him four times for the same murder, a feat unequalled in Georgia history – into a single proceeding, thereby diminishing the all-too-human factors, including bigotry, that swayed the justice system’s work as Berendt chronicles it.76 Spacey delivers a superbly crafted portrayal of Williams, however, and Eastwood complements the narrative with a sweet-sounding potpourri of soundtrack music featuring such luminaries as Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, and Joe Williams, paying frequent tribute to the great songwriter Johnny Mercer, one of Savannah’s favorite sons. True Crime (1999) Eastwood’s affinity for aging, damaged protagonists returned to the fore when he directed and starred in True Crime, based on an eponymous 1995 novel by Andrew Klavan, a former crime reporter, radio news writer, and Hollywood script reader. The screen adaptation, written by Larry Gross, Paul Brickman, and Stephen Schiff, finds Clint playing Steve Everett, a reporter in Oakland, California, who is known as Ev to his friends and colleagues. He has a wife (Diane Venora) who knows him too well to trust him, a little daughter (Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, the director’s own six-year-old child) that he does not have time for, one editor (Denis Leary) whose wife he is having an affair with, and another (James Woods) who is wary of his tendency to make big stories out of small events. He is also a recovering alcoholic, sober for all of two months at the beginning of the story. When another reporter dies in a car accident, Ev is assigned to write a humaninterest article in her place, which is how he finds himself interviewing death-row prisoner Frank Beachum (Isaiah Washington) a few hours before the lethal injection is scheduled. Beachum is a black man found guilty of murdering a pregnant white college student during a robbery, and his conviction has stood up through years of proceedings and appeals. Yet it takes Ev mere moments to spot a fatal flaw in the evidence – a witness who lied must be the real culprit – and soon he is racing against the clock to exonerate Beachum before the legal system makes the irrevocable error of 182

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

executing an innocent man. When dispensing criminal justice, as the indispensable truism rightly says, death is different. Given its deadline-driven story, calculated mixture of personal and professional subplots, and contrasting family portraits – with Ev’s dysfunctional household on one side, Beachum’s loving wife (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and daughter (Penny Bae Bridges) on the other – one might have expected True Crime to be a sizable hit. But one would have been wrong; with domestic grosses of less than $17 million despite distribution to almost two thousand screens, it was Eastwood’s least successful film of the 1990s.77 More interesting than the tepid response by moviegoers is the great diversity of opinion among reviewers. The negative view was forcefully expressed by film scholar and PopMatters critic Cynthia Fuchs, who found the picture’s premise ‘irritating and preposterous’ while describing Ev as ‘a scarred and ugly character’ who ‘gets off the moral hook in a ridiculously contrived series of events’. Espousing the positive view, New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin praised the film for ‘devastating moments’ with Beachum’s family as well as ‘clock-ticking suspense [that] rises to a breathless crescendo’ and gives its ‘biggest surprise … in an especially effective final scene’. Roger Ebert took an unusual tack, saying that the ‘wickedly effective’ suspense story ‘follows the rhythms of a newspaperman’s day’, which for a deadline reporter ‘is a lot like sex’ in that ‘facts, story, deadline, and satisfaction come all at the same time’.78 A judiciously balanced review appeared on the World Socialist Web Site, where David Walsh noted multiple problems with originality, plausibility, character psychology, and overstatement, but found the film ‘sincere and human’ by virtue of emotional details and, more importantly, its treatment of capital punishment, which is the movie’s ostensible subject. Walsh is worth quoting at length: True Crime begins with a shot of San Quentin prison in northern California. A prison is one of the most horrible sights there is. And the carefully prepared, state murder of a man is the most terrible event to go on inside such an institution. The film follows the procedures that death row prisoners must endure on the day of their execution. A guard, no more than 15 feet away, notes every occurrence (prisoner wakes up, prisoner orders such and such for breakfast, etc.). A jailhouse chaplain pesters Beachum; the warden asks him where he would like his remains to be sent. The execution team rehearses the procedure. The various chemicals to be injected are described. I don’t know precisely what Eastwood’s feelings are about the death penalty, but he certainly permits its essential barbarism and inhumanity to emerge. (Interestingly, the film’s official web site has links to a variety of anti-death penalty sites.) In that sense, the film undoubtedly emerges from and feeds into the growing opposition to and indeed revulsion against the death penalty in the US. It would be noteworthy and praiseworthy on that score alone.79 Walsh disclaims knowledge of Eastwood’s feelings about capital punishment. We are perhaps better informed, since we are familiar with the disdain he expressed for deathpenalty faintheartedness when he commented on authorities ‘sitting there worrying c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

183

about how putting a needle in is a cruel and unusual punishment, the same needle you would have if you had a blood test’.80 Eastwood said that in 2008, but there is no reason to think that his outlook was any different when True Crime premiered nine years earlier. This might be why the movie concentrates more on building suspense than on probing the idea that an execution based on a flawed conviction is a miscarriage of justice that can never be corrected. As with other Eastwood pictures that have been discussed in connection with capital punishment, including Unforgiven and Changeling, it is wise not to seek progressive attitudes in True Crime. Capital punishment is not the movie’s moral center, it’s the MacGuffin.81 Space Cowboys (2000) Astronauts make effective movie heroes, at least when they are cast in the heroic mode exploited by, say, Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).82 Those pictures seemed dated when the twenty-first century dawned, and Eastwood saw an opening for an updated take on space-opera formulas. Space Cowboys takes a conventional story idea – the repair or rescue mission endangered by unforeseen perils – and gives it a mildly offbeat twist by making the four protagonists older than Hollywood adventurers generally are. This meant casting senior citizens in leading roles, but this was hardly a risky tactic, since all of those chosen were bona fide movie stars. James Garner was the oldest at 72, followed by Eastwood at 70, Donald Sutherland at 65 and Tommy Lee Jones at 54. The movie centers on Team Daedalus, a quartet of high-flying test pilots who have travelled down separate paths in the years since their 1950s heyday. The public has pretty much forgotten them, but that changes when NASA gets worried about a vintage Russian satellite that is threatening to fall out of orbit. A speedy repair is needed, and an administrator reasons that the best technician for the job would be Frank Corvin (Eastwood), the Daedalus veteran who designed the satellite’s guidance system. Corvin has retired, but he agrees to undertake the mission if his old gang can join him. Which they do, allowing the story to proceed, the plot to thicken and questions to arise. What is wrong with the satellite? If the Soviets launched it during the Cold War, who put an American guidance system on it? Why don’t the desk generals just let it crash into the ocean, or send an ordinary crew to haul it back, or let the Russians clean up their own mechanical mess? And on the human interest level, do the aging astronauts still have enough of the right stuff to accomplish their challenging task? Space Cowboys was scripted by two young writers: Howard Klausner, who had contributed a 1997 episode to the fantasy sitcom Weird Science (1994–98), and Ken Kaufman, whose credits included Muppets from Space (1999). Remembering technical problems that had dogged Firefox two decades earlier, Eastwood recruited George Lucas’s aptly named Industrial Light and Magic to handle the elaborate visual effects, and gaining NASA’s imprimatur enabled him to shoot at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, among other locations.83 For the most part, though, Space Cowboys is powered by its (sometimes) jet-propelled plot and (consistently) amiable stars. 184

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Spiced with a touch of Frank Sinatra, the amiable Space Cowboys (2000) deals with friendship, death, aging, astronauts, and all that jazz

Reviewers who liked the picture often expressed their affection via dreary jokes. (Exhibit A in this department is Dallas Observer critic Andy Klein, who renamed it ‘Geezers in Space’, ‘The Over-the-Hill Gang in the Stratosphere’, and ‘The Sunshine Boys Go to the Moon’ in a single sentence.84) Reviewers who sort of liked it or did not like it often did the same, but the wit occasionally had bite.85 Peter Rainer at New York called it ‘one of those over-the-hill-gang buddyfests that pretend to be about teamwork and valor but are really about movie-star cronyism’. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly linked Space Cowboys with Unforgiven, Absolute Power, and True Crime, all of which deal with ‘existentially solo man trying to settle accounts in their AARP years’. Giving the film a lukewarm grade of B-minus, she stated her reservations in terms appropriate to its content, describing it as ‘poorly engineered: lurchingly paced, the dramatic conflicts duct-taped together’ and joined by ‘screws [that] loosen further in a pointless [Cold War] detour’. Schwarzbaum enjoyed the acting, though, saying that thanks to Green’s handsome cinematography ‘the men fly in an ageless orbit all their own, free from [the film’s] gravitational pull to nowhere’.86 Even bad reviews failed to inflict much damage. The combined domestic and international grosses of Space Cowboys came to twice the picture’s generous $65 million budget, totaling more than True Crime and Absolute Power put together.87 And at least one touch in the picture was as daring and original as anything from this phase of Eastwood’s career. At the end, three of the heroes are safely home, but we last saw the fourth one (Jones’s character, Hawk Hawkins) floating into space after completing a maneuver that saved the others at the expense of his own life. Did he reach the moon, where he always dreamed of going? As the film reaches its bittersweet conclusion, the camera suddenly zooms up through the void until the moon comes clearly into view, and there is Hawk, leaning back against a rock in a posture that makes his dead, cold corpse look almost like a retired gent enjoying the night sky from a comfy reclining chair. And while the camera soars, the soundtrack bursts into the celebratory sound of Frank Sinatra singing his 1964 recording of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, which the pioneering astronaut Buzz Aldrin actually played on a cassette machine during his first walk on the lunar surface.88 It is an electrifying cinematic moment. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

185

Blood Work (2002) Turning again to a literary (loosely speaking) source, Eastwood next directed Blood Work, based on Michael Connelly’s eponymous novel, which won a handful of awards when two Time-Warner companies, Little, Brown and Warner Books (them again), published it in 1998. Eastwood also plays the hero, Terry McCaleb, a cop who collapses with a heart attack while chasing a serial murderer called the Code Killer in the opening scene. Two years and a heart transplant later, Terry is living on a boat docked in a Los Angeles marina, peacefully retired from police work. Or so he thinks until a woman named Graciella (Wanda De Jesus) approaches him with a plea to investigate the murder of her sister – the very person, it turns out, whose donated heart is now beating away in Terry’s chest. This intimate connection, coupled with the wistful sight of the decedent’s orphaned little boy, persuades Terry to overcome his hesitations and look into the homicide, which is linked to the case of the Code Killer, who, like other conscientious serial killers, has been taunting his nemesis with public dares to catch him. Other characters include Buddy Noone (Jeff Daniels), Terry’s neighbor, chauffeur and assistant; Bonnie Fox (Anjelica Huston), his physician; and sundry Los Angeles detectives (Tina Lifford, Dylan Walsh, Paul Rodriguez) with differing attitudes toward Terry’s investigations. Even before True Crime fell short commercially, Eastwood had been giving serious thought to making a sixth Dirty Harry movie, perhaps adapting Connelly’s novel for the purpose.89 Instead he opted for a Callahan-free version of Blood Work, although he consulted with Connelly before the novel was in print, asking the author to ‘amp up or raise the stakes of the ending’, which the author did.90 The adaptation was written by Brian Helgeland, whose credits included the screenplays for Curtis Hanson’s wellreceived L.A. Confidential and Kevin Costner’s disastrously received The Postman, both released in 1997.91 Reviews of the finished film were as jagged as the hero’s heartbeat at his iffiest moments. After an ‘amiable opening’ that introduces Terry as a ‘doddery Dirty Harry’, opined the BBC, ‘the action slows to a crawl and every clue is glaringly signposted, every discovery laboriously repeated in a series of laughable confrontations’, all providing evidence of ‘irreversible … creative decline’ on Eastwood’s part. ‘It doesn’t sound bad,’ Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers wrote. ‘But [it] is bad, oh, lordy, yes, it is. … From Eastwood, you expect more than a rote thriller with tired blood.’ My review was mixed, finding the screenplay serviceable, the supporting cast well chosen, and Eastwood’s directing conservative, ‘with few of the imaginative touches that have made some of his films … so memorable’. New York Times critic A. O. Scott called the filmmaking ‘efficient to the point of drabness’ and chided Eastwood for ‘indifference to the art of generating complication and suspense’, but praised him for ‘embrac[ing] his codgerhood with leathery aplomb’ and concluded that ‘what Blood Work lacks in speed and surprise it almost makes up for in doughty professionalism’. At the most enthusiastic end of the spectrum was Roger Ebert, who wrote, ‘There is action and violence … but not the pumped-up, computer-aided pyrotechnics of so many of Hollywood’s summer thrillers. Here action involves people, and the things that people can do.’92 186

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Writing when Blood Work was still in the works, biographer McGilligan observed that Eastwood was ‘increasingly preoccupied by his legacy’: The elegiac final image of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a Savannah gravestone. True Crime revolves around death and redemption. At the end of Space Cowboys the camera soars into space and orbits the moon, coming to rest finally, hauntingly, on Tommy Lee Jones, dead where he dreamed of landing. Frank Sinatra croons ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ on the soundtrack. A glorious capper it is; but the music could just as well have been a different Sinatra tune, with Clint himself raspily singing ‘My Way.’93 Ebert also waxed retrospective, musing in his Blood Works review that Eastwood’s record of directing himself in twenty films ‘may represent the most consistent directoractor relationship in modern movies. He knows himself, he knows his craft, his pride as a director is dominant over his ego as an actor, and the results are films that use a star aura with an uncommon degree of intimacy.’ The hero of Blood Work is ‘one of Eastwood’s best characters because, in a way, he’s not a new character at all but just the same guy farther down the road’.94 Taking the longest view of all, critic Henry Sheehan wrote that Blood Work continued an ‘extraordinarily reflective’ stage of Eastwood’s career. Having directed and starred in Blood Work at the age of 71, he was already finishing his next film, Mystic River, at 72. ‘Only the most strong-willed American filmmakers,’ Sheehan continued, ‘make it that far: John Ford was 71 when he made 7 Women (1965); Howard Hawks directed Rio Lobo (1970) when he was 73; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot (1977) came out when the grand master was 77.’ A comparable product of advancing years, Blood Work possesses ‘that tight-lipped drumbeat of action and suspense we associate with Eastwood’s detective movies. But the shadows of life continue to lengthen and so does [his] gaze.’95 Eastwood diverged from those old-age filmmakers, however, by having many more films still in him, including the one he was completing as Sheehan wrote, which proved to be one of his greatest. Mystic River (2003) The year is 1975. The place is a modest Boston community with conventional American values, which means the women keep house and tend children while the men go to jobs on weekdays and spend their leisure hours talking Red Sox on cramped back porches or in neighborhood saloons. The opening scene outlines a harrowing crime. Three young boys are carving their names in a block of newly poured sidewalk concrete. A man drives up, shows a police badge, scolds them for their mischief, takes one into his car and drives away. What happens next is clear, although the film does not depict it: the boy is held captive and sexually abused for days before he escapes and makes it home. Now the story leaps ahead, introducing the boys as young men. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a cop with the Massachusetts State Police homicide division. Jimmy (Sean c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

187

Penn) is a shopkeeper, a widower and an ex-convict who served time for robbery. Dave (Tim Robbins), the boy who was kidnapped and abused in ways we can only imagine, is best described as a misfit, haunted by demons that not even his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and son can adequately recognise, let alone identify with or understand. The three have grown apart over the years, but they are drawn together again when Jimmy’s teenage daughter is mysteriously murdered. Certain clues indicate that Dave might be the killer, leading Sean to suspect him and Jimmy to plan revenge. Additional characters include Sean’s partner, a black sergeant called Whitey (Laurence Fishburne), and Jimmy’s wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney). Mystic River takes its title from the resonantly named waterway adjoining the neighborhood where it takes place, and also from the source novel by Dennis Lehane, a gifted writer with an affinity for Boston-area settings and crime-related narratives. Eastwood said the novel appealed to him as an Americanised version of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, and the simile is apt; the last portion especially, in both Lehane’s novel and Brian Helgeland’s screenplay, echoes Macbeth in ways that are, paradoxically enough, disturbing and exhilarating at once. More specifically, Eastwood felt at the time that he was changing his focus of interest from criminal acts and violence to the consequences of those ills. Lehane’s novel allowed him to connect this sociological concern with the topic of paedophilia, one of the hottest of hot buttons in contemporary American society, and one rarely treated from anything like a balanced or multifaceted perspective except by a small number of strongly independent filmmakers.96 ‘I’ve always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence,’ Eastwood told a BBC interviewer. ‘It’s the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one. I think anything to do with children is … very strong in my mind. So, that’s what attracted me to this story – the fact that it comes back in adulthood, and things keep coming around.’ Similar considerations link Mystic River with Unforgiven, which is also about ‘the results of violence, and the effects of it on the perpetrator as well as the victim’.97 Helgeland supported this idea when I spoke with him in Cannes, where the film had its world premiere in May 2003. ‘At the time when Dirty Harry was made,’ he said, ‘it was thought of as a right-wing, reactionary [film that said] the ends justify the means. Mystic River is the complete opposite. He’s come full circle on that theme. … Dirty Harry ends when [Harry] throws his badge in the water, and I think that would be the middle of the film now. … I don’t think [Eastwood’s] philosophy has changed so much, but it’s the aftermath [of events] that he’s interested in now.’ Eastwood made a similar remark when we talked a few months later at the New York Film Festival, where Mystic River was selected for the highly competitive opening-night slot. I told him that I enjoyed the film, and after a polite thank you he properly quibbled with my word choice. ‘I’m not sure “enjoy” is the right word,’ he said. ‘We wanted to say some [important] things in this movie. They’re not on the surface, but they’re there.’98 I quoted that comment in an article and rhetorically asked how many other Hollywood filmmakers would question the ‘enjoyment’ value of their work. The answer, of course, is precious few. Mystic River is the first of several pictures for which Eastwood composed the soundtrack score, marking an uptick in his creative activities that is usually overlooked. 188

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Beyond the atmospheric sound of the music itself, the importance of rhythm works its way into many aspects of the film. ‘I think every film has its rhythm,’ Eastwood said. ‘In the case of this film, it has two rhythms: the Kevin Bacon/Laurence Fishburne rhythm, and the rhythm that Tim and Sean, and Marcia Gay and Laura Linney have. So it was about blending those rhythms as their stories all converge.’99 Now sophisticated enough in his film practice to weave image, performance, narrative and sound into comprehensive organic unities, Eastwood was operating at the peak of his powers. The industry realized this, giving Mystic River two Academy Awards – best actor (Penn) and supporting actor (Robbins) – plus nominations for best picture, Eastwood’s directing, Helgeland’s adapted screenplay and Harden’s supporting performance. In my 2003 review I wrote that Mystic River ‘gains its great resonance from three factors. One is its leisurely pace, contrasting brilliantly with the too-frantic energy of many recent thrillers. The second is splendid acting by Penn as the merchant, Bacon as the cop, Fishburne as his partner, Robbins as Dave, and Linney and Harden as the central female characters in the story. The third is Helgeland’s literate screenplay. … This kind of quiet ambiguity, avoiding easy answers to complex human conflicts, is all too rare in American movies.’ It still is. Nor did those fine performances arise without strong support from the distinctive directing style – at once exacting and free of fuss and bother – that Eastwood had scrupulously refined by this stage in his career. ‘There’s zero rehearsal,’ Bacon told me at Cannes, ‘and maybe two or three takes. When people hear that [they think] it implies a hurried, rushed kind of atmosphere. But the truth is that it’s very, very relaxed – the most relaxed I’ve ever been in, because it’s so well prepared.’ Eastwood’s respect for moviegoers, and his famous taciturnity, contribute here as well. ‘I asked the boss what I was supposed to be playing there,’ Bacon said, speaking of the open-ended quality of the final scene, ‘and he didn’t give me an answer. He said, “I think it’s up to the audience.” … I can’t think of another director in the studio system who challenges those kinds of rules.’ Piano Blues (2003) Eastwood’s involvement with music had grown deeper over the course of his career, and he had written songs and themes for a number of movies (mostly but not exclusively his own) going back to ‘Montage Blues’ in Richard Benjamin’s City Heat. After successfully scoring Mystic River he did the same for Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Changeling, Hereafter and J. Edgar. And in the same year as Mystic River he directed his only feature-length documentary, Piano Blues, made as the final episode in a PBS series produced by Martin Scorsese, comprising seven films by seven filmmakers, each exploring an aspect of blues history. Eastwood’s installment focuses on his own instrument, the piano, generating little cinematic excitement but affectionately spotlighting a diverse roster of talents – Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck, Dr. John, Marcia Ball, Pinetop Perkins, Jay McShann – and affording best-ever chances to see Eastwood himself tickling the ivories.100 While he is no virtuoso, he definitely knows his way around the keyboard, playing with a good-natured confidence that speaks well of the musical sensibility that had quietly matured in c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

189

tandem with his steadily progressing skills as a storyteller and visual artist. Outside the boundaries of Piano Blues, Eastwood has professed admiration for pianists as different as Fats Waller and Fats Domino, ranging from boogie-woogie specialists (Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson) to all-around jazz giants on the order of George Shearing, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, and Oscar Peterson, all of whom he singled out for praise when promoting his documentary.101 Music is a sideline for him, but he is a devotee with eclectic tastes. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Jerry Boyd was going on 70 years old when he published his first collection of stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner, under the nom de plume F. X. Toole in September 2000.102 The book comprised a novella and five short stories, written when he was not busy with his day job as a ‘cut man’, stanching the blood flowing from prizefighters between rounds. Paul Haggis used two of the stories – one called ‘Frozen Water’ and one called ‘Million $$$ Baby’, which Publishers Weekly called ‘arguably the best story’ in a book that is ‘astonishing’ overall – as the basis of the screenplay that became Eastwood’s next film: Million Dollar Baby, a picture thoughtful and downbeat enough to join Mystic River as, in the director’s words, ‘another one of those projects … where I have to do a little arm-twisting to even get [it] made’.103 Other studios had rejected Haggis’s screenplay before it came to Eastwood, and Warner Bros. rejected the requested $30 million budget even after Clint agreed to star in it – a peculiar reluctance when one recalls that Mystic River had brought the studio many coveted awards while parleying its $25 million cost into world grosses of more than $155 million, making it Eastwood’s fifth most lucrative movie. Warner Bros. eventually put up half of the Million Dollar Baby money (when independent producer Tom Rosenberg agreed to do the same), and the movie did even better than its predecessor, with four Academy Award wins (for best picture, directing, actress Hilary Swank and supporting actor Morgan Freeman) out of seven nominations (for actor Eastwood, screenwriter Haggis, and editor Joel Cox) and international grosses of more than $215 million, placing it third on the list of Eastwood money-spinners.104 Score another victory for Eastwood over a studio where institutional memories clearly faded fast. After beginning as a writer of TV sitcoms, animations, and other lightweight fare, Haggis had moved along to more grown-up material, making a theatrical-film breakthrough in 2004 with Million Dollar Baby, immediately followed by the highly successful Crash (2004), which he co-wrote and directed.105 An unusual feature of Million Dollar Baby posed a challenge for those writing about the film during its initial release: for approximately half of the story, the narrative trajectory goes in a single straight line, and then a pivotal event wrenches it onto a new course that is radically different in meaning, implication and tone. Reviewers issued spoiler alerts galore, and as with Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) a dozen years earlier, the strategy worked well enough to prevent moviegoers from feeling deprived of the picture’s emotional jolt.106 190

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a grumpy old man who owns a third-rate Los Angeles gym frequented by boxers, trainers and assorted hangers-on. He has a grand total of two close friends. One is Eddie ‘Scrap-Iron’ Dupris (Freeman), a partly blind old fighter whom Frankie trained when they were both a whole lot younger, and who narrates the film from his perspective as a sympathetic onlooker. The other is Father Horvak (Brian O’Byrne), a Roman Catholic priest who is less a pal than an intellectual sparring partner willing to endure Frankie’s theological bickering after church every single day. Things change for Frankie when he is approached by Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), a small-town waitress and aspiring boxer with promise, determination and a gnawing desire to have Frankie as her trainer and mentor. He is reluctant for all kinds of reasons, including bullheaded male chauvinism and the fact that at thirtysomething she is already past her prime; but she overcomes his hesitations, plunges into his regimen and proves to have phenomenal abilities in the ring. She prevails in bout after bout, rising steadily in the ranks. It is about now that the first-time viewer of Million Dollar Baby starts wondering what the point of all this might be. Where can the movie go from here? The answer (and here is my own spoiler warning) comes in a single slow-motion moment, transforming the film from a triumphalist feel-good picture into a dramatic exploration of what can literally be called life-and-death issues relevant to everyone on earth. Frankie engineers Maggie’s career cautiously – too cautiously, in Scrap’s opinion – so it takes a while before he approves her first championship bout, pitting his protégé against Billy the Blue Bear, a German fighter who holds the World Boxing Association’s female welterweight title. Living up to her reputation for fighting dirty, Billy punches Maggie from behind just after a round has ended. Maggie takes a hard fall onto the stool in her corner and breaks her neck. In an instant she becomes a quadriplegic with no hope of recovery. Frankie visits her, comforts her, reads to her, asks her to move from the rehabilitation centre to his home and prays for a miracle. She tries to rally her spirits, but there is only one thing remotely close to miraculous in store for her: miserable as she is, her misery actually grows worse. Her family demands ownership of her winnings; bedsores open on her body; an infected leg is amputated. Feeling fully and irredeemably beaten for the first time in her life, she now begs Frankie to end her life. Profoundly shaken, he asks Father Horvak for advice, and the cleric does his job, telling Frankie that such an act would damn him to hell for eternity. Ever a fighter, Maggie begins mutilating her tongue with her teeth, but the health team chokes off her attempts to induce fatal bleeding. In the end, Frankie fulfills her wish and then disappears forever into the night. His motivation is love, and now the film’s point is crystal clear: no one can responsibly evade the moral necessity of obeying love’s indispensible demands, however impossible and unbearable they may appear. The ruckus Some of Eastwood’s familiar themes are on show in Million Dollar Baby, including the untidiness of father/child relationships – burdened with a terrible family, Maggie c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

191

becomes a surrogate daughter for Frankie, who is estranged from his own daughter – and the struggles of the old, the damaged, and the seemingly superfluous to keep a measure of dignity and self-worth, however insecure and unstable these prove to be. (It is odd that the family scenes are the only ones that Eastwood miscalculates, making Frankie’s relatives into crude redneck caricatures.) The film’s conception of love is stated with unusual explicitness for Eastwood, but it was not new to his work, as A. O. Scott recognised when he wrote that ‘while there is abundant love in Million Dollar Baby, it is entirely paternal, filial, and brotherly. It is also severely tested by circumstances and proves to be at once a meager and a necessary compensation for the cruel operations of fate.’107 Audiences quickly warmed to the film, which earned back more than six times its production cost ($30 million) while pleasing critics across the spectrum.108 Among other awards and nominations, it was named best picture of 2004 by the National Society of Film Critics, the Broadcast Film Critics Association and critics groups everywhere from Seattle and Kansas City to Central Ohio and Dallas-Fort Worth; honors for Eastwood’s directing came from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Chicago and San Diego critics associations, and others in Japan, Italy, and Canada; for her acting Swank was garlanded by the National Society of Film Critics and reviewers in Boston, Florida, Arizona, and beyond. Reviewers were not unanimous, of course, and some had strongly felt objections to aspects of the film’s story, aesthetics and general tone. After watching Million Dollar Baby twice, Andrew Sarris used his New York Observer column to state that ‘no film in memory had depressed [him] so much’, adding that the ‘thorny issue of mercy killing becomes something of an anticlimax next to the oppressive conjunction of an evil fighter and a monster mother’. Slate critic David Edelstein opined that while its ‘sudden swerve into catastrophic territory is no less heavy-handed than the rest of the movie (it’s more heavy-handed)’, the ‘jump from one shameless genre to another [is] impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impressed itself on your skull’. Those critics were almost kind compared to Charles Taylor, who declared in Salon that Eastwood’s performance ‘is one long wince’ and that ‘he directs as if it would hurt him to throw in … one scene that didn’t look like it was shot in a gas station bathroom’. Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, who had found Mystic River a ‘creaky and pretentious murder story’, stated that the only differences between Million Dollar Baby and a garden-variety boxing picture are that ‘the young hopeful is a woman, and the finish is unforeseen … [and the] trainer reads Yeats’.109 I respect all of these critics (to varying degrees) even as I disagree with all of these critiques. The real ruckus over Million Dollar Baby erupted on a different front, however. As different as it was from Mystic River, the new picture again pushed some of the hottest American hot buttons, drawing ire from advocates for the disabled who condemned both Maggie’s desperate desire to die and Frankie’s agonised granting of her wish. The logic and the principles espoused by such advocates were entirely understandable, even by those of us who read the film’s ethical significance differently; nor were disability activists any more united on this score than reviewers were about the movie’s merits. Million Dollar Baby was vocally supported by Jeff Shannon, for instance, a film 192

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

critic and quadriplegic in Seattle who considered it a great picture and took issue with members of the disabled community who attacked it.110 Logic and principles played a smaller role in the politically fueled attacks of rightwing demagogues on the lookout for high-profile targets in the allegedly liberal mass media. New York Times columnist Frank Rich summarised two such campaigns in a characteristically trenchant essay titled ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie’, focusing on Rush Limbaugh, the radio bloviator, and Michael Medved, a media fussbudget who had once been a movie critic of sorts. Limbaugh inveighed against Million Dollar Baby as a ‘subversively coded endorsement of euthanasia’, Rich wrote, ‘and the usual gang of ayatollahs chimed in’. Then he quoted Medved’s remark that ‘hate is not too strong a word’ to describe his opinion of the film.111 In a USA Today op-ed article, Medved wrote that the just-announced Academy Award nominations for Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside suggest ‘that if Hollywood ever gets around to making “The Jack Kevorkian Story,” it, too, would become an automatic candidate for major awards’.112 This is certainly an intriguing prospect. Rich called Eastwood to ask how he felt about ‘his new status as a radical leftist’, and found the filmmaker ‘both bemused and concerned that a movie with no political agenda should be construed as a polemic and arouse such partisan rage’. The fury’s root cause was Eastwood’s willingness to make a movie that ‘challenges America’s current triumphalist daydream’, Rich wrote. Million Dollar Baby does this, he concluded, not because it has any politics or takes a stand on assisted suicide but because it has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending. What makes some feel betrayed and angry after seeing Million Dollar Baby is exactly what makes many more stop and think: one of Hollywood’s most durable cowboys is saying that it’s not always morning in America, and that it may take more than faith to get us through the night.113 Rich also noted that self-righteous media saboteurs often try to give away a film’s surprises as publicly and explicitly as possible, thereby dampening ticket sales and shoring up claims that Hollywood elites are out of touch with ‘real people’. Nice try, demagogues, but as Eastwood pointed out in connection with another 2004 release, Mel Gibson’s megahit The Passion of the Christ, knowing the ending in advance does not always keep folks away from the box office. During his movie-critic phase, Medved co-wrote (with Harry Medved, his brother) such colorfully-titled volumes as Hollywood Hall of Shame and Son of Golden Turkey Awards. The locus classicus of his media philosophy, however, is his 1992 book, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, which was reissued in 1993 with a flashier subtitle and a jacket quote from Limbaugh, which says in part, ‘In our ongoing culture war [it] hits its targets with the force of a multi-megaton bomb.’114 I have interviewed Medved and reviewed Hollywood vs. America, and nothing I have written tops the comment made by my longtime colleague David Denby in a c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

193

review of the latter for New York magazine: ‘This is the stupidest book about popular culture I have ever read through to its conclusion.’115 I engaged with Medved’s hostility to Million Dollar Baby shortly after the film’s release, through the auspices of The O’Reilly Factor, where I appeared from time to time during my own movie-critic phase, accepting the invitations with the hope (sometimes fulfilled, sometimes not) that I would be able to put a momentary speed bump under the cascade of right-wing spin emitted by Bill O’Reilly’s ‘no-spin zone’ and the rest of the Fox News Channel on a nightly basis. The issue that day was whether Million Dollar Baby should be taken as art or as advocacy. It was a long shot that the author of Hollywood vs. America would opt for the first category. Instead he went for a slippery faux-evenhanded position (art and advocacy) while wildly distorting the film’s content. ‘I object to the fact that the assisted suicide theme is totally one-sided,’ he weirdly claimed, saying that while in Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking (1995) one saw ‘both sides’ of the death-penalty debate, Eastwood’s film is ‘totally over to one side, where assisted suicide, euthanasia, is a good thing. In fact, it is described by the narrator of the film as a heroic act.’ As hard as it is to imagine someone detecting that message after actually watching Million Dollar Baby, it is even more difficult to make sense out of his assertion that ‘the basic glamour of two enormously attractive stars – Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood – makes their involvement in assisted suicide by definition glamorous’. As blogger Jim Emerson has noted, that statement shows not the slightest understanding of ‘the tortured characters or the bleak and harrowing story’ at the heart of this profoundly sad, utterly unglamorous film.116 All this was too much even for O’Reilly, who surprisingly sided with me over Medved, saying in effect that the story’s characters behave like real, imperfect human beings forced to make anguished choices in circumstances that are all but unendurable. O’Reilly’s website summarised the debate concisely, if one-dimensionally: According to some observers, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby overtly advocates assisted suicide. Radio host and author Michael Medved is among those who object to the movie’s message. ‘This is totally over to one side where assisted suicide is a good thing. It’s described by the narrator as a heroic act.’ David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor disagreed with Medved’s assessment. ‘To me the theme is that sometimes people have to make agonizing decisions.’ And The Factor agreed with Sterritt. ‘The assisted-suicide theme doesn’t come in excessively, and I didn’t think it was one-sided. It includes a logical argument as to why euthanasia is not acceptable in the eyes of God.’117 Alongside a moraliser of such as Medved’s, even an ideologue as smug and narcissistic as O’Reilly can seem almost sensible, although that ‘almost’ does loom large. Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) Eastwood’s two unique films about World War II, as different from each other as from every previous war movie, brought his period of greatest accomplishment to a graceful 194

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

close. The home-front drama Flags of Our Fathers, a film about war rather than a film of war, was the first to be completed and released. The title alludes to the raising of an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima by six servicemen – five Marines and a Navy corpsman – who became unwittingly famous when Washington transformed an Associated Press photographer’s artfully composed picture of the event into a public-relations tool for the war effort. The photo did its job: photographer Joe Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize and the image helped rally Americans in support of the ongoing war effort. Three of the men, however, were killed in subsequent fighting. The other three were brought home and sent on a celebrity tour to promote warbond sales, and they are the story’s main characters. John ‘Doc’ Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the corpsman, is the quietest and most levelheaded of the trio. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) is jaunty and genial, while Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), who hails from the Pima Indian community in Arizona, is vulnerable and shy. Scott Foundas outlined their situation in his Village Voice review: Their moment in the spotlight irrevocably altered their lives. For these men were not the first to fly the Stars and Stripes, but rather a secondary team, assembled after the smaller flag erected earlier by a different group was claimed as a souvenir by a naval officer. It was this second flag … that was seen around the world, its raisers plucked from duty and ferried hither and yon by wily politicians who saw the makings of an inspired PR campaign. It was not the first – or last – time that perception trumped reality in the selling of wars to the American public.118 Indeed it was not, as a long list of subsequent incidents woefully attests.119 Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the negative effects – including survivor guilt, posttraumatic stress, and discomfort with the largely fabricated story the men are expected to tell – imposed on these three by the anxiety-inducing circumstances in which they suddenly find themselves. The screenplay, by Paul Haggis and William Broyles Jr., is based on a book by the corpsman’s son, James Bradley, which Steven Spielberg optioned when it was just starting its run of almost a year on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.120 As had happened with The Bridges of Madison County, the project passed from Spielberg to Eastwood, who used it as an opportunity to broaden and deepen the increasingly complex ideas about violence and death that had been germinating in his mind and his movies for the past several years. Press information from the film’s American distributor, Paramount Pictures, stated that corpsman Bradley suffered from night terrors and hallucinations in later life, and as Foundas writes, the movie could almost be one of them: captured in nearly monochromatic widescreen images, the battle scenes ‘are as visceral as anything in [Spielberg’s] Saving Private Ryan [1998]’, and things grow all the more surreal and unsettling ‘when the three heroes are pressed into re-enacting their storied feat as a vaudeville spectacle before a cheering crowd, and when, at a celebratory dinner, they see their huddled likenesses transformed into an ice cream sculpture’.121 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

195

In addition to these aspects of the story, Eastwood evidently saw it as a parable of the dangers pertaining to fame and celebrity. The men ‘didn’t feel heroic’, he remarked. ‘They just felt they were just doing a job, but all of a sudden, they’re brought back and they’re being called the heroes, and they’re being treated by tremendous stars and being romanced by politicians and society in general. … So it’s a little tough for them to accept that. It’s a big thing to lump on to people who are nineteen or twenty years old and, all of a sudden, be in that kind of commotion.’122 Such concerns are a world away from Hollywood heroics. Lauding the ‘deep decency’ in Eastwood’s treatment of battlefield carnage, critic Lisa Kennedy accurately noted that ‘there’s nothing visually celebratory here. The mayhem is graphic, but confoundingly quick. One moment a Marine is running, the next he is no more, but not in some choreographed way that grants beauty to a hasty, ugly demise. Combat … is hell and hell is a very chaotic place.’123 Although it is far from the most important thing about Flags of Our Fathers, mention must be made of the attack aimed at Eastwood by Spike Lee, who had intensely disliked Bird, as we have seen. Now he viewed Flags of Our Fathers through a race-conscious lens and concluded that as history it was incomplete and incorrect. Visiting the Cannes festival to promote his own World War II picture, Miracle at St. Anna, a few months before its 2008 premiere, he engaged Eastwood in a rhetorical battle that unfolded in separate statements to the media by the two directors. I have put it into dialogue form: Lee: Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one negro actor on the screen. If you reporters had any balls you’d ask him why. There’s no way I know why he did that. … But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know. … Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version.124 Eastwood: Has he ever studied the history? … He was complaining when I did Bird. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else. … [The small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as part of a munitions unit] didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go: ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate. … A guy like him should shut his face.125 Lee: [T]he man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either. He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ – come on, Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there. … If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at 196

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist. I’m not making this up. I know history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II. … Not everything was John Wayne, baby. … I never said he should show one of the other guys holding up the flag as black. I said that African-Americans played a significant part in Iwo Jima. For him to insinuate that I’m rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black … no one said that. It’s just that there’s not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.126 Lee and Eastwood are both right. Historians estimate that from a total force of thirty thousand American troops at Iwo Jima, roughly eight hundred African-American soldiers took part in the battle.127 It follows that Eastwood need not and perhaps should not have left black soldiers completely out of his film. It is also true, however, that the tale it recounts does not call for a significant African-American presence. Beyond the bickering, this dispute sets forth complementary critiques of American hypocrisy regarding war. Lee confronts the culture industry’s elision of African-American heroism and patriotism, while Eastwood attacks the readiness of that industry and its military and political bedfellows to lie, mislead and propagandise. More broadly, Lee has good reason to condemn the pervasiveness of the all-white version of World War II that Hollywood has peddled ever since the time of the war itself. ‘This is the same shit they were doing back in the forties, fifties and sixties,’ he said when assailing Eastwood’s film. ‘Really, until Jim Brown was in The Dirty Dozen, in 1967. Home of the Brave was a great film with a great African-American character in it. But if you look at the history of World War II films we’re invisible. We’re omitted.’128 Eastwood is not to blame for this state of affairs, but it was created and is still sustained by the Hollywood establishment to which he belongs.129 Letters from Iwo Jima, a companion piece made back to back with Flags of Our Fathers, opened in American theatres exactly two months later. In a fascinating filmhistorical twist, it can now be seen as a forerunner and not-so-distant cousin of Lee’s own war movie: where Miracle at St. Anna challenges the omission of African-American heroism and patriotism from popular chronicles of World War II, Letters from Iwo Jima makes a parallel move with regard to Japanese sacrifice, suffering and death, recognising these realities with a candor, authenticity and sincerity of purpose unsurpassed by any other film save a few from Japan itself.130 So inured are American moviegoers to the unquestioned centrality of American characters that Eastwood’s spare, sombre drama had tremendous trouble finding an audience in his own country, although it was enthusiastically embraced by the Japanese public. The spirit presiding over Letters from Iwo Jima is that of Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the general of the Japanese Imperial Army who commanded the Japanese garrison on Iwo Jima before and during the battle that ended with the utter destruction of his forces.131 Written by Iris Yamashita from a story that she devised with Haggis, the screenplay grew out of two sources: Kuribayashi’s own Picture Letters from the c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

197

Commander in Chief, a collection of letters written mainly to his family when he was an envoy in the United States and Canada in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Kumiko Kakehashi’s book So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War Based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima, which is described by its title.132 While he was preparing Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood learned that American generals considered Kuribayashi to have been ‘quite clever’, which piqued his curiosity enough to acquire Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief, the only book in English touching on the subject. Further motivated by the nature of Kuribayashi’s correspondence, which included little drawings for his children along with everyday ruminations addressed to his wife, Eastwood set up the project, producing it with Spielberg and Robert Lorenz, who had worked his way from assistant director to producer via Eastwood films. Ken Watanabe, a samurai specialist with a few American pictures on his résumé, landed the all-important role of Kuribayashi, a commanding and venturesome figure who perturbs his staff by relying more on intuition and experience than on the protocols dictated by tradition. The supporting cast is headed by Kazunari Ninomiya as Saigo, a rank-and-file soldier who finds the situation nightmarish and knows it will grow steadily worse as hope diminishes hour by excruciating hour.133 Eastwood made two uncommonly bold technical moves in Letters from Iwo Jima. One was to photograph it in color even more desaturated (except during explosions and the like) than that of Flags of Our Fathers, which was also shot by Tom Stern, his regular cinematographer since Blood Work; the aim, Eastwood said, was to convey a ‘non-comfortable’ sense of war.134 The other move, truly radical in the xenophobic climate of Hollywood cinema, was to present all of the Japanese-language dialogue in, amazingly enough, the Japanese language. Since subtitles are regarded as surefire commercial poison, no filmmaker with a smidgen less than Eastwood’s industry clout could have contemplated such a thing, much less pulled it off, especially in a movie not featuring Eastwood on the screen. Audiences did not take readily to Flags of Our Fathers, which became Eastwood’s least financially successful release in years, recouping somewhat more than two-thirds of its $90 million budget. Letters from Iwo Jima fared worse yet in American theatres, presumably thanks to its Japanese dialogue, colour-drained look, and reverse-angle perspective on what Hollywood prefers to depict as a good war fought by a greatest generation of American warriors. But whereas the first film had done about the same amount of business in domestic and foreign markets – roughly $33 million worth in each category – the nosedive of the second film in US theaters (less than $14 million)

Lt. Fujita (Hiroshi Watanabe) and Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) in Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), a dark, ‘non-comfortable’ war picture, with dialogue in Japanese 198

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

was marvelously outbalanced by almost $55 million abroad, most of it earned in Japan. Eastwood made his experimental war picture for slightly less than $20 million, and it paid high dividends in aesthetic and financial terms alike. The penultimate movies The films released by Eastwood after 2006 are an uneven bunch, marking a general falloff from the mostly high, sometimes stratospheric levels of quality that he sustained between Bird and the remarkable World War II movies. Understandably if ironically, critics have used even the thinnest of his late-career movies as occasions for hyperbolic praise; one finds the New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis hailing the raggedy Gran Torino as the product of ‘a man whose vitality as an artist shows no sign of waning’ and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calling the wearisome Invictus a ‘rare achievement’ and ‘a film that truly is good for the soul’. Such encomiums should be taken as what they evidently are – expressions of respect (in some cases overdue) for a filmmaker now being judged not for the work of the moment but for the decades of accomplishment that led up to it. With that in mind I turn to the films of Eastwood’s latest phase. Changeling (2008) Eastwood again directed back-to-back releases in 2008, first returning to the theme of crime against children in Changeling, which premiered at Cannes in May, played as the centrepiece of the New York Film Festival in October and arrived in theatres soon thereafter. It was written by J. Michael Straczynski, whose previous work was entirely in television, and came to Eastwood by way of Brian Glazer, who joined him, Lorenz and Ron Howard to produce the picture. Rene Rodriguez synopsised it in The Miami Herald: Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a working-class single mother who, on April 10, 1928, kissed her 9-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) goodbye and left for her job at the Pacific Telegraph Co. When she got home Walter was nowhere to be found. A phone call to the police resulted in the usual response: ‘You must wait 24 hours before filing a missing-persons report.’ But 24 hours later, Walter still wasn’t home – and he remained missing for almost five months, until the police inform Christine they have found her son alive and well in Dekalb, Ill. But when the train transporting the boy pulls into the station, where his mother and hordes of press await, Christine is dismayed to discover that the boy is not Walter. And no one believes her.136 Eastwood recalled living in Los Angeles ‘around that time,’ and this apparently made him feel close to the film’s true-crime events, although his parents did not move there until 1934, when Clint was four. In any case, he saw this as very much an LA story and lavished great attention to details of period and place, working with production c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

199

designer James J. Murakami, who had designed Letters from Iwo Jima and went on to several more Eastwood pictures. As he had done in Mystic River, Eastwood took care that the pivotal episode of child abuse – the boy was taken to an isolated chicken ranch, sexually violated and beaten – be obliquely treated, here using shadows and soundtrack voices to suggest the ranch’s grim history as a site of multiple child murder and molestation. Eastwood was also intrigued by the weird insistence of the LA police that they are more knowledgeable than the mother about who is and who is not her little boy. ‘We looked at photos in the archives of the two boys … and Arthur [Hutchins], who the police insisted was Christine’s son Walter, didn’t look anything like him,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how they managed it, but they did a hell of a job convincing her she was hallucinating for a while there!’137 One of the film’s canniest maneuvers was to calculate just how much the audience should see of Walter at the beginning so that when ‘he’ returns the viewer cannot be quite certain if this is Walter or an imposter.138 Reviews were all over the proverbial map. According to Rex Reed in the New York Observer, ‘Eastwood files every detail vividly, unraveling every clue and sparing no shocks in a great crime story, without once losing his grip on the human elements. Changeling is … as good as any film he has ever made, and 10 times more electrifying than most. It grabs you by the throat and never lets go.’ According to Christopher Orr in the New Republic, ‘It is Eastwood’s burden to make [the true story] feel true, to overcome our skepticism at its innate outlandishness, and in this, Changeling is a singular failure. Scene after scene, twist after twist – and this is a film of many twists – rings false. … Changeling is a genuine stinker.’139 While neither assessment rings true to me, Reed is closer to the mark than Orr, who claims to have been ‘a fan (and defender) of Eastwood for as long as [he] can remember’. That is probably the trouble. Fans grumble the loudest when a hero lets them down. Gran Torino (2008) Eastwood’s second movie of 2008 centres on his own performance as Walt Kowalski, a cranky veteran of the Korean War who has never gotten over the atrocious things he witnessed and participated in there. Now old, disgruntled and as ornery as he ever was, he finds himself the last Anglo still residing in a Detroit neighborhood newly filled with an Asian-American populace. Walt’s main activity is scowling at the Hmong family that lives next door, and when a local teenager auditions for membership in a gang by trying to heist his beloved vintage automobile, he sets out to shape the whippersnapper up with a heavy dose of tough love. This puts him on the gang’s enemies list, setting the scene for a classical Clint-movie showdown. In his first feature-film screenplay, Nick Schenk gives crusty old Walt enough obnoxious notions, locutions, biases and intolerances to make Archie Bunker, the comical arch-bigot of television’s All in the Family, seem like a model of working-class virtue. Eastwood’s portrayal, mostly a matter of squinting and glowering, adds another layer of exaggeration to a character who was already cardboard thin. Two factors partly redeem the movie, however. One is its finale, which works a neat variation on the clas200

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

sical Clint-movie showdown, bearing out the theory that Eastwood’s later films are acts of atonement for the Neanderthal aspects of his Man With No Name and Cop With No Rulebook years. Gran Torino places the reactionary persona of old into productive counterpoint with the kinder, gentler Clint we know today. In my review I wrote that the climax is ‘corny and overdone (the Christ-on-the-cross symbolism is really a bit much) but it’s also bitter, sweet, and heartfelt’.140 That still sounds fair to me. The film’s other worthwhile element is its sociology, rudimentary in its insights but compelling in its recognition of contemporary American realities that Hollywood rarely acknowledges. Nowhere are these realities more distressingly on view than in Detroit, which was in terminal decline when Eastwood set up his cameras there and literally went bankrupt five short years later, with appalling consequences for municipal workers, retirees and other citizens. Eastwood was admirably sensitive to the city’s distressing downward slide, and to what this revealed about America’s diminishing prospects in an age of capitalistic decay, not that he would ever use such terminology. Gran Torino explores the phenomenon indirectly, limning not the shutdown factory or faltering dealership but rather ‘the sideline effects of it all’ on the general public. ‘The obvious stories, the Norma Rae kind of stories,’ he told Scott Foundas, referring to Martin Ritt’s union-friendly drama of 1979, ‘those are hurdles, but they’re kind of right out there in front. It’s the hurdles that are inside that you have to deal with to make characters interesting, I think.’141 This is the part of Gran Torino that Dargis got right in her review: ‘Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.’142 Eastwood was not confident that Gran Torino would prosper, fearing that audiences – primed by the movie’s poster, with a mean-looking Walt clutching an M-1 carbine – would feel let down by the novel twist at the climax. ‘I wonder,’ he said to Foundas, ‘if those people will be disappointed – the ones who just want the hard-ass stuff, the rifle in the face and the guns and stuff like that. You hope that if that’s what attracts an audience in, it isn’t what they’re left with. You hope the undercurrent will get to them as well.’143 He need not have worried. Gran Torino became the highestgrossing film of his career. Invictus (2009) The beginning of 2009 brought Barack Obama to the White House, and the end of the year brought Invictus to movie theatres. The hope that a racially divided nation might be healed and unified by a courageous black leader was at the heart of both events. Going by the evidence on the screen, though, what motivated Eastwood to make Invictus was a combination of scepticism about Obama and a hankering to see Morgan Freeman play Nelson Mandela, a role he was surely born to play. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

201

Drawn from the title of a poem by William Ernest Henley, a British publisher and poet who died in 1903, the film’s title is the Latin word for ‘unconquered’.144 The poem presents some extremely well-known formulations, among which are ‘unconquerable soul’ and ‘bloody but unbowed’ as well as the final couplet, ‘I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul.’ Mandela recited it to other prisoners during his long imprisonment by South Africa’s apartheid regime, and perhaps inspired by Eastwood’s movie, Obama quoted the concluding couplet at the climax of his speech at Mandela’s funeral in December 2013.145 Invictus begins with Mandela’s release after 27 years in captivity and his election as South Africa’s first black president four years later. Crime, poverty, disease and intense racial suspicions are epidemic in the country, and Mandela knows he must act expeditiously to stabilise the dangerously volatile climate. In 1994 he sees a crowd of black South Africans root for an English rugby team over their own national team, the Springboks, and conceives the idea of freeing the Springboks from their longtime association with apartheid racism in time for the Rugby World Cup match coming up in 1995. Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, the captain who leads the Springboks to victory. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post crisply sketched the movie’s main theme as the ‘opportunity for healing in the rites and rituals of sport’, pursued by a leader who must ‘forge within the black community a sense of identification with a mostly white team that for years has represented oppression’.146 Eastwood said when the film opened that he ‘wasn’t trying to sell any American politics in the thing’, but he quickly added that he did not find Obama’s first year in office very heartening. ‘Obama is a charismatic young man,’ he told Foundas, ‘and he did talk about change and all this kind of stuff that sounded great. … Whether he’s able to deliver the goods or not is another thing.’ With delivery of the goods in mind, it is interesting that early in Invictus the newly elected President Mandela sees a heading reading, ‘He Can Win an Election but Can He Run a Country?’ in an Afrikaans newspaper. And a couple of months later Eastwood upped the ante, telling a British journalist, ‘You can win an election, but does that mean you can govern a country? Up until now [Obama] hasn’t shown much strength of leadership.’147 It seems there are some American politics in the thing after all. Freeman and Damon are excellent actors, but neither Anthony Peckham’s screenplay (based on a recent book by John Carlin) nor Eastwood’s directing generates the excitement than one would expect from a film steeped in sports and politics, the key competitive arenas of our time. Enthusiastically cheered by many critics, it struck this one as a pretty pale shadow of the movie it might have been.148 Its bravest component is the title that Eastwood gave it, aware as he must have been that Latin terminology does not usually help at the box office.149 The word also applies well to his unconquerable work ethic and drive, still vigorously pulsing in the face of advancing age. Hereafter (2010) The topic of Hereafter seemed altogether suited to a filmmaker hitting 80 years of age. Eastwood’s cinema had touched on the supernatural many years earlier, most notably 202

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

in High Plains Drifter, but now he pitched directly into it, directing his first fantasy film. Hereafter is also his first and only multipart film, spinning three stories that come together only in the final scenes. One centers on French TV newscaster Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), who is vacationing with her boss and boyfriend Didier (Thierry Neuvic) at a Pacific resort when a horrific tsunami sweeps over the area, bringing her to and perhaps beyond the brink of death. Pulled back into life at the last possible instant, she becomes obsessed by the need to understand and communicate the ineffable experience that has profoundly transformed her. A second story revolves around George Lonegan (Matt Damon), an authentic clairvoyant whose career of helping desperately sad clients – looking into their pasts, contacting their loved ones who have died – has rendered him isolated, melancholic and a bit crazy. Shutting down his practice, he goes into an unrelated line of work and joins a cooking class to meet people, but his hanger-on brother Billy (Jay Mohr) selfishly pushes a new client named Christos (Richard Kind) onto him. Then his new cooking-class friend Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard) learns of his former profession and requests a reading for herself. The third narrative involves Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren), preadolescent twins in London who help each other cope with their addicted and abusive mother. An abrupt accident kills Jason, whereupon Marcus moves in with a foster family, loses interest in daily life and school and eventually starts visiting mediums and psychics – one fraud or crackpot after another – in an effort to reach his brother beyond the grave. The three stories finally converge at the London Book Fair, which George, Marie, and Marcus are all visiting for different reasons. The secondary characters include Dr. Rousseau (Marthe Keller), a Swiss hospice director consulted by Marie, and the actor Derek Jacobi, who plays himself at the book fair. Hereafter was another project initially owned by Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks, which gave it over to Warner Bros. and Malpaso when Eastwood took a liking to Peter Morgan’s original script and decided to produce (with Robert Lorenz and Spielberg associate Kathleen Kennedy) and direct it, composing the score along the way. It was Eastwood’s most ambitious production in quite a while, calling for elaborate visual effects in the opening tsunami sequence and another scene in which the London transport bombings of 2005 play a part. The tsunami episode is breathtakingly vivid, propelling the film with a forcefulness that intermittently dwindles as the multiple narratives run their meandering courses for the remaining two hours. Eastwood handles the fantastic elements with his customary confidence and skill, but he injects little of value pertaining to the film’s unifying themes of immortality and the afterlife, which are (in theory at least) of the greatest possible import to us mortals. Eastwood’s opinions on these grand topics, expressed in comments to interviewers, are entirely prosaic. ‘It’s not about the occult, it’s about the spiritual,’ he told Michael Henry Wilson of the French journal Positif. ‘That’s one of the aspects that immediately fascinated me … particularly so because the spiritual isn’t at all tied to religion. … No one knows what happens on the other side. … So the viewer has to think and see how c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

203

it relates to his own beliefs and experiences.’ And his own sense of the matter? ‘I’m not certain of anything. I don’t know if there is a hereafter … I’m the kind of person who says, “I’ll believe it when I see it”.’ And if that isn’t bland enough, we have his views on organised faiths to consider. ‘I don’t discount them, I don’t discount anything at all. … The main thing is for everyone to find what works best for them … I think you have to believe in yourself first of all.’150 Few would expect Eastwood to be a competent theologian as well as a gifted filmmaker, but the flavorless quality of these remarks is fully in sync with the watereddown ‘spirituality’ of the movie itself. Persuasive, compassionate acting – especially by Damon, who has rarely been more quietly affecting – is by far the greatest blessing of Hereafter. J. Edgar (2011) Eastwood’s sincere interest in the complicated workings of homophobia and gay-related hypocrisy made its first major appearance in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and its last in J. Edgar, an offbeat biopic that chronicles J. Edgar Hoover’s improbable achievement of reigning over the Federal Bureau of Investigation for almost half a century. The film shows him using his position to infiltrate and manipulate all too many sectors of American civil and political life, doing his best to moralize the world while keeping his own dysfunctional sexuality hidden so deeply in the down-low that he is barely aware of it himself. This is not the first movie to tackle America’s national cop, and in some ways it picks up the trail of Larry Cohen’s agreeably hysterical 1977 melodrama The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, which stars a perfectly cast Broderick Crawford as the title character. Leonardo DiCaprio is less than ideal in Eastwood’s picture; caked with make-up in scenes depicting Hoover’s later years, the star simply looks like Hoover caked with make-up. The film manages to be fresh and surprising nonetheless, and it certainly has a sense of humor; a close reading by J. Hoberman makes note of references, allusions and winks to movies ranging from William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) to, a tad less plausibly, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999).151 All the while Hoover’s passionate friendship with deputy and companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) rumbles in the movie’s basement, going off the rails only once, when the boss starts talking about marrying the Hollywood actress Dorothy Lamour, who is sexy, famous, and two decades younger than he. Stunned and panicky, Tolson has a conniption that turns into a knockabout fight, culminates with an unwanted kiss, and leaves a haze of fiercely repressed desire in its wake. It is a pitiable situation, and there is no way out except gradual estrangement and ultimately Hoover’s lonely death under the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, a malefactor whose wiles match the lawman’s own. J. Edgar was written by Dustin Lance Black, a specialist in gay-themed drama whose credits include the script for Gus Van Sant’s excellent Milk (2008) and several episodes of the HBO series Big Love (2006–11) during its earlier (and better) seasons. Among 204

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

the standouts in the supporting cast are Judy Dench as Hoover’s mom and Naomi Watts as his apparently sexless secretary. Robert Lorenz and Brian Grazer produced the film with Eastwood, who worked with such reliable regulars as production designer James J. Murakami, editor Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, and cinematographer Tom Stern, as always a virtuoso artist of the underlit set. The critical corps divided right down the middle on J. Edgar. Hoberman was decisively among the ayes, as was David Denby, who deemed the picture to be ‘of all things, a portrait of a soul’. Salon reviewer Andrew O’Hehir was conclusively among the nays: ‘One of the worst ideas anybody’s ever had,’ he wrote, ‘a mendacious, muddled, submediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history’s most controversial figures.’152 One person’s clear position, of course, is another person’s one-dimensional reductiveness. Eastwood represented clear positions aplenty in his early films; then around the time of Pale Rider and Bird he became harder to nail down; and finally he reached his full stature as an expert wielder of ambiguity and nuance, finding a thousand shades of gray in even his weaker stories and characters. His last several films are less than great, and J. Edgar is no masterpiece, but it remains in memory longer than the insubstantial competitors that outranked it at the box office. And rarely has Eastwood found a more deliciously appropriate protagonist: a Dirty Harry with a police force all his own, a man so burdened with arbitrary power, inchoate rage and secret shame that even an actor as heroically resourceful as DiCaprio has trouble embodying his murky depths. ‘No stranger man – not even Nixon – has ever been at the center of an American epic,’ wrote Denby at the end of his review. He is right. And that ultimately unfathomable strangeness is the kind of challenge on which Eastwood’s cinema thrives. Jersey Boys (2014) Music is a constant in Eastwood’s fims, but this music came as a surprise: not many would have guessed that his enthusiasms extended to the hinterlands of Top 40 pop. Apart from the country sounds of Honkytonk Man, his music-related movies gravitate toward jazz, which he worked into Play Misty for Me, explored brilliantly in Bird, and embraced again in Piano Blues, a love ballad dressed as a documentary. But in 2014 he turned his attention to Jersey Boys, based on a Broadway show about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, a pop group whose longevity comes close to Eastwood’s own. The movie is an amiable ramble through their lives and times, complete with flavorful renditions of more-or-less golden oldies like ‘Sherry’ (1962), ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ (1962), ‘Walk Like a Man’ (1963), and ‘Rag Doll’ (1964), all number-one hits for the group, and ‘My Eyes Adored You’ (1974) and ‘Grease’ (1978), chart toppers for Valli on his own. Brief, breezy scenes trace the foursome’s journey from early incarnations – when lead singer Frankie Castelluccio called himself Frankie Valley or Frankie Vally and the group was the Four Lovers, among other names – to their days of fame and fortune, their growing rivalries and petty schemes, their inevitable break-up, and c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

205

finally the reunion concert celebrating their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which culminates the movie. Jersey Boys follows a predictable path through the not-very-thick thickets of pop music between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. The characters too are formulaic; among them are the quartet’s members, every one a stereotypical Joisey boy: Gyp DeCarlo, a mobster and mentor brought alive by Christopher Walken’s deliciously idiosyncratic acting; Bob Crewe, a gay recording entrepreneur whose mannerisms are pushed to the brink of caricature, but not over it; by Mike Doyle’s precisely tuned performance; and Norm Waxman, a loan shark lent just the right degree of nastiness by Donnie Kehr’s sharp portrayal. Several members of the cast, including Kehr and John Lloyd Young, who plays Valli, are holdovers from the Broadway production or one of its clones.153 The film’s origin as a stage musical is fully evident in its episodic structure, its presentational style, and its generally insubstantial air; only occasional moments, such as the death of Valli’s daughter late in the story, have genuine dramatic weight. The most engaging qualities of the movie come not from fresh ingredients but from freshness of mood, tone and texture – the very qualities that distinguish the best pop music of the period. Eastwood resists every temptation to make the proceedings flashier or spiffier than they need to be; for proof check out the group’s choreography, too rudimentary for a middle-school cheerleader but utterly disarming in its unembarrassed naiveté. And that’s entirely apt. This is, after all, the tale of a group that figured its new songwriter was a genius because in 1958 he penned the Royal Teens hit ‘Short Shorts’, one of the most gloriously idiotic records in rock’n’roll history. What better calling card could a tunesmith of the era proffer? It is a fascinating truth that rock’n’roll biopics usually turn out very well; examples range from Steve Rash’s The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and Jim McBride’s Great Balls of Fire! (1989) to Brian Gibson’s What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993) and Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002).154 I count Jersey Boys among the genre’s many successes, and while most critics received it with little gusto, my good opinion was shared by a discerning minority that included New Yorker critic Richard Brody, who found it ‘an unusually flinty musical’ that is ‘restrained and cheerful, deceptively simple and deceptively bland, like the music that it celebrates.’155 The bouncy joys of rock’n’roll turned out to suit Eastwood just fine. Et cetera Clint Eastwood remains hard at work as this book goes to press, doing postproduction for the 2015 release American Sniper, based on Chris Kyle’s memoir American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.156 Kyle served four tours in Iraq as a member of Navy SEAL Team 3, earning two Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars for Valor, and other honors, and acquiring the nickname Devil of Ramadi from Iraqi insurgents before he retired from combat and became the Navy’s chief instructor of snipers and sniper teams.

206

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Eastwood’s former assistant Robert Lorenz directed Trouble with the Curve (2012), starring Clint as an aging baseball coach and Amy Adams as his daughter

A successful rodeo cowboy before embarking on his sniper career in 1999, Kyle left the military in 2009 to work with a nonprofit veterans-health foundation and run a training company for military and law-enforcement personnel. He died a sadly ironic death in February 2013, when he and a friend were murdered by a young Marine Reserves corporal, himself an expert marksman who had fought in Iraq and earned numerous medals; the killing occurred at a shooting range where Kyle sometimes brought emotionally troubled veterans as a wound-healing and morale-boosting exercise. ‘The suspect may have been suffering from some kind of mental illness from being in the military’, the sheriff of Erath County, Texas, said at a news conference after the killing.157 Clearly the best in his business, Kyle was credited with more than 150 kills during his Iraq service – the previous American record was 109, racked up in Vietnam by an army rifleman – and in his book he claimed to have slain more than 250 people.158 Kirkus Reviews deemed the memoir an ‘aggressively written account of frontline combat, with plenty of action and technical nitty-gritty’ that ‘should appeal to conservative readers and military buffs.’159 Eastwood’s film, adapted from Kyle’s bestseller by Jason Dean Hall, is one of is the director’s infrequent military pictures – the others are Firefox, Heartbreak Ridge and the two World War II films – and also one of his few biopics, joining Bird, J. Edgar, Jersey Boys and, arguably, Invictus. Bradley Cooper plays the hero, Sienna Miller his wife, and such experienced Eastwood collaborators as producer Robert Lorenz, cinematographer Tom Stern, production designer James J. Murakami and film editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach contributed their considerable talents. More acting might also be in Eastwood’s future. His starring performance in the 2012 sports drama Trouble with the Curve came after four years of absence and a widespread assumption (encouraged by him) that he would grace the screen no more. Wonders to behold, his portrayal of an elderly baseball scout proved superb in every way – arguably the most delicate, nuanced, and emotionally true performance of his career. Final judgments of Eastwood’s career are invariably premature. He seems almost as unkillable as the heroes he has portrayed.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

207

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

208

Wilde made this remark, which became one of his widely known aphorisms, in conversation with André Gide, who called it in his journal entry for 29 June 1913, ‘that extraordinary sentence which I quoted and which has since been quoted everywhere,’ and added, ‘I should be interested to know if he ever said that sentence to anyone else but me.’ See André Gide, Entry for 29 June 1913, Journals: 1889–1913, Vol. 1, trans. Justin O’Brien (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 339–340, cited at 339. Parts of The African Queen were also shot in the UK and Turkey. The screenwriter and short-story writer John Collier penned the first draft of the script, and Viertel wrote the last scenes with Huston after Agee suffered a major heart attack; neither Collier nor Viertel received screen credit for these contributions. Steve Rose, ‘Anjelica Huston: My father John’s wildest shoot,’ The Guardian (11 May 2010), section G2, 20. The crew member was Angela Allen, a continuity checker. Katharine Hepburn, The Making of The African Queen: How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (New York: New American Library, 1987). Lauren Bacall went along to be with Bogart, her husband. Rose, ‘Anjelica Huston,’ p. 20. Michel Ciment, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 160–171, cited at 162. Originally published as ‘Entretien avec Clint Eastwood,’ Positif 351 (May 1990), pp. 5–11. Eric Henderson, ‘White Hunter, Black Heart,’ Slant (1 September 2003) http:// www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/white-hunter-black-heart/201 (accessed 4 February 2013). Roger Ebert, ‘White Hunter, Black Heart,’ Chicago Sun-Times (14 September 1990) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/white-hunter-black-heart1990 (accessed 14 September 2013). ‘To have listened to the commentary spoken by Huston in this film very early in my life made me familiar with his voice,’ Eastwood said in 1990. See Ciment, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 163. Peter B. Flint, ‘John Huston, Film Director, Writer and Actor, Dies at 81,’ The New York Times (29 August 1987) http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/ onthisday/bday/0805.html (accessed 9 February 2013). Rose, ‘Anjelica Huston,’ p. 20. Buddy Van Horn’s Pink Cadillac made a pallid showing as well, earning slightly more than $12 million following its May 1989 release Eliot, American Rebel, p. 255. Hal Hinson, ‘The Rookie,’ The Washington Post (7 December 1990) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies /videos/therookierhinson_a0a9be.htm (Accessed 9 February 2013). Walter Metz, ‘The Old Man and the C: Masculinity and Age in the Films of Clint Eastwood,’ in Leonard Engel, Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), pp. 204–217, cited at 207. Metz th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35

notes that this ill-matched partner is ‘no more mismatched, of course, than Beryl Thibodeaux’s [Geneviève Bujold] quasi-feminist rape crisis counselor in 1984’s Tightrope.’ Van Horn directed Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can, The Dead Pool and Pink Cadillac, which are Van Horn’s only films as director. Ric Gentry, ‘Slam, Bang, Crash, Boom for the Rookie’ and ‘Rookie Stunts, Effects Dazzle Viewer,’ American Cinematographer vol. 71 no. 1 (January 1991). O’Brien, Clint Eastwood, p. 176. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 157–158. Michael J. Weldon, The Psychotronic Video Guide (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), p. 474. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) and Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990) had been released as of 1990. McTiernan’s Die Hard: With a Vengeance, which Knapp also cites, did not arrive until 1995. Two additional films have subsequently appeared. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, p. 156. David Breskin, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ Rolling Stone (17 September 1992), pp. 66–69, 108, 110. Amy Taubin, ‘An Upright Man,’ Sight and Sound vol. 3 no. 9 (September 1993), pp. 9–10, cited at 10. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 452. Béhar, ‘Portrait of the Gunslinger as a Wise Old Man,’ p. 188. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 451, 453. Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 39. Detecting a pattern here, Sheehan also notes that Josey Wales sounds something like Jesse James, ‘or “Jesus Christ” for that matter.’ Henry Sheehan, ‘Scraps of Hope,’ Film Comment (September-October 1992). Reprinted as ‘Clint Eastwood – ‘Scraps of Hope’’ on henrysheehan.com (2004) http://www.henrysheehan.com/ essays/def/eastwood.html (accessed 9 October 2013). William Friedkin directed The French Connection and John Frankenheimer directed French Connection II. Breskin, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ p. 382. Kitses, Horizons West, p. 310. Capital Punishment Timeline, Prosecuting Attorney: Clark County Indiana – Fourth Judicial Circuit (2009) http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/timeline.htm (accessed 6 July 2009). Kitses, Horizons West, p. 310. Jeff Dawson, ‘Dirty Harry Comes Clean.’ The Guardian (6 June 2008), Features section, p. 3. I return to Eastwood and the death penalty in my discussion of True Crime. He did not use that medical term; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) did not enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until the third edition, in 1980. Military Veterans PTSD Reference Manual, Chapter 1, n.p. http://www. ptsdmanual.com/chap1.htm (accessed 4 March 2009). Breskin, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ p. 383. Breskin, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ p. 381. On seeing the King video, Eastwood said, one is ‘overwhelmed’ by the excessiveness of the police violence. He himself became c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

209

36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49

50

51

210

angry with the media, however, which took to ‘exploiting it [by] running it back and forth. … It’s like now on TV news with accidents – they dolly in on the parts of a person. The media has gotten so calloused about it. It’s all one-upmanship for ratings, so that’s kind of annoying. But … there are certainly parallels to what goes on in Unforgiven. What’s so astute about the writing is that it is something that’s gone on forever’; cited at pp. 383–384. Jousse and Nevers, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ p. 185. Knapp, Directed by Clint Eastwood, pp. 174–175. Michael Henry Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Bridges of Madison County,’ in Michael Henry Wilson, Eastwood on Eastwood (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2010), pp. 130–141. Reprinted in in Kapsis and Coblenz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 168–177, cited at 173–174. Originally published as ‘Personne ne me demande plus de porter un sombrero, Dieu merci!’ Positif no. 445 (March 1998), pp. 130–41. Taubin, ‘An Upright Man,’ p. 10. Woody Allen’s Zelig was a 1983 release. Gene Siskel, ‘Clint Vs. Malkovich Matchup Makes Line of Fire a Thrill,’ Chicago Tribune (9 July 1993) http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993–07–09/entertainment/9307090252_1_esquirestar-john-malkovich (accessed 11 November 2013). Henri Béhar, ‘America on the Brink of the Void,’ in Kapsis and Coblenz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 156–162, cited at 157. Originally published as ‘L’Amérique au bord du vide’ in Le Monde (16 December 1993). Schickel, Clint Eastwood, pp. 478–479. James Berardinelli, ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Reelviews (n.d.) http://www. reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=651 (accessed 11 October 2013). David Willbern, The American Popular Novel After World War II: A Study of 25 Best Sellers, 1947–2000 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), p. 149. Robert James Waller, Love in Black and White (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) and The Bridges of Madison County (New York: Warner Books, 1992). Jack Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers, 1992–1995.’ PopHistoryDig.com (June 15 2008) http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=bridges-of-madison-county-book (accessed 11 October 2013). Frank Rich, ‘One-Week Stand,’ The New York Times (25 July 1993) http://www. nytimes.com/1993/07/25/magazine/endpaper-public-stages-one-week-stand. html?pagewanted=2 (accessed 11 October 2013). Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers.’ L. S. Klepp, ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Entertainment Weekly 122 (12 June 1992) http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,310787,00.html. (accessed 11 October 2013). ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Publishers Weekly (13 April 1992) http://www. publishersweekly.com:8080/978–0–446–51652–5. Nolan and Kelman cited in Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers’ (accessed 11 October 2013). Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers.’

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64

65 66

67 68 69 70

‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Kirkus Reviews (15 January 1992) https://www. kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-james-waller/the-bridges-of-madisoncounty/ (accessed 11 October 2013). Eastwood and Kennedy produced the film together. Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers.’ Irishness is part of Eastwood’s equation too. ‘The best part of me is the Irish part – Egans on my mother’s side – she had roots in Monaghan and I’ve been there many times,’ he said upon receiving the first John Ford Award in 2011. See Patricia Danaher, ‘The Directors: Clint Eastwood Received First John Ford Award,’ Irish America (February/March 2012) http://irishamerica.com/2012/01/the-directorsclint-eastwood-receives-first-john-ford-award/ (accessed 10 October 2013). Willbern, The American Popular Novel After World War II, p. 150. Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ p. 175. Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ pp. 174–175. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 60. Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ p. 177. Janet Maslin, ‘Love Comes Driving Up the Road, and in Middle Age, Too,’ The New York Times (2 June 1995) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D01 E3DC1639F931A35755C0A963958260 (accessed 12 June 2012). Peter Travers, ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’ Rolling Stone (2 June 1995) http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/the-bridges-of-madison-county19950602 (accessed 12 June 2012). Doyle, ‘Of Bridges & Lovers.’ Bartlett Sher directed the musical, which had a book by Marsha Norman and a score by Jason Robert Brown. Several of those involved in the production have won or been nominated for Tony Awards in the past, including Norman, who has won a Pulitzer Prize as well. See Adam Hetrick, ‘Hunter Foster Completes Love Triangle of Broadway Musical The Bridges of Madison County,’ Playbill (3 December 2013) http://www.playbill.com/news/article/185074-Hunter-Foster-Completes-Love-Triangle-of-Broadway-Musical-The-Bridges-of-MadisonCounty (accessed 10 October 2013). David Baldacci, Absolute Power (New York: Warner Books, 1996). David Sterritt, ‘Absolute Power Marks High Point for Eastwood,’ The Christian Science Monitor (21 February 1997) http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/0221/022197. feat.film.1.html (accessed 19 October 2013). The headline on this article came from the newspaper, not the writer; in the review the term ‘high point’ refers only to Eastwood’s comparatively nuanced acting in this film. ‘Absolute Power,’ Publishers Weekly (15 January 1996) http://www.publishersweekly.com/978–0–446–51996–0 (accessed 10 October 2013). Eliot, American Rebel, p. 296. Schickel, Clint Eastwood, p. 447. John C. Tibbetts, ‘The Machinery of Violence: Clint Eastwood Talks About Unforgiven,’ in Engel, Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director, 171–180, cited at 179. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

211

71 72

73 74 75

76

77 78

79

80 81

82

83 84 85

212

Sterritt, ‘Absolute Power Marks High Point for Eastwood.’ Carl Solana Weeks, ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,’ New Georgia Encyclopedia (10 July 2002) http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/ midnight-garden-good-and-evil (accessed 4 January 2014). Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ p. 173. Wilson, ‘Truth, Like Art, Is in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ p. 171. Gene D. Phillips, ‘The Rainmaker (1997),’ in James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill, The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), pp. 211–214, cited at 214. Glenna Whitley, ‘Voodoo Justice,’ The New York Times (20 March 1994) http:// www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/midnight.html (accessed 4 January 2014). McGilligan, Clint, p. 538. Cynthia Fuchs, ‘Old Man, Take a Look at My Life,’ PopMatters (n.d.) http://www. popmatters.com/review/true-crime/ (accessed 6 January 2014). Janet Maslin, ‘Getting in Touch With His Inner Good Guy,’ The New York Times (19 March 1999) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9807EFD61731F93AA25750 C0A96F958260. Roger Ebert, ‘True Crime,’ Chicago Sun-Times (19 March 1999) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/true-crime-1999 (all accessed 4 January 2014). David Walsh, ‘An oddly human work,’ World Socialist Web Site (30 March 1999) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/03/true-m30.html (accessed 4 January 2014). See note 220. ‘MacGuffin’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s famous term for a plot device that is, in the words of Hitchcock aficionado Ken Mogg, ‘really just an excuse and a diversion. In a whimsical anecdote told by Hitchcock, he compared the MacGuffin to a mythical “apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. In other words, it could be anything – or nothing – at all.’ Ken Mogg, ‘Frequently-asked questions,’ The MacGuffin Web Page (n.d.) http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/faqs_c.html (accessed 4 January 2014). They are not entirely reliable on this score. John Sturges’s space opera Marooned (1969) earned back barely half of its budget in North American receipts, for instance, and Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (2000) made only a modest profit on its $100 million investment. Art-film astronauts, such as those in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime Solaris (1972) and Steven Soderbergh’s less-impressive interpretation of Stanisław Lem’s source novel from 2002, are hors de combat since they do not aim at high grosses. Then again, Stanley Kubrick’s towering 2001: A Space Odyssey rejuvenated the whole genre in 1968, and Alfonso Cuarón’s soaring 3-D adventure Gravity did the same in 2013. McGilligan, Clint, p. 539. Andy Klein, ‘Star trek,’ Dallas Observer (3 August 2000) http://www.dallasobserver.com/2000–08–03/film/star-trek/ (accessed 4 November 2013). I do not make that claim for the dreary joke I snuck into the end of my 2000 review: ‘It’s not “Grumpy Old Astronauts,” and that alone is cause for gratitude.’ th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

86

87 88

89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97

98

99 100

Writing that was a true crime. See David Sterritt, ‘Trouble in orbit? Send in geezers,’ The Christian Science Monitor (4 August 2000) http://www.csmonitor. com/2000/0804/p15s1.html (accessed 4 November 2013). Peter Rainer, ‘Space Cowboys,’ New York (n.d.) http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/ reviews/3641/ (accessed 4 November 2013). Lisa Schwarzbaum, ‘Movie Review: Space Cowboys,’ Entertainment Weekly (11 August 2000) http://www.ew.com/ew/ article/0,,277028,00.html (all accessed 4 November 2013). Hughes, Aim for the Heart, p. 151. Aldrin spoke of this to jazz composer, arranger, and producer Quincy Jones, who arranged and conducted Sinatra’s classic recording of Bart Howard’s song for the 1964 album Might as Well Be Swing with Count Basie’s band. See Diane K. Shah, ‘On Q,’ The New York Times (18 November 1990) http://www.nytimes. com/1990/11/18/magazine/on-q.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (accessed 4 November 2013). Eliot, American Rebel, 298–299. McGilligan, Clint, p. 536. Helgeland wrote the former with Hanson, based on James Ellroy’s novel, and the latter with Eric Roth, based on David Brin’s novel. Nev Pierce, ‘Blood Work,’ BBC (27 December 2002) http://www.bbc.co.uk/ films/2002/11/07/blood_work_2002_review.shtml. Peter Travers, ‘Blood Work,’ Rolling Stone (9 August 2002) http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/ blood-work-20020809. David Sterritt, ‘Eastwood is back as a milder Dirty Harry,’ The Christian Science Monitor (9 August 2002) http://www.csmonitor. com/2002/0809/p15s01-almo.html. A. O. Scott, ‘Forget About Retirement, There’s a Killer to Catch,’ The New York Times (9 August 2002) http://www. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9904E6DF173AF93AA3575BC0A9649C8B6 3. Roger Ebert, ‘Blood Work,’ Chicago Sun-Times (9 August 2000) http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/blood-work-2002 (all accessed 4 November 2013). McGilligan, Clint, p. 541. Ebert, ‘Blood Work.’ Henry Sheehan, ‘Blood Work,’ HenrySheehan.com (September 2002) http://www. henrysheehan.com/reviews/abc/bloodwork.html (accessed 4 November 2013). Todd Solondz stands out for such films as Happiness (1998) and Life During Wartime (2009), and Gregg Araki deserves mention for Mysterious Skin (2004). Stella Papamichael, ‘Clint Eastwood: Mystic River,’ BBC (October 2003) http:// www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/10/10/clint_eastwood_mystic_river_interview.shtml (accessed 6 November 2013). David Sterritt, ‘Play Mystic for Me,’ The Christian Science Monitor (10 October 2003) http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1010/p13s01-almo.html (both accessed 6 November 2013). Papamichael, ‘Clint Eastwood.’ The best of the seven films is Charles Burnett’s historically rich Warming by the Devil’s Fire, and the worst is arguably Scorsese’s own, Feel Like Going Home.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

213

101 102 103

104 105

106

107

108

109

110

214

Clint Eastwood, ‘Director Interview,’ PBS (November 2003) http://www.pbs.org/ theblues/aboutfilms/eastwoodinterview.html (accessed 6 November 2013). F. X. Toole, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner (New York: Ecco, 2000). Amy Taubin, ‘Staying Power,’ Film Comment vol. 1 no. 1 (January-February 2005) 26–33; revised and expanded version, ‘Interview: Clint Eastwood,’ http://www. filmcomment.com/article/online-exclusive-clint-eastwood-interview. Reprinted in Kapsis and Coblenz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 193–205, cited at 195. See also ‘Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner,’ Publishers Weekly (4 September 2004) http://www. publishersweekly.com/978–0–06–019820–6 (accessed 6 November 2013). Eliot, American Rebel, p. 309. When they won the Academy Awards for best picture of 2004 and 2005, respectively, Million Dollar Baby and Crash made Haggis the first person to write the screenplays for two consecutive best picture winners. Crash also brought Haggis and co-writer Robert Moresco the Academy Award for best original screenplay, and Haggis was nominated as best director. (Crash debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2004 but had its US premiere in April 2005, which is why it competed with that year’s releases in award races.) Roger Ebert also adduced the example of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), in which male Billy Kwan is played by female Linda Hunt, but I find this irrelevant to the present instance because (as Ebert acknowledged) this is unrelated to the plot and there is no ‘revelation’ of any kind. See Roger Ebert, ‘Critics Have No Right to Play Spoiler,’ Chicago Sun-Times (29 January 2005) http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/critics-have-no-right-to-play-spoiler (accessed 6 November 2013). A. O. Scott, ‘3 People Seduced by the Bloody Allure of the Ring,’ The New York Times (15 December 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/movies/15baby. html?pagewanted=2 (accessed 6 November 2013). In domestic grosses, Million Dollar Baby ranked with the top two dozen films released in 2004, and its foreign grosses were higher still. It is the third most lucrative film directed by Eastwood and his fourth most lucrative as an actor; among films he has produced it is outdone only by Unforgiven. Andrew Sarris, ‘Why Clint Eastwood’s Baby Knocked Me Down, Not Out,’ New York Observer (17 January 2005) http://observer.com/2005/01/why-clinteastwoods-baby-knocked-me-down-not-out/. David Edelstein, ‘Punch Drunk,’ Slate (15 December 2004) http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ reel_time/2004/12/wings_of_desire.single.html. Charles Taylor, ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ Salon (15 December 2004) http://www.salon.com/2004/12/15/million_ dollar/. Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Flying and Fighting,’ The New Republic (17 January 2005) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/flying-and-fighting (all accessed 6 November 2013). Roger Ebert, ‘Critics Have No Right to Play Spoiler.’ This was not contrarianism on Shannon’s part. He reacted in an opposite way to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, a fact-based movie about Ramón Sampedro, a paralyzed Spaniard (Javier Bardem) who waged a personal right-to-die campaign for three decades. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

111

112

113 114

115

116

117

118

119

120 121

(This film coincidentally reached American screens just two days after Million Dollar Baby.) ‘Despite considerable pain and anguish for a variety of quad-related reasons,’ Shannon commented, ‘I agree with … Sampedro’s cause, but I cannot share his attitude for one simple reason: I look at life the way I look at a good movie – I can’t wait to see what happens next.’ Frank Rich, ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie,’ The New York Times (13 February 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/arts/13rich.html?ex=1265778000 &en=20285b456ee22b66&ei=5090&partnrer=rssuserland&_r=1& (accessed 22 September 2013). Michael Medved, ‘Oscar bids reflect industry’s discomfort with religion,’ USA Today (25 January 2005) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials /2005–01–25-medved_x.htm (accessed 22 September 2013). Rich, ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie.’ Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Reprinted as Hollywood vs. America: The Explosive Bestseller That Shows How – And Why – The Entertainment Industry Has Broken Faith With Its Audience) (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993). See also Harry Medved and Michael Medved, Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History (New York: Perigee, 1984) and Harry and Michael Medved, Son of Golden Turkey Awards (New York: Villard, 1986). Cited in Danielle Berrin, ‘Making Movies Matter,’ Jewish Journal (17 August 2011) http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/making_movies_ matter_ 20110817 (accessed 22 September 2013). Jim Emerson, ‘Million Dollar Misrepresentations,’ Scanners (10 February 2005) http://rogerebert-prod-1056988946.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/scanners/ million-dollar-misrepresentations (accesed 22 September 2013). ‘Unsolved Problems Segment,’ BillOReilly.com (7 February 2005) http://www. billoreilly.com/show?action=viewTVShow&showID=126 (accessed 22 September 2013). Scott Foundas, ‘Print the Legend,’ The Village Voice (10 October 2006) http:// www.villagevoice.com/2006–10–10/film/print-the-legend/ (accessed 9 December 2013). Among the most egregious instances are the bogus narratives about former football star Pat Tillman, killed not by enemy rifles but by friendly fire, and Jessica Lynch, rescued from supposedly brutal captors in an unnecessary raid, that were sold as truth by the US government during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the former see, for example, Steve Coll, ‘Army Spun Tale Around Ill-Fated Mission,’ Washington Post (6 December 2004), p. A01. On the latter see, for example, John Kampfner, ‘The truth about Jessica,’ The Guardian (15 May 2003) http://www. theguardian.com/world/2003/may/15/iraq.usa2 (accessed 9 December 2013). James Bradley with Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam Books, 2000). Foundas, ‘Print the Legend.’

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

215

122

123

124 125 126

127

128 129 130

131

132

133 134 135

136 137

138

216

Terry Gross, ‘Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 206–218, cited at 213. Originally broadcast on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on 10 January 207. Lisa Kennedy, ‘Stirring Flags salutes an extraordinary wartime event,’ The Denver Post (20 October 2006) http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_4511944 (accessed 9 December 2013). Paul Lewis, ‘Spike Lee gets in Clint Eastwood’s line of fire,’ The Guardian (5 June 2008), p. 17. Jeff Dawson, ‘Dirty Harry comes clean,’ The Guardian (5 June 2008), p. 3. Sheila Marikar (2008, June 6) ‘Spike Strikes Back: Clint’s “an Angry Old Man”,’ ABC News (6 June 2008) http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story? id=5015524&page=1#.TuvXQkovZNc (accessed 11 November 2008). John Colapinto, ‘Outside Man: Spike Lee’s Celluloid Struggles,’ The New Yorker (22 September 2008) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_ fact_colapinto (accessed 11 November 2008). Colapinto, ‘Outside Man.’ See David Sterritt, Spike Lee’s America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 185–188, 202. Masaki Kobayashi’s nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece The Human Condition (1959–1961) and Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (1959) and The Burmese Harp (1985) come most readily to mind. Kuribayashi lost twenty thousand out of twenty-two thousand troops; the American losses were seven thousand out of about seventy thousand. See Gross, ‘Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima,’ p. 206. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief, ed. Tsuyuko Yoshida, trans. Michi Fusayama (San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2007) and Kumiko Kakehashi, So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War Based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima, trans. Giles Murray (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007). The former was first published in Japan in 2002, the latter in 2005. Gross, ‘Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima,’ pp. 206–208. Gross, ‘Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima,’ p. 211. Manohla Dargis, ‘Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country,’ The New York Times (11 December 2008) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/movies/12tori.html? _r=0. Peter Travers, ‘Invictus,’ Rolling Stone (10 December 2009) http://www. rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/invictus-20091210 (both accessed 28 January 2014). Rene Rodriguez, ‘Changeling,’ The Miami Herald (n.d.) http://www.miami.com/ changeling-r-article (accessed 28 January 2013). Geoff Andrew, ‘Changeling Man,’ Sight and Sound vol. 18 no. 9 (September 2008), 17, 21–22, cited at 17. Reprinted as part of ‘The Quiet American’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 219–225. Thanks to Murray Pomerance for pointing this out to me.

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

139

140 141

142 143 144

145

146

147

148 149

150

151

Rex Reed, The New York Observer (21 October 2008) http://observer.com/2008/10/ in-like-clint/ (accessed 28 January 2013). Christopher Orr, ‘Changeling,’ The New Republic (23 October 2008) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/ the-movie-review-changeling (both accessed 28 January 2013). David Sterritt, ‘Wrestling with Real Life,’ Tikkun vol. 24 no. 2 (March-April 2009), p. 61. Scott Foundas, ‘Clint Eastwood, America’s Director: The Searcher,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 230–233, cited at 231. Originally in LA Weekly on 18 December 2008. Dargis, ‘Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country.’ Foundas, ‘Clint Eastwood, America’s Director,’ p. 232. The title was added to Henley’s untitled poem by Arthur Quiller-Couch when the latter included it in The Oxford Book of British Verse in 1900. See Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 226. See also A. T. Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1908), p. 1019. The poem has been quoted in various movies, including Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), and in Sam Wood’s King’s Row (also 1942) it offers solace to Ronald Reagan’s character after a leg amputation, the same kind of misfortune that inspired Henley to write it. Then again, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh recited it before his execution in June 2001. See Anne Billson, ‘Invictus aside, poetry in cinema is embarrassing,’ The Guardian (28 January 2010), Film & music, p. 2. Ann Hornaday, ‘Clint Eastwood’s rugby drama Invictus, with Matt Damon,’ The Washington Post (11 December 2009) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121001375.html (accessed 28 January 2013). Scott Foundas, ‘Eastwood on the Pitch: At Seventy-Nine, Clint Tackles Mandela in Invictus,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 234–244, cited at 243. Xan Brooks, ‘Has Obama failed the Invictus leadershiop test?’ The Guardian (10 February 2010) http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/feb/10/clinteastwood-invictus-barack-obama (accessed 28 January 2013). See John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2008). The movie grossed about $37.5 million domestically plus almost $85 million internationally; it was the latter figure that made for good returns on the $60 million budget. Michael Henry Wilson, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood: First, Believe in Yourself,’ in Kapsis and Coblentz, Clint Eastwood, pp. 245–251, cited at 246–247. Originally published as ‘Entretien avec Clint Eastwood: Il faut d’abord croire en soi-même’ in Positif 599 (January 2011), pp. 9–13. J. Hoberman, ‘Great Man Theories: Clint Eastwood on J. Edgar,’ The Village Voice (9 November 2011) http://www.villagevoice.com/2011–11–09/film/great-mantheories-clint-eastwood-on-j-edgar/ (accessed 28 January 2013). c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

217

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

218

David Denby, ‘The Man in Charge,’ The New Yorker (14 November 2011) http:// www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/11/14/111114crci_cinema_ denby. Andrew O’Hehir, ‘J. Edgar: Clint Eastwood’s lame and insulting Hoover biopic,’ Salon (8 November 2011) Young originated the role of Valli on Broadway and won a Tony Award for his performance. Erich Bergen, who plays Four Seasons songwriter Bob Gaudio, had that part in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas casts as well as the national touring company, which also featured Michael Lomenda, who had played Nick Massi in the Toronto production. Vincent Piazza, as Tommy DeVito, is a newcomer. Valli and Gaudio themselves were among the movie’s executive producers. Others are Luis Valdez’s La Bamba (1987), Gregory Nava’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998), Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004), James Mangold’s Walk the Line (2005), Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), and Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), which deserves mention for excellence even though the Carpenters were hardly a rock’n’roll act. Failed entries in the genre include Haynes’s overambitious and undercooked I’m Not There. (2007). Richard Brody, ‘Jersey Boys and the Lost Mainstream of America,’ NewYorker.com (26 June 2014) http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/jerseyboys-and-the-lost-mainstream-of-america.html (accessed 28 June 2014). Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (New York: William Morrow, 2012). Manny Fernandez and Michael Schwirtz, ‘Untouchable in Iraq, Ex-Sniper Dies in a Shooting Back Home,’ The New York Times (3 February 2013) http://www. nytimes.com/2013/02/04/us/chris-kyle-american-sniper-author-reported-killed. html?_r=2& (accessed 14 June 2014). Raf Sanchez, ‘“The Devil of Ramadi” named America’s deadliest sniper,’ The Telegraph (3 January 2012) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8990552/The-Devil-of-Ramadi-named-Americas-deadliest-sniper. html (accessed 14 June 2014). Kirkus Reviews, ‘American Sniper,’ (7 November 2011) https://www.kirkusreviews. com/book-reviews/chris-kyle/american-sniper/ (accessed 14 June 2014).

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eastwood’s Politics: ‘Leave everyone alone’

I’ve been a Republican because I chose that party at the time of my military service at the beginning of the fifties … but I have a tendency to consider myself more of a ‘free thinker’. My political choices don’t really fit in with any of the camps, and actually I feel myself to be something of a libertarian, in the sense that I think you have to let people live in peace, respect individual freedoms. Clint Eastwood, 19921 What are Clint Eastwood’s politics? Some observers, such as liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich, affirm his ‘free thinker’ self-image by saying his ideas ‘defy neat categorisation’. Clint has supported both Republicans and Democrats over the years; one of the latter was Gray Davis, the California governor who was ousted by a recall election and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, in 2003. As to his own beliefs, he told Rich in 2005 that he ‘professes the libertarian creed of “less government” and “was never a big enthusiast for going to Iraq but never spoke against it once the troops were there”’. This puts Eastwood in ‘the same middle as most Americans’, according to Rich, who quotes the star as saying, ‘I vote for what I like. I’m not a loyalist to any party. I’m only a loyalist to the country.’2 Thinking about that ‘libertarian creed’ for a moment, however, it is not clear that libertarians fall into the American middle as monolithically as Rich implies; nor is it clear that lukewarm ambivalence about the Iraq War (never a big enthusiast; never spoke against it) was a mark of constructive centrist thinking in the hellish year of 2005. Eastwood has often characterised himself as a live-and-let-live libertarian rather than a Republican Party regular, but his Republican credentials were entirely in order c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

219

when he embarked on his 1986 mayoral campaign in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and they have remained so since, notwithstanding his criticism of individual officeholders from time to time. In a 2008 interview with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel, he said he ‘became a Republican’ when he cast his first-ever ballot for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, adding that he ‘always liked their kind of philosophy of less government, and watching the spending, and not spending more’.3 In subsequent years he supported Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, among other Republican stalwarts. I cite these facts not to question Clint’s libertarianism but to suggest that it is a libertarianism of the right, geared more to preserving power and privilege than to removing inequity and injustice. (He was ‘critical of Bill Clinton on trying to get tough on cigarette companies’, Cavuto pointed out.) The cult of small government looms large in this ideological sphere, which (for example) did not much mind George W. Bush when he was a right-wing political cowboy in Texas but came to detest him when swollen budget deficits, the bungled Iraq adventure and other debacles proved him to be an insufficiently right-wing cowboy in the nation’s capital. Eastwood followed this pattern when he acknowledged to Cavuto that Republicans had ‘veered … far’ from the small-government model under Bush, who was still in office at the time of the interview, and agreed with Cavuto’s suggestion that government should not ‘be entangling itself in foreign affairs’.4 Clint’s interventions in Carmel politics as a ‘probusiness’ advocate bear out the thesis that his libertarianism stresses liberties within a very narrow range. Power corrupts Eastwood’s best-known statement of his libertarian leanings appeared in a 2004 interview with USA Weekend. After summarising his ‘philosophy’ in three little words – ‘leave everyone alone’ – he acknowledged the longevity of his political views. ‘Even as a kid,’ he said, ‘I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.’ Asked about the hot-button issue of same-sex marriage, he stuck to his guns: ‘From a libertarian point of view, you would say, “Yeah? So what?” You have to believe in total equality. People should be able to be what they want to be and do what they want – as long as they’re not harming people.’5 This was not Eastwood’s first declaration along these lines. Asked seven years earlier how he characterised himself politically, he told a Playboy interviewer the same thing: ‘Libertarian. Everyone leaves everyone else alone.’ When the interviewer followed up with a question about reproductive rights, another hot-button issue, he was again consistent with his principles. ‘I’ve always been pro-choice,’ he said. ‘It’s an individual decision. I don’t believe organizations should start taking over the decision-making process. Absolute power corrupts.’ (When reading those three little words, one notes with interest that the year of this interview, 1997, was the year when Eastwood’s thriller Absolute Power premiered.) Clint also endorsed ‘term limitations’ for members of Congress, because ‘it’s good to have new blood’, and spoke in favor of a single sixyear presidential term, on the grounds that ‘only two years of a four-year term are put 220

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

to good use’, while the rest goes to running for a second term, ‘and that’s very expensive and counterproductive’.6 In an essay that ran under his name in the 12 January 1997 issue of Parade magazine, Eastwood expanded on the problem of government power as he sees it. ‘Those in power get jaded, deluded, and seduced by power itself,’ his article says. ‘The hunger for absolute power [those words again] and, more to the point, the abuse of power, are part of human nature.’7 The term ‘human nature’ is a loaded one, suggesting that certain traits and tendencies are apolitical or at least pre-political – inherent in the human animal, not generated by particular conditions – and in keeping with that attitude, Eastwood sees abuse of power as a widespread phenomenon, not ‘limited to the bad guys of other nations’ but present ‘in our [own] country if we’re not vigilant’. To illustrate this he cites two notorious incidents of 1990s: the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agents laid siege to a survivalist household in Idaho, resulting in several deaths; and the Waco siege of 1993, when the FBI mounted a 51-day operation against the Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, ending with scores of cult members being killed. In the latter incident, Eastwood asked, ‘was there really an urgency to get those people out of the compound at that particular time?’ And at Ruby Ridge, where ‘there was one guy in a cabin on top of the mountain’, was it necessary for federal agents to go up there, shoot a 14-year-old in the back and shoot a woman with a child in her arms? What kind of mentality does that? When will the agents of the FBI say, ‘Wait a second! I don’t want to shoot people – we can wait them out, because eventually they’re going to go to the market?’ Whether you agree with someone’s philosophy or politics, they are still human beings and deserve to be treated as such.8 Similar observations have been made by commentators of various political persuasions, and one need not be a libertarian to see some sense in them. Anarchy and iconicity One of the more interesting characterisations of Clint’s political attitude comes from film and literature scholar David Cremean, who finds a heady strain of anarchism in the Sergio Leone trilogy and the westerns Eastwood has directed.9 While anarchism comes in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and schools, Cremean takes it as a social philosophy that valorises individual freedom yet recognises obligations to society (Daniel Guérin: ‘I become free only through the freedom of others.’)10 and tends to be ‘antimechanisation, at least when technology is used to control people; anti-capitalistic; and anti-property (though it allows for possessions)’. This established, Cremean finds that Eastwood’s characters in these seven westerns ‘unceasingly act as anarchists, striking out against forms of domination, whether it be of themselves or of others’. So thoroughgoing are their ‘pure agency’ and ‘free will’ that at the conclusions of their stories they ride away in solitude, leaving behind (in most cases) not so much as a name, c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

221

since occupying ‘a space within a community and a space of power’ is antithetical to anarchist doctrine, and being remembered by name would mean he is leaving ‘a fixed legacy, a reputation that can be emulated or used by those seeking power by claiming they were acting in his name. He would become an icon.’11 Eastwood is exactly that, of course – an icon – and Cremean acknowledges that in addition to being ‘extremely wealthy and in ways [living] accordingly’, Clint has never stated any support for anarchism, or indicated that he is even aware of the subject, for that matter. Cremean fills this gap by invoking ‘the full range of Eastwood’s politics, which tend toward a brand of libertarianism of which anarchism is typically considered a form’, and by quoting Noam Chomsky’s remark that anarchism ‘may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism’.12 Never mind that Clint has never said that he is a socialist, either. Cremean traces the presence of ‘hefty anarchist elements’ in Eastwood’s westerns to four factors in addition to his libertarian streak: his experience with Leone, who personally embraced ‘a kind of anarchy’ and acknowledged weaving this into his films; the ‘leftist milieu’ that Clint encountered when working with the likes of Italian actor and activist Gian Maria Volontè in the first two Dollars films, even though ‘language barriers … prevented much communication’ between them; his association with Don Siegel, who shared Leone’s anarchist leanings; and the popularity of ‘anarchic westerns made by Sam Peckinpah, another Siegel protégé’, at the time when Clint started making his own films in the genre.13 Add these up, Cremean says, and ‘on the grounds of sheer influence alone’ the anarchist elements in Eastwood’s westerns ‘would seem almost inevitable’.14 Cremean’s analysis runs up against various problems – it is not easy to cast a rich Republican as an anti-capitalist rebel – and he confronts them as best he can. He admits that the anarchistic undercurrents in Eastwood’s westerns are unfocused and unsystematic, for instance, but turns this into a virtue, since it saves the movies from being ‘mere political cinema’. (In a similar vein, Leone’s description of himself as a ‘moderate anarchist’, which sounds less than full-blooded to me, strikes Cremean as bravely ‘non-doctrinaire’, lending the films ‘an anarchic brand of anarchy’.) He has a harder time rationalising the fact that in High Plains Drifter the anarchistic stranger played by Eastwood rapes two women. Cremean solves this by declaring that the stranger ‘essentially rapes’ the women – an odd phrase, which Cremean explains by saying that ‘the acts are “justified” by hints of the first woman’s apparent willingness and by the second woman’s eventual complicity’. In any case, he continues, mythologist Joseph Campbell said that women got raped all the time in wars of old. And we should not forget that anarchism includes ‘sexual liberty’, in which the High Plains Drifter women ‘become participants’ when they ‘indicate willingness’. (To me this particular notion of ‘sexual liberty’ seems dangerously patriarchal at best, downright sinister at worst.) Finally, the absence of children in the town symbolises a sterility that the stranger may vanquish along with its other ills and evils, since his ‘virile nature’ implies that he, and his anarchistic ways, are probably ‘regenerative’ in a literal sense. ‘Anarchism,’ the writer concludes, ‘is fertile.’15 This is shaky stuff, suggesting that Cremean’s analysis is too anarchistic for its own good. But in its more sure-footed moments – as when Cremean links the doom222

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

laden cinematography of the storm in Unforgiven with the idea of anarchist revolt as a part of the natural order, and perhaps of the spiritual order as well – it casts light on Eastwood’s politics from an interesting and unusual angle. In something of a surprise ending, Cremean takes the rumor about Bill Munny that culminates this film (a rumor saying that Munny moved to San Francisco with his children, changed his name and became a contented dry-goods merchant) as Eastwood’s final comment, in what is probably his final western, on anarchist values. Or rather his final comments, since the rumor can be interpreted in two different ways. If it is a false rumor, we are free to imagine Munny riding down ‘further anarchist roads’, perhaps under one of the aliases that movie anarchists are wont to use.16 If the rumor is true, however, Eastwood’s choice of this concluding moment may indicate why anarchism ‘proves problematic for most people, as it is for Eastwood himself ’ and was for Leone before him. Anarchist theory and practice may be enormously valuable at times, Cremean writes, ‘but the appeal of a quiet, lawful life, benignly resigned to the rule of law and government and the comforts of capitalism’ – notice Munny’s last name – ‘may in the end prove more appealing for most people attracted to the Anarchist’s emblem’.17 This articulately stated proposition has the ring of truth and of sincerity. Yet in another last-minute twist, Cremean redeems Unforgiven for unrepentant anarchists by observing that Munny’s departure from the town he has purged fulfills a key tenet of the anarchist tradition, since it leaves the citizenry to decide their own future according to their own designs. Then again, he acknowledges, Munny’s departing words are not exactly neutral – if the citizenry decides to live its future along the same corrupt lines as its past, he will ‘come back and kill every one of you sons-of-bitches’.18 If this is anarchism, it is anarchism with a paradoxically authoritarian streak. If it is libertarianism, it is libertarianism with a vengeance. Contrarian Clint The ability to find strains of political philosophy in Eastwood’s cinema does not mean that his ideas are broad or substantial. ‘There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul,’ he said in a British magazine’s profile piece. ‘Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. … I got where I am by coming off the wall.’19 Here we have Clint as a mere contrarian, being different for the sake of being different, and as a mere showoff, pushing a ‘rebel’ image that is as trite as it is unfounded. ‘I have a reverence for individuality,’ he told the same magazine in the same self-congratulatory vein, adding later, ‘I’ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either rightwing or left-wing.’20 Eastwood may think himself the most individualistic of individualists, and critics like Cremean may link his libertarianism to the more radical code of anarchism, but Clint has been slotted as a regular conservative by right-wingers eager to claim such a luminous star for their cause. He ‘does not embrace the moniker of “conservative,” but his politics fall decidedly that way’, journalist Justin Quinn wrote in a 2009 profile. Like many conservative commentators, Quinn is quick to set up a face-off between Clint’s conservative values and Hollywood’s liberal ones. Noting that Changeling c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

223

received Academy Award nominations for best actress, best cinematography and best art direction, he grumbles that ‘nominations [sic] for Eastwood’s directing work’ were ‘conspicuously’ missing. Even worse, Gran Torino made ‘more money in one weekend than any of [Eastwood’s] other films ($30 million) and received wide critical acclaim’ but was ‘not nominated for any Academy Awards. There is wide Internet buzz that these slights are payback for his support of a Republican candidate [John McCain] in 2008.’ Putting this into the context of Oscar nods for pictures with more unsavory contents, Quinn continues: In a year when the leading candidates for Best Actor are men who portrayed a gay city councilman [Sean Penn in Milk] and an evil Richard M. Nixon [Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon], it doesn’t appear that there is any room for a conservative actor who plays a bigoted retiree who becomes a reluctant hero. Although it is vexing that Eastwood wasn’t nominated for Best Director for Gran Torino, it is particularly disconcerting that he was snubbed by the Academy for Best Actor. Eastwood, whose acting ability is highly regarded in Hollywood, has – inexplicably – never won an Oscar in that category … and it appears unlikely that he ever will.21 If one entertains this Manichaean analysis for the sake of discussion, one must wonder how Eastwood’s career managed to thrive during the campaigns of earlier Republican candidates, such as Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, of whom he was also ‘publicly supportive’, as Quinn acknowledges. Quinn does not speculate on this, however. A commentator with better understanding of Eastwood’s films, David Swindle, wrote in the conservative FrontPage Magazine that the release of Gran Torino gave moviegoers a ‘bold reminder’ that Clint had been acting in and directing ‘films with conservative themes’ for several decades. Swindle argues that Eastwood’s characters in the Dollars trilogy presented ‘a new kind of western protagonist, a bounty hunter who was motivated by self-interest’, and that this ‘refocusing’ of the genre laid ‘the groundwork for the libertarian westerns he would direct himself later in his career’.22 I will leave aside the obvious point that self-interest has been the motivation for bountyhunter protagonists from time immemorial, but I suggest that conservatives such as Swindle bone up on such pre-Clint westerns as The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953) and Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959), which leave no doubt as to why bounty hunters are called bounty hunters. Turning to the larger issue of Clint as a conservative filmmaker, Swindle adduces five films (only two of which are westerns) to illustrate his thesis. I summarise his views here because they amount to a representative case for Clint as a political thinker with whom conservatives and/or libertarians can feel at home. Dirty Harry showed the eponymous police officer, Harry Callahan, hunting for a sadistic psychopath. ‘When one of the murderer’s victims was supposedly trapped with a limited oxygen supply,’ Swindle writes, ‘Callahan ignored legal bureaucracy and regulations, breaking into the killer’s home without a search warrant and engaging in 224

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

some “enhanced interrogation techniques” to try and push the madman into revealing the girl’s location.’ Swindle then adds, ‘It seems clear how a contemporary film might apply this attitude to a terrorist with knowledge of an impending attack,’ a comment that indicates a commonplace naïveté with regard to the moral and practical concerns pertaining to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, a term closely associated with practices of torture approved by the George W. Bush administration for use in the so-called war on terror. Contrary to Swindle’s claim, it is not clear how ‘a contemporary film’ would apply ‘this attitude’ – whether that ambiguous phrase refers to Callahan’s mindset or that of the filmmakers – to a terrorist in a ticking-bomb scenario. Some films produced after the attacks of 11 September 2001, most famously the Fox television series 24 (2001–2010), have vaunted the merits of torture in fighting actual or alleged terrorism; yet others, such as the New Line Cinema production Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) and various documentaries, have stressed the injustices and impracticalities of so-called enhanced interrogation.23 In any case, the leap from Dirty Harry’s improvisational police tactics to institutional practices in the geopolitical arena indicate Swindle’s sympathy with a neo-conservative outlook that is certainly not universal among conservatives, much less libertarians. It is not clear that Clint, who appears to have seen the character in more amorphous terms, would concur with him. ‘The guy was just a man who fought bureaucracy and a certain established kind of thing,’ Eastwood remarked in 1976. ‘Just because he did things a little unorthodox – that’s the only way he knew how to handle it.’24 The Outlaw Josey Wales is ‘a revisionist western that showed a different facet of [Eastwood’s] libertarian vision’, Swindle writes. ‘The hero … just wants to be left alone after the Civil War,’ while the bad guys are ‘a Union brigade that has abused its powers – representative of excessive government – that pursue Wales, wanting him to surrender to them.’25 I find the philosophy of the 1976 film at least as close to communitarianism as to conservatism. Josey becomes an enemy of the state only after marauding soldiers kill his family and destroy his homestead, and his association with anti-Union rebels is driven by his wish for vengeance, not by an anti-government political stance. During his adventures he gradually acquires a small number of fellow travelers (an eccentric Indian, an elderly woman and so on) who become a cohesive circle of companions, united by their wish for a peaceful and secure social order, not necessarily one devoid of leadership and governance. I do not mean to draw overly sharp distinctions between communitarian and conservative worldviews, but the former tends to be more invested than the latter in egalitarian group values vis-à-vis such matters as economic fairness, cultural relativism and the hazards of unchecked individualism. ‘The exclusive pursuit of one’s self-interest is not … a good prescription for conduct in the marketplace,’ says one communitarian manifesto; ‘for no social, political, economic or moral order can survive that way.’26 Josey’s desire ‘to be left alone’ is progressively tempered by the urge to reestablish such orders on bases marked less by libertarian self-sufficiency than by communitarian ideals of mutual understanding and support. This is what makes The Outlaw Josey Wales one of Clint’s more thoughtful and progressive westerns. Unforgiven offers ‘a similar vision of man [sic] against government power’, with sheriff Little Bill Daggett standing for ‘corrupt government’ and Clint putting a ‘more c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

225

human face on his Fistful of Dollars persona’ via the Bill Munny character. This is a reasonable analysis, as far as it goes, since Little Bill is unquestionably corrupt and Munny is a vastly more developed figure than the Dollars protagonists. Eastwood does not see Bill and Little Bill as polar opposites, however – their shared name suggests that they are two sides of a single patriarchal coin – and the protracted bloodbath that climaxes the film points to capacities for savagery on the parts of government and citizenry alike. Swindle adds that ‘Second Amendment advocates will likely get a kick out of the fact that the sheriff enforces draconian gun control laws – all visitors to the town are required to surrender their firearms. Thus the tyrannical government is allowed to dominate – until Eastwood shows up.’27 Second Amendment sceptics may get less of a kick out of the film’s implication that the wellbeing of a body politic may ultimately have a mathematical solution: guns + guns + guns… Million Dollar Baby deals with the contentious issue of assisted suicide in ways that ‘infuriated social conservatives who interpreted the film as a defense of euthanasia’, according to Swindle, who rebuts the charge of euthanasia liberalism by quoting Eastwood rather than presenting his own argument, and then promptly changing the subject. ‘Are you interested in the people?’ Clint asked his conservative critics by way of an interview in the Guardian. ‘Are you interested in the plight of a man who has never had a relationship with the daughter he wanted to have a relationship with?’ Before her tragic injury the heroine is ‘willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what’, he told Rich in the New York Times, where he also noted that ‘the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud’. Few things energise the conservative mind as effectively as the phrase ‘welfare fraud’, and Swindle hints at his own views on poverty when he summarises the plot in the next sentence: ‘The film juxtaposes the working-class boxer Maggie (Hilary Swank), who fights to improve her situation as opposed to her poor family members who remain at the bottom because of their participation in a culture of laziness and immorality.’28 I have already indicated my displeasure with Eastwood’s handling of the relatives, but in any case they are minor characters with very little screen time; they loom large in this précis, however, complete with judgmental descriptors (laziness, immorality) and no mention of socioeconomic context or etiology. ‘Are you interested in the people?’ one is tempted to ask. Gran Torino most clearly expresses the ‘transition from libertarianism to libertarian-conservatism’ that Swindle sees as the welcome trajectory of Eastwood’s career. This change takes place in two stages. The early films endorse a ‘vision of freedom’, calling for ‘a society in which individuals have the opportunity to pursue their own destinies’; this is the libertarian ‘everyone leaves everyone else alone’ period. The second, truly conservative phase begins with Dirty Harry, when the filmmaker starts to realise that ‘freedom must be defended from those who threaten it; it must be conserved’ even if this requires the ‘extreme measures’ that Harry Callahan employs in shielding ‘a city’s freedom’ from attack. Eastwood’s evolution culminates in Gran Torino, which sets forth conservative ideas and ideals with uncommon clarity. ‘We want a society,’ Swindle writes, ‘in which the next generation has the same opportunities of individual liberty to pursue their dreams. In order for the next generation to enjoy that freedom, 226

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

we must confront sociopaths and nihilists – whether they be international Islamofascists or just local criminal gangs – who would threaten that fundamental American Vision.’29 It is a troubling aspect of Swindle’s analysis that he invokes Dirty Harry as an exemplar of healthy conservative values, especially in the first movie of the series, which is not the least benighted of the five. It seems to me that if the inspector’s ‘extreme measures’ are the method of choice to defend ‘a city’s freedom’, that very freedom might be among the defender’s unlucky victims. Beneath its hortatory tone, Swindle’s writing about Gran Torino again displays the avoidance of socioeconomic context and root-cause analysis that obtains in most of Eastwood’s films, as in Hollywood movies generally. Not all conservatives consider this omission to be an asset, however. In a review of Gran Torino for the American Spectator, conservative scholar James Bowman criticises the absence of such discussion in Eastwood’s later films, writing: The Unforgiven motif as well as the suggestion of post-traumatic stress disorder will be familiar to students of … late Eastwood who, most recently in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, keeps coming back to the subject of the psychic costs of violence with little or no consideration given to the reasons for it. In Gran Torino as elsewhere, this produces a strange, other-worldly quality to the moral dramas he would present us with.30 What’s needed, Bowman appears to say, is an account of violence that incorporates a theory of its origins as well as a depiction of its psychological tolls. Many a liberal would agree. The most famous petty bureaucrat in America I don’t see myself as conservative, but I’m not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Clint Eastwood31 If he were an ultra-leftist, and probably if he were an ultra-rightist, Eastwood might not have won the 1986 election for mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in which he ran on the Republican ticket. As his best-known excursion into practical politics, this episode and its aftermath must be discussed in any account of the ideological orientation that has shaped important aspects of Clint’s private and public life. Carmel is regarded as a quiet and moderate town, and the issue that prompted Eastwood to seek office was a homely one related to zoning rules. He wanted to build a two-story office and retail complex next to the Hog’s Breath Inn, a restaurant he partly owned, and the Carmel City Council turned down his bid for a construction permit, agreeing with the village’s architectural planning commission that the blueprint called for too little wood, too much concrete and glass. Clint’s response was to enter politics, and nothing – not even the go-ahead he got for a modified version of his building plan – could make him waver once his decision was made. ‘I’m doing this as a resident,’ he c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

227

told the Carmel Pine Cone during the campaign. ‘I don’t need to bring attention to myself. This is where I intend to live the rest of my life.’32 The hottest bone of contention when the campaign clicked into high gear, according to Entertainment Weekly, was a recently passed law designed to reduce littering and preserve the town’s scenic atmosphere by forbidding local stores from selling take-out foods. Declaring himself ‘the pro-business candidate’ and taking aim at allegedly antigrowth forces – i.e. those who had taken control of the city council in 1984 and down-zoned part of the business district – Clint defeated incumbent mayor Charlotte Townsend by a resounding margin of 2,166 to 799. Once in office he lost no time in vacating the offending ordinance, and subsequently he facilitated enhancements of Carmel’s water supply and its inventory of public restrooms.33 Eastwood biographer Patrick McGilligan claims that Eastwood’s mayoral run was driven by two ‘ulterior motives’, neither of them altogether savory. One was the prospect of spending more time in Carmel than usual ‘because of all the women he was involved with up there’. The other was a desire for ‘revenge on the city planning commission’ that had denied his application to build a commercial structure next to his restaurant. ‘Clint hated to be told no, and … hated to be treated in this fashion,’ McGilligan writes, going on to assert that Eastwood took ‘every possible insurance against losing’ the election, working the system with the help of experienced consultants, ready cash and personal charm. ‘A man of Clint’s stature,’ one of the consultants explained, ‘does not go blind into anything that might end up making him look stupid.’ He also recruited likely winners to run for city-council seats so he would have a majority in his corner as mayor. Everything went just as Eastwood planned, sweeping away potential problems including antipathy toward candidates burdened with a ‘Hollywood image’ and the fact that many of his pro-business supporters lived outside the city limits and could not participate in the balloting. 34 McGilligan’s take on Eastwood is often sceptical and scrappy, as we have seen, and if Clint’s motivations were as cynical as the biographer indicates, one would have expected him to have a less one-sided victory in the election and a more troubled tenure as the town’s chief executive. One may reasonably suspect, however, that Eastwood’s wealth, celebrity and doggedness made a stronger impact on the vote than any administrative skills or fidelity to small-town values he may have possessed. Eastwood left his position as ‘the most famous petty bureaucrat in America’ when his term ended in 1988,35 but it appears that politics had gotten into his blood. Five years later he re-entered the fray on an unofficial basis, becoming the main backer of a proposal that would give downtown businesses more leeway in catering to tourists by re-zoning them and widening the authority to grant building permits. Putting his cash to work, Clint donated nearly $42,000 in support of the measure, which came to more than ten dollars for each registered voter and more than three-quarters of all the money raised by both sides. Opponents of the measure claimed that Eastwood wanted to reap personal gains from it, since it would allow him to lease his two-story downtown property – the one he built after becoming mayor, now almost half empty – to a wider variety of tenants.36 (Some felt he damaged the town by his very presence; a councilwoman said he attracted ‘a low grade of tourists who stay only long enough to 228

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

buy Eastwood souvenirs’, according to a Los Angeles Times report.)37 Clint responded by saying the measure’s passage would not ‘have any benefit’ for him ‘one way or the other’ but would bring new businesses and tax revenues to the town. Wherever the truth lay with regard to Eastwood’s motivations, advocates of the status quo felt the stakes were extremely high for the town’s 4,400 citizens, placing into the balance ‘what kind of place [Carmel] will be: a commercial tourist trap ruled by greedy landlords or a quiet community that serves the interests of its residents’.38 Once again Clint’s side prevailed, but in contrast with the mayoral election, which he won with 72 percent of the vote, this time the margin of victory was slim.39After days of tallying, election officials announced a final count of 1,099 to 1,089 – a difference of ten votes out of 2,188 ballots cast.40 It is not hard to see a cognitive clash between Eastwood’s self-declared identity as a leave-everyone-alone libertarian on one hand, and his star-powered ventures into local politics on the other. Why did those ventures intrigue him to the point of investing significant amounts of time, energy and money? As we have seen, he has explained these involvements as a combination of civic duty (beefing up the business district, raising tax revenues) and hometown boosterism (showing loyalty and love for the community) plus a dose of commonsense capitalism (commerce is America’s lifeblood) for good measure. Some observers see less altruistic factors in the mix as well, however, and movie-star egotism might have been one of them. A report in the Los Angeles Times espoused this view in 1993: It is not at all like in his movies. Here in this quaint seaside village, Clint Eastwood has lots of little rules to follow. In the modest commercial building he owns, the tough-guy actor can rent space to a clothing store – but not to a T-shirt shop. He could bring in an artist – but not an art gallery. He could open a grocery store – but not one that sells take-out food.41 Maybe some celebrities would knuckle under to these little rules, the writer implies, but Eastwood is not one of them. Showdown over the Mission Ranch Inn Who in America gives these lawyers the right to be the self-appointed vigilantes to enforce the law? Clint Eastwood42 If fame and fortune have given Eastwood advantages over less privileged people on many occasions, on others they have been liabilities, bringing attention that he does not welcome and cannot control. The author of a 2003 book on disability politics, for example, surely sought to capitalise on Clint’s celebrity when she placed his name in the subtitle – the writer is Mary Johnson and her study is called Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights – and the c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

229

Advocado Press surely had the same goal when it designed the cover, which displays an extremely small photograph of actor Christopher Reeve, who was disabled, and an extremely large one of Eastwood, who is not.43 Looking to the substance of the book, Clint makes an appropriate poster boy for Johnson’s polemic on the necessity of civil rights for disabled people and the need for anti-discrimination laws to provide these effectively, and Eastwood’s entry into the disability-rights arena offers revealing insights into aspects of his political thinking. The saga began at the Mission Ranch Inn, a nineteenth-century dairy farm near Carmel that Eastwood bought in 1987 and transformed into a hotel. A patron named Diane zum Brunnen, who had muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair, visited there with her husband in 1995 and 1996, and filed suit against Eastwood in 1997, lodging three complaints: that the only wheelchair-accessible room cost $225 a night, while other rooms had rates as low as $85; that the wheelchair-accessible bathroom was in a separate building more than two hundred feet away; and that there was no ramp to the inn’s main office. If present, these conditions would violate access rules set up under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990 and includes the provision that ‘an inn, hotel, motel, or other place of lodging’ shall in most instances be considered a ‘public accommodation’ wherein no one ‘shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment’ of whatever the place may offer to its customers or clients.44 The lawsuit angered Eastwood, who claimed it snuck up on him without warning. Before long his anger was in the news, prompting accounts such as that by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Vandehei, who wrote, Dirty Harry wants revenge, Washington style. … These ‘sleezebag lawyers,’ the veteran actor says, his voice constricting, messed with the wrong guy when they ‘frivolously’ sued him and hundreds of other small-business owners for failing to comply quickly enough with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Mr. Eastwood … is striking back with a Washington lobbying campaign for new legislation to modify the law. ‘I figure I won’t back down because of all these people … who can’t defend themselves.’ Hence the Hollywood-style spectacle imagined by Vandehei’s front-page article, which conjures up ‘a gang of trial lawyers staring down Clint Eastwood, asking themselves about taking him on: “Do I feel lucky?”’45 Arguing on behalf of the zum Brunnens during the two-week trial in US District Court in San Francisco, their attorney claimed that Clint had spent millions buying and renovating the Mission Ranch but had not spent ‘a fistful of dollars’ on access for the disabled. Not to be outdone, Eastwood’s lawyer responded that the plaintiff was after ‘a fistful of dollars’ with her lawsuit. Clint testified that his renovations were designed to provide disability access without compromising the ranch’s historic character, and said his plans had been approved by Monterey County building officials. He stated that he would have fixed the violations if he had been informed about them, while the plaintiff claimed she had sent him two letters of complaint about the 230

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

room rates and received no reply.46 After deliberating for four hours, the eight-member jury awarded no damages to the plaintiff, holding that Eastwood was liable only for the minor violations of having no ramp to the office, posting insufficient restroom signage and providing just one (instead of two or more) guest rooms with disability access. After hearing the verdict, media reports said, Clint shook jurors’ hands, gave autographs and posed for photos with some of them.47 ‘We kind of didn’t think [zum Brunnen] was really there for dinner,’ a juror said, meaning that the plaintiff visited the hotel in 1996 for the purpose of spotting ADA violations. Eastwood said he had refused on principle to seek an out-of-court settlement. ‘I’d rather be on the side of right,’ he self-righteously declared, ‘than let these guys get away with murder.’48 And again, ‘If you’re right, you’ve got to hold your ground. I also fought for the businessmen and businesswomen who own small businesses and are trying to get by and they get worked over by those people.’49 Clint may have felt firmly planted on the side of right, but Johnson sees the trial’s outcome in a different light, noting that the jury confirmed the presence of conditions that violated both the ADA and California law, and that the lawsuit impelled Eastwood to ‘finally provide the access’ called for by the applicable codes.50 And while the reported sum of $577,000 in damages sought by the plaintiffs was denied, the San Francisco Chronicle observed that ‘the presence of architectural violations at the resort – a point that has been conceded – could require the payment of well over $577,000 in attorney fees’.51 If his courtroom victory was less than complete, however, Clint was also busy on another disability-rights front during 2000. Pursuing his campaign for new national legislation to modify the existing law, he had hooked up with Representative Mark Foley, a Republican from Florida, to push a bill called the ADA Notification Act, which would require anyone planning an ADA lawsuit to notify the proposed defendant ninety days in advance. Preempting potential charges of insensitivity toward the disabled, Foley placed much of the blame for ‘litigation abuse’ on a favorite conservative bugaboo, the ‘growing number of trial lawyers who generate huge legal fees’ by flooding the courts with frivolous cases. Eastwood followed suit. ‘What happens is these lawyers, they come along and they end up driving off in a big Mercedes,’ he said, ‘and the disabled person ends up driving off in a wheelchair.’ In the run-up to a Congressional hearing scheduled for 18 May, Clint worked the media, guesting on Hardball and Crossfire, appearing in a Fox News Special, and more. Johnson quotes an exchange on the MSNBC-TV show Hardball that had Chris Matthews naming improvements in disability access over the past twenty years (more ramps, doors wide enough for wheelchairs, etc.) and then asking Eastwood if he has all those things in his hotel. ‘We have – we have those,’ Clint replied. ‘But see this is – these are professional litigants, so it doesn’t matter whether you have it or not.’52 There was more of the same at the Congressional hearing, with Clint speaking out against attorneys who are perverting the law by going around and filing these broadside, sand-bagging type suits where they hit you broadside from nowhere, with absolutely no c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

231

warning. … Every time they come back they keep upping the ante, adding many more problems to be solved which they can collect fees on. … I realize I am a bit naïve on this, but with the same people perpetrating this over and over again … it is just not fair, and I am here just as a common person speaking of fairness.53 Johnson cites various sources in rebuttal of such statements. Fred Schotz, an ADA consultant who belongs to the Florida Paraplegic Association, examined the legal papers filed in the Mission Ranch Inn case and learned that contrary to Eastwood’s claim of being blindsided by zum Brunnen’s lawsuit a full year after her unhappy experience, a certified letter of complaint had been sent to him just three months after it – a letter ‘that he refused to sign for, and that got returned to the plaintiff’s attorney’. Speaking of the notification bill being promoted by Foley with Eastwood’s help, Baltimore attorney Andrew Levy told the Congressional hearing that requiring advance notice of lawsuits would encourage people ‘to do nothing [about ADA violations] until they get a letter’, making ADA rules even harder to enforce than they already were; as for greedy lawyers filing gratuitous cases to line their pockets, Levy said there was no incentive for such actions because the law allows defendants to recover their legal costs if a suit is deemed frivolous or in bad faith, and even victorious plaintiffs are allowed to collect only ‘reasonable’ fees. Maxine Waters, the famously scrappy Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, said she was ‘skeptical’ of Foley’s bill and that she could not ‘in good faith support an attack on the ADA because we want to go after bad-acting lawyers’.54 In the end, the notification bill supported by Foley and Eastwood never made it out of committee. Johnson gave credit to the disability-rights movement, which ‘unilaterally opposed’ the measure. But she added that the bill has kept resurfacing in subsequent Congressional sessions, and said she did not expect it to disappear any time soon.55 Hey, if we kill ’em… The conflict between Eastwood and the ADA might appear to be removed from Clint’s film career, but with a media celebrity and cultural icon of such magnitude it is impossible to draw firm lines between one sphere of activity and another. Accordingly, the disability activists who assailed Million Dollar Baby saw its arrival in 2004 as another frontal attack from the ‘celebrity sniper’ who had declared war in the zum Brunnen case in 1997 and kept up hostilities in the Notification Act hearing in 2000.56 ‘Speaking of oppression,’ wrote author Mickey Z., it ‘might be possible to chalk up [Clint’s] ignorance and insensitivity as being no better or worse than the average … but his record vis-à-vis disability rights speaks for itself.’57 A disability group called Not Dead Yet picketed theatres showing the film in Chicago, and Marcie Roth, the director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, charged Eastwood with carrying on a ‘disability vendetta’, assailing the film’s conclusion for implying that ‘having a spinalcord injury is a fate worse than death’. Academy Award voters were deluged with protest emails, according to a newspaper report, sent by activists hoping to stave off 232

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

votes for the film and its participants.58 Calling the picture a ‘corny, melodramatic assault on people with disabilities’, research analyst Steve Drake wrote: ‘The cynic in me says that maybe the most accurate label we can put on this movie is “Clint Eastwood’s Revenge.” Hey, if we kill ’em, we don’t have to make our resorts accessible!’59 Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved hastened to join the chorus, as did conservative talk-show host Debbie Schlussel (the film advocated ‘killing the handicapped, literally putting their lights out’, she said) and Ted Baehr, head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, who found it ‘very anti-Catholic and anti-Christian’ in its views.60 Rabbi Daniel Lapin said on MSNBC that Eastwood had committed a cultural crime akin to Bill Clinton having ‘brought the term “oral sex” to America’s dinner tables’.61 The puzzling thing about many such attacks, wrote Los Angeles correspondent Andrew Gumbel in the Independent, ‘is that Eastwood is hardly your stereotypical flaming Hollywood liberal. … To the extent that it has been faulted at all by professional critics, Million Dollar Baby has, if anything, been deemed too conservative in its view of race relations, in its unflattering portrayal of all women except for Swank’s character, and in its swipes at hillbillies and welfare cheats.’ Placing the issue in a broader perspective, Gumbel continued: The validity of the arguments against the film may be less important … than the desire of social conservatives to keep up their barrage of attacks on Hollywood in general. During last year’s presidential election campaign, the film industry was repeatedly identified by Republican grassroots activists and the Bush campaign as part of a pro-Democrat liberal elite, and targeted as a source of filth, sexual promiscuity and moral equivocation out of step with mainstream American values. According to Thomas Frank, author of … What’s The Matter With America?, the attacks on Hollywood (whose products are consumed with equal enthusiasm by right- and left-wingers) are part of a pattern by social conservatives of picking cultural battles they are almost sure to lose, all the better to stir up the resentment and outrage of their prospective political supporters. Gumbel added a point made by other commentators as well (and noted above), writing that Limbaugh and Medved were perhaps less interested in starting a moral conversation than in giving away the ending.62 Medved denied everything, saying he ‘never disclosed specifics on the movie’s dark surprise, nor indicated which of its endearing characters chose to exercise “the right to die”’ – at least until disability-rights organisations came on the scene, whereupon he apparently felt liberated to out the picture’s ‘dirty little secret’.63 Clint stated his side of the story in the New York Times, telling columnist Frank Rich that the movie’s ethos ‘all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie’. Rich does not say so, but Eastwood’s right-wing bona fides are still intact, this particular controversy notwithstanding. Who could blame the star for rhetorically asking, ‘What do you have to give these [commentators] to make them happy?’64 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

233

Adventures in litigation Eastwood’s involvement in the Mission Inn case was initially brought about by the plaintiff, but another window on Eastwood’s political sensibility is provided by the litigation he has instigated himself, some of which suggests that his wealth, celebrity and tenacity have tipped the scales of justice in the courtroom much as they worked to his advantage in the 1986 mayoral election and in his campaign to alter Carmel’s zoning arrangements five years later. One revealing court case occurred when the Malpaso Company sued Every Which Way But Loose screenwriter Jeremy Joe Kronsberg for scripting a movie called Going Ape! that featured three orangutans, as if Malpaso’s production of Every Which Way But Loose gave Clint the right to control any primate-related story that Kronsberg might ever choose to create. Malpaso and Warner Bros. stopped sending Kronsberg the profit-participation checks due to him from the Eastwood comedy, whereupon the writer countersued; the case was settled (on undisclosed terms) shortly before the release of Any Which Way You Can in 1980. (Stanford Sherman wrote Any Which Way You Can for Malpaso after the company rejected Kronsberg’s script for it.) Kronsberg can hardly have expected a good outcome for his suit after the court-appointed mediator, a retired judge, asked Clint for his autograph.65 A longer and weightier court proceeding had its beginnings late in 1993, when the National Enquirer trumpeted an ‘exclusive interview’ that Eastwood had purportedly given to the famously sensationalistic tabloid, with an ‘exclusive photo’ to match, showing Clint and the baby girl he had had with Frances Fisher, his girlfriend at the time. The headline was benign: ‘Clint Eastwood at 63: being a new dad has made my day.’ But the new dad was not pleased. He had not granted an exclusive interview to the Enquirer – he had never granted any interview to the paper – and the piece appearing in the 21 December 1993 issue was reprinted from Today, a London tabloid, under an Enquirer byline. Adding to the affront, the Enquirer had edited the article so as to heighten the impression that Eastwood and the putative writer had actually talked – the actor said things ‘with a chuckle’, for instance. Clint and his attorneys sued the publication, claiming that it had damaged his reputation. He could not win by making a traditional libel claim, according to Alison P. Howard’s analysis of the case in the California Law Review, because he could not clearly and convincingly prove that the Enquirer had published an untruthful report knowingly or with reckless disregard of its falsity. So his lawyers turned to Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, a federal statute that aims to codify the laws relating to trademarks and unfair competition, thereby protecting ‘consumers and business competitors from deception and misrepresentation of products and services in commerce’.66 Clint hated the tabloid press in general and the National Enquirer in particular. Tabloids had broken the stories of his break-ups with first wife Maggie Eastwood and longtime girlfriend Sondra Locke, and of his parentage of children with women he was not married to; and he had sued the National Enquirer in 1984 over a report alleging a romance with country singer Tanya Tucker, asking $10 million in damages for ‘exploiting [his] name and invading his privacy’, then accepting an undisclosed 234

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

out-of-court settlement. In the ‘exclusive interview’ case he sought $10–15 million in damages. Attorneys for the National Enquirer argued that Eastwood had mused about parenting with various other publications, from Playboy and Rolling Stone to Variety and the Ladies Home Journal; that National Enquirer had checked the validity of the story’s quotes with Cameron Docherty, the Today writer who had (supposedly) conducted the interview; and that the contested article was both ‘inherently believable’ and ‘unabashedly positive’.67 It was not inherently believable, however, that Clint would give the time of day, much less an exclusive sit-down, to a tabloid he wholeheartedly despised. And this was all that mattered in the terms of his Lanham Act complaint, which hinged entirely on the question of whether the newspaper’s claim of having an ‘exclusive interview’ hurt his reputation by implying his approval of the publication. ‘Our first line of argument,’ Eastwood’s lawyer said afterward, ‘was that it was an invasion of privacy, a hijacking of his persona for their commercial gain.’68 The legal strategy worked. After three and a half days of sequestration, the jury decided in Eastwood’s favor, holding that the National Enquirer had willfully misrepresented the interview as ‘exclusive’ thus implicitly claiming (on the front page, no less) that Eastwood had ‘endorsed’ the supermarket tabloid. The very suggestion that Clint Eastwood sat for an interview with this disreputable weekly was harmful to his reputation, the court opined, since the paper’s 2.7 million readers might now regard him as, in Howard’s words, ‘either a washed-up star or a hypocrite for baring his private life’ so publicly. Pursuant to the Lanham Act, the court awarded $75,000 to Eastwood as compensation for harm to his reputation and another $75,000 representing profits unjustly obtained by the tabloid; pursuant to the California misappropriation statute, it added the far greater sum of $653,156 for legal fees and expenses as well, making a total award of $803,156. This fell considerably short of the $10–15 million Eastwood had sought, and it took a federal court proceeding in 1996 for him to obtain the feesand-expenses award. But he took the decision as a ‘win’, according to Patrick McGilligan’s biography, and again shook jurors’ hands, reportedly offering to sign autographs as well. Quickly filing an appeal in the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, the National Enquirer argued in its brief that ‘at stake here is the actual malice standard – and how it will govern the relationship between all publishers and all public figures who wish to exert greater control over their press coverage than is allowed by the First Amendment’. And again Eastwood prevailed. Upholding his award, the court observed that the Enquirer, in McGilligan’s paraphrase, ‘should have known better than to cross the line of legality with a star who was known even by the justices, as stated in the ruling, for his “litigiousness”’. It is worth observing that in 1993 one of the Ninth Circuit judges described that legal venue as ‘the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit’.69 Eastwood was not the first celebrity to use the Lanham Act in a lawsuit. The analysis in the California Law Review compares the final outcome of his case in 1998 with those of other claims brought by Hollywood stars against media defendants. Dustin Hoffman sued Los Angeles magazine in 1999 for publishing a photo that showed him as his character in the 1982 film Tootsie but altered the picture to drape him in a designer gown. His claim relied partially on the Lanham Act, and as in Eastwood’s case, the c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

235

verdict (by the US District Court for the Central District of California) held that the image was likely to confuse people into thinking that the star ‘endorsed, approved, or was somehow associated with’ the Los Angeles fashion spread. Rejecting defence arguments citing journalistic freedom to report on public affairs, moreover, the judge proclaimed that Hoffman is ‘one of our country’s living treasures’, implying that sufficiently luminous stars should be shielded from such annoyances. Hoffman and Eastwood evidently possessed such luminosity, as did Tom Waits in 1992, when he won a Lanham Act suit in the Ninth Circuit against Frito-Lay, which ran a commercial for Doritos that mimicked his voice. But similar status was not granted to Cher in a 1982 lawsuit concerning an ‘exclusive’ interview that ran in two different tabloids, first in Forum as ‘Exclusive: Cher Talks Straight’ and then (abbreviated) in Star as ‘Exclusive Series – Cher: My life, my husbands and my many, many men’. Cher’s claim was heard in the same Ninth Circuit where Eastwood would later win his case, but this time the court held that the plaintiff ‘did not suffer any damage from Star’s exaggerated claims of exclusivity’. While she did prevail in the part of her action that accused Forum of running a patently false advertisement implying that she had endorsed the magazine, the court found the magazine’s culpability to reside only in the ad, which was ‘commercial speech’ with weaker legal protection.70 Contrary to the ruling on Eastwood’s claim, the court found no liability to arise from the deceptive headline on the tabloid’s cover.71 These conflicting outcomes suggest the interesting likelihood that Eastwood and Hoffman benefited from the sheer magnitude of their celebrity, whereas Cher, their less charismatic counterpart, was left to tolerate a blatantly absurd situation – a nonexclusive ‘exclusive’ interview – without recourse. The political ramifications of this situation are noteworthy, since Eastwood succeeded in using a statute designed to ‘reduce consumer confusion by prohibiting false endorsement and false advertising’ for the different purpose of winning ‘claims against media defendants arising out of news coverage and editorial content’.72 Polishing the rep Beyond the juridical politics of the National Enquirer legal case, Eastwood’s lawsuit took place at a time when journalists (largely but not entirely in the tabloids) were looking for weak spots in the ‘once-unassailable mythology’ 73 that attended his public image as a decent man, a concerned citizen and a responsible entertainer. His aggressive responses to the National Enquirer and its ilk therefore related to what media scholar Robert E. Kapsis calls the ‘politics of reputation’, which must be carefully managed by anyone wishing to reach and remain in the top ranks of media stardom.74 Clint’s challenge from the mid-1970s on had been to counter the accusations of sexism, ‘fascism’ and brutality that assailed the Sergio Leone and Dirty Harry pictures, and he saw this as a specifically political task. Hostile critics had typed him as a right-wing extremist, he told a Village Voice interviewer in 1976, because his fame as a western star linked him with John Wayne, who ‘was always considered right-wing’, and because the Dirty Harry character ‘had more feeling for the victim than he had for the killer’. But in 236

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

reality, Eastwood insisted, Harry was ‘obeying a higher moral law. He was a man following his conscience, doing what he felt he had to do despite the rules. Hell, isn’t that what the Nuremberg trials were all about? People following a higher moral law than the rules put down for them?’75 This remark illustrates the strategy Eastwood has employed to enhance and promote his reputation as a socially engaged artist. For all the wildness, vulgarity and violence of his entertainments, we are assured, his moviestar career is informed and buttressed by a political sensibility so morally secure as to merit comparison, he believes, with that of the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal. Eastwood has been ‘an active promoter of his career’, Kapsis wrote in a 1993 analysis of Clint’s reputation politics. ‘The fact that in 1984 he had placed a one-page ad in the high-brow New York Review of Books (a not so unflattering piece on Eastwood had appeared there two years earlier) to promote his latest film, Tightrope, strongly suggests that, in addition to perfecting his craft, he also endeavored to improve his reputation.’ Kapsis sees 1985 as the pivotal year in Eastwood’s ‘reputation history’, bringing museum tributes in European capitals, the selection of Pale Rider for the Cannes International Film Festival and numerous articles in the vein of a New York Times Magazine piece called ‘Clint Eastwood, Seriously.’ From this point on, Kapsis asserted, critics have increasingly come to recognize how Eastwood, from the beginning of his directorial career, has played with and re-worked his star persona through his films, now viewed as highly reflexive works. This critical re-evaluation occurred partly because Eastwood apparently made all the right career moves in reshaping his reputation. He would often select properties that challenged his earlier macho image without the constraint of a critical discourse hostile to such efforts. Also critics, writing during the less radical 1980s, could acknowledge that the charge that Eastwood was a ‘fascistic’ director was a vast overstatement.76 Eastwood’s tactics apparently worked on Kapsis, who concludes his analysis by agreeing with a critical majority who ‘now see Eastwood as a serious artist whose work, both as director and actor, continues to deepen and mature’. Acting through both word and deed, Kapsis writes, Eastwood has ‘helped many overcome their initial blindness to his talents as a director’.77 Whether this ‘help’ has served the cause of critical acuity as effectively as it has served Eastwood’s career agenda is open to debate, although I have indicated my own feelings over the course of this book. (Perhaps his tactics worked on me as well.) Be that as it may, the question comes into sharper focus when we remember that for Eastwood, managing his reputation has meant managing public discourse, insofar as this is possible, and that when necessary he will take his case all the way to the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Notes 1

Thierry Jousse and Camille Nevers, ‘Interview with Clint Eastwood,’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, eds. Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

237

2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15

16

238

Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 176–186, cited at 178. First published as ‘Entretien avec Clint Eastwood’ in Cahiers du cinema, no. 460 (October 1992), pp. 67–71. Frank Rich, ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie,’ The New York Times (13 February 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/arts/13rich.html?pagewanted= print&position= (accessed 22 March 2007). Your World w/ Neil Cavuto, ‘Exclusive Interview: Clint Eastwood on Politics and Real Estate,’ FoxNews.com http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,329947,00. html (accessed 9 March 2009). Your World w/ Neil Cavuto, ‘Exclusive Interview.’ Dennis McCafferty, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ USA Weekend (25 January 2004) USAWeekend.com http://www.usaweekend.com/04_issues/040125/ 040125clint_ eastwood.html (accessed 21 April 2009).’ Bernard Weinraub, ‘Playboy Interview: Clint Eastwood,’ Playboy (March 1997) Playboy.com http://www.playboy.com/articles/clint-eastwood-1997-playboy% 20interview/index.html?page=2 (accessed 10 March 2009). Quoted in Libertarian Rock, ‘Clint Eastwood: Actor,’ http://www.libertarianrock. com/clint.html (accessed 19 May 2009). Quoted in Reason, ‘Quotes,’ Reason Online (April 1997) http://www.reason.com/ news/show/30212.html (accessed 19 May 2009). He omits Hang ‘Em High and Joe Kidd, which Eastwood did not direct. The films analysed are High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven, plus the Leone films A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Guérin is paraphrasing nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the pioneering Russian theorist of collectivist anarchism. Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, trans. Mary Klopper ((New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 32–33. Quoted in David Cremean, ‘A Fistful of Anarchy: Clint Eastwood’s Characters in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and in His Four ‘Own’ Westerns,’ in Leonard Engel, ed., Clint Eastwood: Actor and Director – New Perspectives, pp. 49–76, cited at 50. Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ pp. 50, 52–53. Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ 31. Cremean quotes this from Chomsky’s introduction to Anarchism by Guérin (see note 9 above). Cremean draws on Jim Kitses, who reports that Leone and Siegel shared ‘an outcast mentality and sympathies, a leaning towards anarchism … The thrust of their respective visions found a receptive response in Eastwood,’ and adds, ‘Siegel would remark on the star’s readiness to embrace anti-heroic roles.’ Kitses, Horizons West, p. 286 Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ pp. 66–67. Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ pp. 50, 55–56, 68. Cremean refers to The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, the 1988 companion book to a sixpart television documentary aired that year by the Public Broadcasting Service. I think the rumor must be taken as false, since slippages and inadequacies of language are a theme of the film. The injury inflicted on Delilah is horrible enough, th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

17

18 19 20

21

22

23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

for instance, but when the Schofield Kid describes it to Munny his account is highly exaggerated and inaccurate, and it becomes even more grotesque when Munny repeats it to Ned a short time later. Another example is the concluding text, which states that the marker on Mrs. Munny’s grave provides her mother with no answers to her doubts and questions when the old woman travels to the burial site and reads it. Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ p. 71. Cremean identifies ‘the Anarchist’s emblem’ with the eponymous symbol – ‘On a field, sable, the letter A, gules’ – in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, a tale that certainly has anarchist overtones but not the kind of influence implied by Cremean’s reference. The best-known traditional emblem of anarchism is the black flag, which first gained prominence in connection with the Paris Commune of the late nineteenth century. The main alternatives have been the black-and-red flag, dating from around the same time, and the more recent Circle-A flag, primarily associated with youth movements of the 1960s. Cremean, ‘Fistful of Anarchy,’ p. 72. ‘Clint Eastwood,’ Hello! (n.d.) hellomagazine.com http://www.hellomagazine.com/ profiles/clinteastwood/ (accessed 1 June 2009). Quoted in Bill Winter, ‘Clint Eastwood – Libertarian,’ Advocates for Self-Government (n.d.) http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/clint-eastwood.html (accessed 19 May 2009). Justin Quinn, ‘A Profile of Conservative Hollywood Actor & Filmmaker Clint Eastwood,’ About.com:US Conservative Politics (n.d.) About.com http://usconservatives.about.com/od/hollywoodconservatives/p/EastwoodBIO.htm (accessed 30 July 2009). David Swindle, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Libertarian-Conservative Vision,’ FrontPageMagazine.com (23 January 2009), n.p. http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33798 (accessed 1 June 2009). Examples include Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) and Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) as well as the British production The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (Adam Curtis, 2004). Patrick McGilligan, ‘Clint Eastwood,’ in Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, eds., Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 21-41, cited at 32. First published in Focus on Film no. 25 (Summer-Fall 1976), pp. 12–20. Swindle, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Libertarian-Conservative Vision.’ The Communitarian Network, ‘The Responsive Communitarian Platform,’ http:// www.gwu.edu/~icps/RCP%20text.html (accessed 2 July 2009) Swindle, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Libertarian-Conservative Vision.’ Swindle, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Libertarian-Conservative Vision.’ Swindle, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Libertarian-Conservative Vision.’ James Bowman, ‘Gran Torino,’ The American Spectator (30 January 2009) http:// spectator.org/archives/2009/01/30/gran-torino/print (accessed 21 April 2009) McCafferty, ‘Clint Eastwood.’ c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

239

32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40

41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48 49 50 51 240

Quoted in Benjamin Svetkey, ‘Play Mayor for Me: Clint Eastwood’s Political Stint – A look back at the actor’s real life [as] mayor of Carmel, California,’ Entertainment Weekly no. 112 (3 April 1992) http://www.ew. com/ew/article/0,,310041,00. html (accessed 9 March 2009). Svetkey, ‘Play Mayor for Me.’ McGilligan, Clint, pp. 383–385. Svetkey, ‘Play Mayor for Me.’ Richard C. Paddock, ‘Carmel Voters Ready for Showdown Over Tourism’ – ‘Politics: To opponents of commercialism, former Mayor Clint Eastwood is the bad guy in rezoning battle. He says new businesses and tax revenue are needed to support the high level of services,’ Los Angeles Times (6 June 1993) http://articles.latimes.com/1993-06-06/news/mn-311_1_clint-eastwood (accessed 9 March 2009). Paddock, ‘Carmel Voters Ready for Showdown Over Tourism.’ Paddock, ‘Carmel Voters Ready for Showdown Over Tourism.’ The New York Times, ‘Eastwood Is Sworn In As Mayor of Carmel,’ (16 April 1986) http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/16/us/eastwood-is-sworn-in-as-mayorof-carmel.html (accessed 9 March 2009). Some reports say Eastwood won the election by 72.5 percent of the ballots. Los Angeles Times, ‘Rezoning Backed by Eastwood Approved’ (15 June 1993) http:// articles.latimes.com/1993-06-15/news/mn-3264_1_clint-eastwood (accessed 9 March 2009). Paddock, ‘Carmel Voters Ready for Showdown Over Tourism.’ Quoted in Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights (Louisville: Advocado Press, 2003), p. 150. Reeve became paralysed from the neck down after a horse-riding accident in 1995. In subsequent years he advocated on behalf of spinal-cord research and human embryonic stem-cell studies. He died of heart failure in 2004. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 – ADA – 42 US Code Chapter 126, §12181 and §12182. http://finduslaw.com/americans_with_disabilities_act_ of_1990_ada_42_u_ s_code_chapter_126#25 (accessed 6 July 2009). Jim Vandehei, ‘Clint Eastwood Saddles Up For Disability-Act Showdown,’ The Wall Street Journal (9 May 2000), p. 1. Quoted in Johnson, Make Them Go Away, p. 1. Brian Bergstein, ‘Jury: Eastwood Didn’t Violate Disabilities Act,’ ABC News (29 September 2000) http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=95576& page=1 (accessed 6 July 2009). Maria Alicia Gaura and Alan Gathright, ‘Eastwood Wins Suit Over ADA: But jury says resort needs improvements,’ San Francisco Chronicle (30 September 2000), p. A15. Bergstein, ‘Jury.’ Gaura and Gathright, ‘Eastwood Wins Suit Over ADA,’ p. A15. Johnson, Make Them Go Away, p. 242. Gaura and Gathright, ‘Eastwood Wins Suit Over ADA,’ p. A15. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

52 53 54 55

56 57

58

59

60 61

62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71 72

Johnson, Make Them Go Away, pp. 2, 24. Johnson, Make Them Go Away, pp. 49–50. Johnson, Make Them Go Away, pp. 151–2, 163, 149, 153, 162. Mickey Z., ‘The Million Dollar Interview: Talking to Mary Johnson about Clint Eastwood, Hunter Thompson and the “Right to Die”,’ CounterPunch (28 February 2005) http://www.counterpunch.org/mickey02282005.html (accessed 6 July 2009). Johnson, Make Them Go Away, p. 3. Mickey Z., ‘“Piss on Pity”: Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar” Snuff Film,’ Dissident Voice (24 January 2005) http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/MickeyZ0124.htm (accessed 6 July 2009). Andrew Gumbel, ‘Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of “Hollyweird”,’ The Independent (23 February 2005) http://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/americas/eastwood-the-republican-pinup-is-new-target-forthe-enemies-of-hollyweird-484446.html (accessed 22 March 2007). Steve Drake, ‘Dangerous Times,’ Ragged Edge Online (11 January 2005) http:// www.raggededgemagazine.com/reviews/drakemillionbaby.html (accessed 22 March 2007). Quoted in Gumbel, ‘Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of “Hollyweird”.’ Quoted in Frank Rich, ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie,’ The New York Times (13 February 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/arts/13rich. html?pagewanted= print&position= (accessed 22 March 2007). Gumbel, ‘Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of “Hollyweird”.’ Michael Medved, ‘My “Million Dollar” Answer,’ The Wall Street Journal (17 February 2005) http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006305 (accessed 22 March 2007). Rich, ‘How Dirty Harry Turned Commie.’ McGilligan, Clint, p. 324. Alison P. Howard, ‘A Fistful of Lawsuits: The Press, the First Amendment, and Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act,’ California Law Review 88:1 (January 2000), pp. 127–179, cited at 141, 171, 128, 130. McGilligan, Clint, pp. 510–511. Howard, ‘Fistful of Lawsuits,’ p. 141. McGilligan, Clint, 511, 512; Howard, ‘Fistful of Lawsuits,’ pp. 141, 143. The tear-out subscription ad declared, ‘There are certain things that Cher won’t tell People and would never tell Us. She tells Forum … So join Cher and FORUM’s hundreds of thousands of other adventurous readers today.’ Howard, ‘Fistful of Lawsuits,’ pp. 142–143, 134, 144. Howard, ‘Fistful of Lawsuits,’ 128. This amounted to an ‘attack on constitutional protections,’ according to Howard’s analysis, because it circumvented ‘the First Amendment and its goal of promoting the free exchange of ideas and information.’ c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

241

73 74

75 76 77

242

McGilligan, Clint, p. 510. Robert E. Kapsis, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Politics of Reputation: How the Actor/Director Achieved Critical Acclaim,’ Society 30: 6 (1 September 1993), pp. 68–71. http:// www.springerlink.com/content/c8531136h546g690/ (accessed 9 July 2009). Kapsis, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Politics of Reputation.’ Kapsis, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Politics of Reputation.’ Kapsis, ‘Clint Eastwood’s Politics of Reputation.’

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

EPILOGUE

‘If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me…’

‘I am,’ I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair Neil Diamond, ‘I Am … I Said’1 If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to say something, they’re gonna have to take what they can get. Clint Eastwood, 20122 In an unforeseen development of 2012, Clint Eastwood made a national media appearance that may well stand as the most memorable political act of his career. Invited to speak his mind at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, the superstar celebrity opted for an impromptu performance in which he addressed an empty chair, making believe that President Obama was in it. He got the idea from ‘I Am … I Said’, a 1971 hit by pop singer Neil Diamond, which he heard on his hotel-room radio before giving his speech. Eastwood later told a journalist that his actions at the podium ‘seemed odd at the time’ even to him. ‘But, you know, I’m an odd person,’ he added. ‘One thing about getting into the senior status of life, like I am, you don’t really care. You just say what you say and then you get away with it.’3 Rambling beyond his allotted time, Eastwood perplexed the audience and severely distressed Stuart Stevens, the senior strategist for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, whose nomination was nominally the convention’s main business. The strategist ‘excused himself, went into another room and vomited’, according to a book about the 2012 campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.4 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

243

Eastwood was meant to be a surprise ‘mystery speaker’, but multiple news organisations leaked the news when the convention band spent the afternoon rehearsing the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Highlights from the talk included: ‘I think attorneys are so busy – you know they’re always taught to argue everything, and always weigh everything, weigh both sides. They’re always devil’s-advocating this and bifurcating this and bifurcating that. You know all that stuff.’ [Eastwood may have forgotten that Romney himself has a Harvard Law School degree.] ‘You thought the war in Afghanistan was okay. You know, I mean, you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to how they did there for ten years.’ [Eastwood may have forgotten that the war in Afghanistan was launched by the Republican administration of President George W. Bush.] ‘What do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. I can’t tell him to do that to himself.’ [Eastwood may have forgotten that many Republicans are ‘family values’ conservatives who do not enjoy jokes that imply the words, ‘Go fuck yourself ’.] ‘I mean, what do you say to people? Do you just, you know, I know, people were wondering – you don’t – handle that okay.’ [Eastwood may have forgotten what he was going to say.] In an analysis of the event, a Huffington Post political editor noted that while Eastwood is ‘consistently a Republican’, he is also ‘pro-gay marriage (“I don’t give a fuck,” he said in a 2011 interview), pro-choice and pro-environment’. His views are therefore ‘almost identical to those formerly held by the man he endorsed, Mitt Romney, who was once pro-choice, pro-environment and pro-gay rights’.5 All the more reason, one might have thought, why Eastwood would not have been an ideal speaker on this occasion even if he had comported himself more correctly. Why, then, was he invited? The reason, Halperin and Heilemann report, is that Romney was ‘starstruck’.6 Of the speech itself, the Huffington Post analyst remarked that the ‘prolific actor and director … appeared to be showing his age’. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign commented, ‘Referring all questions on this to Salvador Dali.’7 What is one to make of this? For me, the answer is straightforward. Eastwood is many things to many people, but however one chooses to read him as a star, an artist, a mogul, a celebrity, a cultural production or all of these, he is today an octogenarian who has paid up his dues and is heading for the ultimate exit with all his libertarian colors flying high. It is midnight in the garden. There won’t be another icon like him – fascinating, infuriating, perhaps a touch crazy and original to his bones – for a long time to come. Notes 1 2

244

Neil Diamond, ‘I Am … I Said,’ The Neil Diamond Lyrics Page http://www.neildiamondhomepage.com/lyricpag.htm#IAmISaid (accessed 9 January 2014). Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Double Down: Game Change 2012 (New York: Penguin, 2013). Quoted in Ted Johnson, ‘New Book Details Clint Eastwood’s Disastrous Speech at 2012 Republican Convention,’ Variety http://variety. th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

3

4 5

6 7

com/2013/film/news/clint-eastwood-republican-convention-speech-doubledown-1200796980/ (accessed 9 January 2014). Eastwood’s interview with Becky Quick was aired on the CNBC program Squawk Box. Quoted in Caitlin McDevitt, ‘Eastwood chair inspired by Neil Diamond,’ Politico (8 February 2013) http://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2013/02/eastwood-chair-inspired-by-neil-diamond-156472.html (accessed 9 January 2014). Johnson, ‘New Book Details Clint Eastwood’s Disastrous Speech at 2012 Republican Convention.’ Luke Johnson, ‘Clint Eastwood Speech: Movie Star Talks To An Empty Chair,’ The Huffington Post (31 August 2012) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/ clint-eastwood-speech_n_1844908.html#slide=1456934 (accessed 9 January 2014). Johnson, ‘New Book Details Clint Eastwood’s Disastrous Speech at 2012 Republican Convention.’ Johnson,‘New Book Details Clint Eastwood’s Disastrous Speech at 2012 Republican Convention.’

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

245

FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR

The Beguiled: The Storyteller (doc., 1971) Director: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Don Siegel (as himself ). Colour. 12 min. Malpaso/Universal. USA. Play Misty for Me (1971) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Jo Heims and Dean Riesner; story by Jo Heims. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Art director: Alexander Golitzen. Film editor: Carl Pingitore. Music: Dee Barton. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Dave), Jessica Walter (Evelyn), Donna Mills (Tobie), John Larch (Sgt. McCallum), Jack Ging (Frank), Irene Hervey (Madge), James McEachin (Al Monte), Clarice Taylor (Birdie), Donald Siegel (Murphy), Duke Everts (Jay Jay), George Fargo (Man), Mervin W. Frates (Locksmith), Tim Frawley (Deputy Sheriff), Otis Kadani (Policeman), Brit Lind (Anjelica), Paul E. Lippman (2nd Man), Jack Kosslyn (Cab Driver), Ginna Patterson (Madalyn), Malcolm Moran (Man in Window). Technicolor. 103 min. Universal/Malpaso. USA. 246

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

High Plains Drifter (1973) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Ernest Tidyman. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Art director: Henry Bumstead. Film editor: Ferris Webster. Music: Dee Barton. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (The Stranger), Verna Bloom (Sarah Belding), Mariana Hill (Callie Travers), Mitchell Ryan (Dave Drake), Jack Ging (Morgan Allen), Stefan Gierasch (Mayor Jason Hobart), Ted Hartley (Lewis Belding), Billy Curtis (Mordecai), Geoffrey Lewis (Stacey Bridges), Scott Walker (Bill Borders), Walter Barnes (Sheriff Sam Shaw), Paul Brinegar (Lutie Naylor), Richard Bull (Asa Goodwin), Robert Donner (Preacher), John Hillerman (Bootmaker), Anthony James (Cole Carlin), William O’Connell (Barber), John Quade (Jake Ross), Dan Vadis (Dan Carlin), Buddy Van Horn (Marshal Jim Duncan), Jane Aull (Townswoman), Reid Cruickshanks (Gunsmith), James Gosa (Tommy Morris), Jack Kosslyn (Saddlemaker), Russ McCubbin (Fred Short), Belle

Mitchell (Mrs. Lake), John Mitchum (Warden), Carl C. Pitti (Teamster), Alex Tinne, Chuck Waters (Stableman). Technicolor. 105 min. Universal/ Malpaso. USA. Breezy (1973) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Jo Heims. Cinematography: Frank Stanley. Art director: Alexander Golitzen. Film editor: Ferris Webster. Music: Michel Legrand. Principal cast: William Holden (Frank Harmon), Kay Lenz (Breezy), Roger C. Carmel (Bob Henderson), Marj Dusay (Betty), Joan Hotchkis (Paula), Jamie Smith Jackson (Marcy), Norman Bartold (Man in Car), Lynn Borden (Overnight date), Shelley Morrison (Nancy), Dennis Olivieri (Bruno), Eugene Peterson (Charlie), Lew Brown (Police Officer), Richard Bull (Doctor), Johnnie Collins III (Norman), Don Diamond (Maitre’d), Scott Holden (Veterinarian), Sandy Kenyon (Real Estate Agent), Jack Kosslyn (Driver), Mary Munday (Waitress), Frances Stevenson (Saleswoman), Buck Young (Paula’s Escort), Priscilla Morrill (Dress Customer), Earle (Sir Love-A-Lot), Clint Eastwood [uncredited] (man in crowd on pier). Technicolor. 106 min. Malpaso/Universal. USA. The Eiger Sanction (1975) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Hal Dresner, Warren B. Murphy, and Rod Whitaker; based on the 1972 novel The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian. Cinematography: Frank Stanley. Art directors: George Webb (USA), Aurelio Crugnola (Swizterland). Film editor: Ferris Webster. Music: John Williams.

Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Jonathan Hemlock), George Kennedy (Ben Bowman), Vonetta McGee (Jemima Brown), Jack Cassidy (Miles Mellough), Heidi Bruhl (Mrs. Montaigne), Thayer David (Deagon), Reiner Schoene (Freytag), Michael Grimm (Meyer), Jean-Pierre Bernard (Montaigne), Brenda Venus (George), Gregory Walcott (Pope), Candice Rialson (art student), Elaine Shore (Miss Cerberus), Dan Howard (Dewayne), Jack Kosslyn (reporter). Technicolor. 123 min. Malpaso/Jennings Lang/Universal. USA. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus; based on the 1975 novel Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: Tambi Larsen. Set decoration: Chuck Pierce. Film editor: Ferris Webster. Music: Jerry Fielding. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Josey Wales), Chief Dan George (Lone Watie), Sondra Locke (Laura Lee), Bill McKinney (Terrill), John Vernon (Fletcher), Paul Trueman (Grandma Sarah), Sam Bottoms (Jamie), Geraldine Keams (Little Moonlight), Woodrow Parfrey (carpetbagger), Joyce Jameson (Rose), Sheb Wooley (Travis Cobb), Royal Dano (Ten Spot), Matt Clarke (Kelly), John Verros (Chato), Will Sampson (Ten Bears), John Mitchum (Al). Colour. 135 min. Warner Bros./ Malpaso. USA. The Gauntlet (1977) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Robert Daley. Screenplay: Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack. Cinematography: Rexford Metz. Art c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

247

director: Allen E. Smith. Film editors: Joel Cox, Ferris Webster. Music: Jerry Fielding. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Detective Ben Shockley), Sondra Locke (Gus Mally), Pat Hingle (Maynard Josephson), William Prince (Commissioner Blakelock), Bill McKinney (Constable), Michael Cavanaugh (Feyderspiel). Colour. 109 min. Warner Bros./ Malpaso. USA. Bronco Billy (1980) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Neal Dobrofsky, Dennis E. Hackin. Screenplay: Dennis Hackin. Cinematography: David Worth. Art director: Gene Lourie. Film editors: Joel Cox, Ferris Webster. Costume design: Glenn Wright. Music: Snuff Garrett. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Bronco Billy McCoy), Sondra Locke (Antoinette Lily), Geoffrey Lewis (John Arlington), Scatman Crothers (Doc Lynch), Bill McKinney (Lefty LeBow), Sam Bottoms (Leonard James), Dan Vadis (Chief Big Eagle), Sierra Pecheur (Lorraine Running Water), Walter Barnes (Sheriff Dix), Woodrow Parfrey (Dr. Canterbury), Beverlee McKinsey (Irene Lily), Douglas McGrath (Lieutenant Wiecker), William Prince (Edgar Lipton), Hank Worden (station mechanic). Colour. 116 min. Warner Bros./Second Street Films. USA. Firefox (1982) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Alex Lasker and Wendell Wellman; based on the 1977 novel Firefox by Craig Thomas. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Art directors: Elayne Ceder, John Graysmark, Beala Neel. Film editors: Ron Spang, Ferris Webster. 248

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Music: Maurice Jarre. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Mitchell Gant), Freddie Jones (Kenneth Aubrey), David Huffman (Captain Buckholz), Warren Clarke (Pavel Upenskoy), Ronald Lacey (Semelovsky), Kenneth Colley (Colonel Kontarsky), Klaus Lowitsch (General Vladimirov), Nigel Hawthorne (Pyotr Baranovich), Stefan Schnabel (Leonid Brezhnev), Thomas Hill (General Brown), Clive Merrison (Major Lanyev), Kai Wulff (Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Voskov), Dimitra Arliss (Natalia Baranovich), Austin Willis (Walters), Michael Currie (Captain Seerbacker). Colour. 136 min. Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA. Honkytonk Man (1982) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Clancy Carlile; based on his 1980 novel Honkytonk Man. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: Edward C. Carfagno. Film editors: Joel Cox, Michael Kelly, Ferris Webster. Music: Steve Dorff. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Red Stovall), Kyle Eastwood (Whit), John McIntire (Grandpa), Alexa Kenin (Marlene), Verna Bloom (Emmy), Matt Clark (Virgil), Barry Corbin (Arnspriger), Jerry Hardin (Snuffy), Macon McCalman (Dr. Hines), Joe Regalbuto (Henry Axle), Gary Grubbs (Jim Bob), Rebecca Clemons (Belle), Johnny Gimble (Bob Wills), Marty Robbins (Smoky), Porter Wagoner (Dusty). Technicolor. 122 min. Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA. Sudden Impact (1983) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Joseph C Stinson; story by Earl E. Smith,

Charles B. Pierce; based on material by Harry Julian Fink and R.M. Fink. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: Edward Carfagno. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lalo Schifrin. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Inspector Harry Callahan), Sondra Locke (Jennifer Spencer), Pat Hingle (Chief Jannings), Bradford Dillman (Captain Briggs), Paul Drake (Mick), Audrie J. Neenan (Ray Parkins), Jack Thibeau (Kruger), Michael Currie (Lieutenant Donnelly), Albert Popwell (Horace King), Mark Keyloun (Officer Bennett), Kevyn Major Howard (Hawkins), Bette Ford (Leah), Nancy Parsons (Mrs. Kruger), Wendell Wellman (Tyrone). Colour. 117 min. Warner Bros./Malpaso. USA. Pale Rider (1985) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: Edward Carfagno. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Preacher), Michael Moriarty (Hull Barret), Carrie Snodgress (Sarah Wheeler), Christopher Penn (John LaHood), Richard Dysart (Coy LaHood), Sydney Penny (Megan Wheeler), Richard Kiel (Club), Doug McGrath (Spider Conway), John Russell (Stockburn), Charles Hallahan (McGill), Marvin J. McIntyre (Jagou), Fran Ryan (Ma Blankenship), Richard Hamilton (Jed Blankenship), Graham Paul (Ev Gossage), Chuck Lafont (Eddie Conway). Technicolor. 115 min. Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA.

Vanessa in the Garden (1985) Season 1, Episode 12 (29 December) of Amazing Stories (Series, 1985–1987) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: David E. Vogel. Writer: Steven Spielberg. Cinematography: Robert Stevens. Production design: Bob Keene. Rick Carter. Art director: Lynda Paradise. Film editor: Joe Ann Fogle. Music: Leonard Niehaus. Principal cast: Harvey Keitel (Byron Sullivan), Sondra Locke (Vanessa Sullivan), Beau Bridges (Teddy Shearing), Margaret Howell (Eve Shearing). Colour. 25 min. Amblin Enterinment/Universal TV/NBC. USA. All-Star Party for Clint Eastwood (Special, 1986) (30 November 1986) Director: Dick McDonough. Producers: M.J. Frankovich, Paul E. Keyes. Writer: Paul W. Keyes. Music: Nick Perito. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, Charles Bronson, Tyne Daly, Sammy Davis Jr., Roberta Flack,, Cary Grant, Hal Holbrook, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, Marsha Mason, Mort Sahl, Don Siegel, James Stewart (all appear as themselves). Music: ‘How Much I Care’ written by Clint Eastwood and Sammy Cahn; performed by Jill Hollier. Colour. 47 min. Paul W. Keyes Productions. USA. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: James Carabatsos. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Edward Carfagno. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway), Marsha Mason (Aggie), Everett McGill (Major Malcolm A. c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

249

Powers), Moses Gunn (Staff Sergeant Luke Webster), Eilenn Heckart (Little Mary Jackson), Bo Svenson (Roy Jennings), Boyd Gaines (Lieutenant M.R. Ring), Mario Van Peebles (Corporal Stitch Jones), Arlen Dean Snyder (Sergeant Major Choozoo), Vincent Irizarry (Lance Corporal Fragetti), Ramon Franco (Lance Corporal Aponte), Tom Villard (Profile), Mike Gomez (Corporal Quinones), Rodney Hill (Corporal Collins), Peter Koch (Sergeant Swede Johanson), Richard Venture (Colonel Meyers), Peter Jason (Major Devin), Begoña Plaza (Mrs. Aponte), John Eames (Judge Zane), John Hostetter (Reese), Holly Shelton-Foy (Sarita Dwayne). Technicolor/B&W. 130 min. Jay Weston Productions/Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA. Bird (1988) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Joel Oliansky. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Edward C. Carfagno. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Forest Whitaker (Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker), Diane Venora (Chan Parker), Michael Zelniker (Red Rodney), Samuel E. Wright (Dizzy Gillespie), Keith David (Buster Franklin), Michael McGuire (Brewster), James Handy (Esteves), Damon Whitaker (Young Charlie Parker), Morgan Nagler (Kim), Arlen Dean Snyder (Dr. Heath), Sam Robards (Moscowitz), Bill Cobbs (Dr. Caulfield), Diane Salinger (Baroness Nica). Technicolor. 161 min. Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA.

250

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

White Hunter Black Heart (1990) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Peter Viertel, James Bridges, and Burt Kennedy; based on the 1953 novel White Hunter Black Heart by Peter Viertel. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Art director: Tony Reading. Production design: John Graysmark. Costume design: John Mollo. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (John Wilson), Jeff Fahey (Pete Verrill), Charlotte Cornwell (Miss Wilding), Norman Lumsden (George), George Dzundza (Paul Landers), Alun Armstrong ((Ralph Lockhart), Timothy Spall (Hodkins), Boy Mathias Chuma (Kivu), Christopher Fairback (Tom Harrison), Clive Mantle (Harry), Catherine Nielson (Irene Saunders), Marisa Berenson (Kay Gibson), Richard Vanstone (Phil Duncan). Technicolor. 112 min. Malpaso/Rastar/Warner Bros. USA. The Rookie (1990) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Howard G. Kazanjian, Steven Siebert, David Valdes. Screenplay: Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Art director: Ed Verreaux. Production design: Judy Cammer. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Nick Pulovski), Charlie Sheen (David Ackerman), Raul Julia (Strom), Sonia Braga (Liesl), Tom Skerritt (Eugene Ackerman), Lara Flynn Boyle (Sarah), Pepe Serna ( dLieutenant Raymond Garcia), Marco Rodriguez (Loco Martinez), Pete Randall (Cruz), Donna Mitchell (Laura Ackerman), Xander Berkeley (Ken Blackwell), Tony Plana (Morales), David Sherrill (Max), Hal

Williams (Powell), Technicolor. 120 min. Warner Bros./Malpaso/KazanjianSiebert Productions/Lighthouse Entertainment. USA. Unforgiven (1992) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: David Webb Peoples. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Art directors: Adrian Gorton, Rick Roberts. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Bill Munny), Gene Hackman (Little Bill Daggett), Morgan Freeman (Ned Logan), Richard Harris (English Bob), Jaimz Woolvett (the Schofield Kid), Saul Rubinek (W.W. Beauchamp), Frances Fisher (Strawberry Alice), Anna Thomson (Delilah Fitzgerald), David Mucci (Quick Mike), Rob Campbell (Davey Bunting), Anthony James (Skinny Dubois), Tara Dawn Frederick (Little Sue), Beverley Elliott (Silky), Liisa Repo-Martell (Faith), Josie Smith (Crow Creek Kate). Technicolor. 131 min. Warner Bros./ Malpaso. USA. A Perfect World (1993) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Mark Johnson, David Valdes. Screenplay: John Lee Hancock. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Art director: Jack G. Taylor Jr. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Film editors: Joel Cox, Ron Spang. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Kevin Costner (Butch Haynes), Clint Eastwood (Red Garnett), Laura Dern (Sally Gerber), T.J. Lowther (Phillip Perry), Keith Szarabajka (Terry Pugh), Leo Burmester (Tom Adler), Paul Hewitt (Dick Suttle), Bradley Whitford (Bobby Lee), Ray

McKinnon (Bradley), Jennifer Griffin (Gladys Perry), Leslie Flowers (Naomi Perry), Belinda Powers (Ruth Perry), Darryl Cox (Mr. Hughes). Technicolor. 138 min. Warner Bros. Pictures/ Malpaso. USA. The Bridges of Madison County (1995) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood and Kathleen Kennedy. Screenplay: Richard LaGravenese; based on the 1992 novel The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Jeannine Oppewall. Art director: William Arnold. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Robert Kincaid), Meryl Streep (Francesca Johnson), Annie Corley (Carolyn), Victor Slezak (Michael), Jim Haynie (Richard), Phyllis Lyons (Betty), Debra Monk (Madge), Sarah Kathryn Schmitt (Young Carolyn), Christopher Kroon (Young Michael), Richard Lage (Lawyer), Michelle Benes (Lucy Redfield). Technicolor. 134 min. Amblin/Malpaso Company/Warner Bros. USA. 77 Sunset Strip (Pilot, 1995) (Never Broadcast) Creator: Roy Huggins. Executive producer: Clint Eastwood. Writer: Roy Huggins. Principal cast: Maria Bello, Jim Cavaziel, Timothy Olyphant, Vince Vaughn. Colour. 25 min. WB Television. USA. Absolute Power (1997) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Karen Spiegel, Screenplay: William Goldman; based on the1996 novel Absolute Power by David Baldacci. Cinematography: Jack c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

251

N. Green. Production designer: Henry Bumstead. Art director: Jack Taylor. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Luther Whitney), Gene Hackman (President Richmond), Ed Harris (Seth Frank), Laura Linney (Kate Whitney), Judy Davis (Gloria Russell), Scott Glenn (Bill Burton), Dennis Haysbert (Tim Collin), E.G. Marshall (Walter Sullivan), Melora Hardin (Christy Sullivan), Ken Welsh (Sandy Lord), Penny Johnson (Laura Simon), Richard Jenkins (Michael McCarty), Mark Margolis (Red), Elaine Kagan (Valerie), Alison Eastwood (Art Student), Yau-Gene Chan (Waiter), George Orrison (Airport Bartender), Charles McDaniel (Medical Examiner), John Lyle Campbell (Repairman), Kimber Eastwood (White House Tour Guide), Eric Dahlquist, Jr. (Oval Office Agent), Jack Stewart Taylor (Watergate Doorman), Joy Ehrlich (Reporter), Robert Harvey (Cop). Technicolor. 121 min. Castle Rock Entertainment/ Malpaso. USA. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Arnold Stiefel. Screenplay: John Lee Hancock; based on the 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Arts directors: Jack G. Taylor, James J. Murakami. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Kevin Spacey (Jim Williams), John Cusack (John Kelso), Jack Thompson (Sonny Seiler), Irma P. Hall (Minerva), Jude Law (Billy Hanson), Alison Eastwood (Mandy Nicholls), Paul 252

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Hipp (Joe Odom), the Lady Chablis (Chablis Deveau), Geoffrey Lewis (Luther Driggers), Dorothy Loudon (Serena Dawes), Anne Haney (Margaret Williams), Kim Hunter (Betty Harty), Richard Herd (Henry Skerridge), Leon Rippy (Detective Boone), Bob Gunton (Finley Largent), Michael O’Hagan (Geza Von Habsburg), Tim Black (Jeff Braswell), Muriel Moore (Mrs. Baxter), Sonny Seiler (Judge White), Patrika Darbo (Sara Warren), Tyrone Lee Weaver (Ellis), Shannon Eubanks (Mrs. Hamilton), Joann Pflug (Cynthia Vaughn), James Moody (Mr. Glover), Michael Rosenbaum (George Tucker), Dan Biggers (Harry Cram), Georgia Allen (Lucille Wright), Michael ‘Kevin’ Harry (Phillip), Margaret R. Davis (Ruth). Technicolor. 155 min. Malpaso/ Silver Pictures/Warner Bros. USA. True Crime (1999) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Richard D. Zanuck & Lili Fini Zanuck. Screenplay: Larry Gross and Paul Brickman and Stephen Schiff; based on the1995 novel True Crime by Andrew Klavan. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Art director: Jack G. Taylor, Jr. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Steve Everett), Isaiah Washington (Frank Beechum), Denis Leary (Bob Findley), Lisa Gay Hamilton (Bonnie Beechum), Diane Venora (Barbara Everett), Bernard Hill (Luther Plunkitt), James Woods (Alan Mann), Michael McKean (Reverend Shillerman), Michael Jeter (Dale Porterhouse), Mary McCormack (Michelle Ziegler), Hattie Winston (Mrs. Russel), Penny Bae Bridges (Gail

Beechum), Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (Kate Everett), John Finn (Reedy), Laila Robins (Patricia Findley), Sydney Poitier (Jane March), Erik King (Pussy Man), Graham Beckel (Arnold McCardle), Frances Fisher (Cecilia Nussbaum), Marissa Ribisi (Amy Wilson), Christine Ebersole (Bridget Rossiter), Anthony Zerbe (Henry Lowenstein), Nancy Giles (Leesha Mitchell), Tom McGowan (Tom Donaldson), William Windom (Neil), Don West (Dr. Roger Waters), Dina Eastwood (Wilma Francis), Nicolas Bearde (Reuben Skycock), Frances Lee McCain (Mrs. Lowenstein), Rev. Cecil Williams (Reverend Williams), Casey Lee (Warren Russel), Jack Kehler (Mr. Ziegler), Colman Domingo (Wally Cartwright), Linda Hoy (Counter Woman), Danny Kovacs (Atkins), Kelvin Han Yee (Zachary Platt), George Maguire (Fredrick Robertson), Cathy Fithian (Nancy Larson), John B. Scott (Colonel Drummond), Edward Silva (Colonel Hernandez), Jordan Sax (Colonel Badger). Technicolor. 127 min. Zanuck Company/Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA. Space Cowboys (2000) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Andrew Lazar. Screenplay: Ken Kaufman, Howard Klausner. Cinematography: Jack N. Green. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Art director: Jack G. Taylor Jr. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Frank Corvin), Tommy Lee Jones (Hawk Hawkins), Donald Sutherland (Jerry O’Neill), James Garner (Tank Sullivan), James Cromwell (Bob Gerson), Marcia Gay Harden (Sara Holland), William Devane (Eugene

Davis), Loren Dean (Ethan Glance), Courtney B. Vance (Roger Hines), Barbara Babcock (Barbara Corvin), Rade Serbedzija (General Vostov), Blair Brown (Dr. Anne Caruthers), Jary Leno (himself ), Nils Allen Stewart (Tiny). Technicolor. 130 min. Clipsal Films/ Mad Chance/Malpaso/Village Roadshow Pictures/Warner Bros.) USA/Australia. Blood Work (2002) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producer: Clint Eastwood. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, based on the 1998 novel Blood Work by Michael Connelly. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Art director: Jack G. Taylor, Jr. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Lennie Niehaus. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Terry McCaleb), Jeff Daniels (Buddy Noone), Anjelica Huston (Dr. Bonnie Fox), Wanda De Jesús (Graciella Rivers), Tina Lifford (Jaye Winston), Paul Rodriguez (Detective Ronaldo Arrango), Dylan Walsh (Detective John Waller), Mason Lucero (Raymond), Gerry Becker (Mr. Toliver), Rick Hoffman (James Lockridge), Alix Koromzay (Mrs. Cordell), Igor Jijikine (Bolotov), Dina Eastwood (Reporter #1), Beverly Leech (Reporter #2), June Kyoko Lu (Mrs. Kang), Chao-Li Chi (Mr. Kang), Mark Thomason (James Cordell), Maria Quiban (Gloria Torres). Technicolor. 110 min. Warner Bros./Malpaso. USA. Piano Blues (doc., 2003) Episode 7 (4 October) of The Blues (Series, 2003) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Bruce Ricker. Writer: Peter Guralnick. Cinematography: Vic Losick. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

253

Roach. Music: Principal cast: Clint Eastwood, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Dr. John, Jay McShann, Pinetop Perkins (all appear as themselves). Colour. 85 min. BBC/Cappa Productions/PBS. Germany/UK. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Paul Haggis, Tom Rosenberg, Albert S. Ruddy. Screenplay: Paul Haggis; based on the stories ‘Frozen Water’ and ‘Million $$$ Baby’ from the 2001 collection Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner by F.X. Toole. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Henry Bumstead. Art director: Jack G. Taylor Jr. Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Frankie Dunn), Hilary Swank (Maggie Fitzgerald), Morgan Freeman, Eddie ‘Scrap-Iron’ Dupris, Jay Baruchel (‘Danger’ Barch), Mike Colter (‘Big Willie’ Little), Lucia Rijker (Billie ‘The Blue Bear’), Brian O’Byrne (Father Horvak), Anthony Mackie (Shawrelle Berry), Margo Martindale (Earline Fitzgerald), Riki Lindhome (Mardell Fitzgerald), Michael Peña (Omar), Bruce MacVittie (Mickey Mack), Marcus Chait (J.D. Fitzgerald). Colour. 132 min. Warner Bros./Lakeshore Entertainment/Malpaso/Ruddy-Morgan Productions. USA. Flags of Our Fathers (2006) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis; based on the 2000 book Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Henry Bumstead. 254

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Film editor: Joel Cox. Music: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Ryan Phillippe (John ‘Doc’ Bradley), Jesse Bradford (Rene Gagnon), Adam Beach (Ira Hayes), John Benjamin Hickey (Keyes Beech), John Slattery (Bud Gerber), Barry Pepper (Mike Strank), Jamie Bell (Ralph ‘Iggy’ Ignatowski), Paul Walker (Hank Hansen), Robert Patrick (Colonel Chandler Johnson), Neal McDonough (Captain Severance), Melanie Lynskey (Pauline Harnois), Tom McCarthy (James Bradley), Chris Bauer (Commandant Vandegrift), Judith Ivey (Belle Block), Myra Turley (Madeline Evelley), Joseph Franklin Sousley), Benjamin Walker (Harlon Block), Alessandro Mastrobuono (Lindberg), Scott Reeves (Lundsford), Stark Sands (Gust), George Grizzard (John Bradley), Harve Presnell (Dave Severance), George Hearn (Walter Gust), Len Cariou (Mr. Beech), Christopher Curry (Ed Block), Connie Ray (Mrs. Sousley), Ann Dowd (Mrs. Strank), Mary Beth Peil (Mrs. Bradley), David Patrick Kelly (President Truman), Jon Polito (borough president), Ned Eisenberg (Joe Rosenthal), Gordon Clapp (General ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith), Michael Cumpsty (Secretary Forrestal), Kirk B.R. Woller (Bill Genaust), Tom Verica (Lieutenant Pennel), Jason GrayStanford (Lieutenant Schrier), Matt Huffman (Lieutenant Bell), David Hornsby (Louis Lowery), Brian Kimmet (Sergeant Boots Thomas), Tom Mason (John Tennack), Oliver Davis (Young James Bradley), John Nielsen (Senator Boyd), Jon Kellam (Senator Haddigan), Ron Fassler (Senator Robson), Yukari Black (Tokyo Rose). Technicolor. 132 min. DreamWorks/Warner Bros./ Malpaso/Amblin Entertainment. USA.

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Paul Haggis, Steven Spielberg. Screenplay: Iris Yamashita; story by Iris Yamashita, Paul Haggis; based on Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi, edited by Tsuyoko Yoshido. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Henry Bumstead, James J. Murikami. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens. Principal cast: Ken Watanabe (General Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya (Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Baron Nishi), Ryo Kase (Shimizu), Shidou Nakamura (Lieutenant Ito), Hiroshi Watanabe (Lieutenant Fujita), Takumi Bando (Captain Tanida), Yuki Matsuzaki (Nozaki), Takashi Yamaguchi (Kashiwara), Eigiro (Ozaki (Lieutenant Okubo), Nae (Hanako), Nobumasa Sakagami), Lucas Elliot (Sam), Sonny Seiichi Saito (Endo), Steve Santa Sekiyoshi (Kanda). Colour. 141 min. DreamWorks/Warner Bros./ Malpaso/ Amblin Entertainment. USA. Changeling (2008) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: J. Michael Straczynski. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: James J. Murakami. Art director: Patrick M. Sullivan. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Angelina Jolie (Christine Collins), Gattlin Griffith (Walter Collins), Michelle Gunn (Sandy), Michael Kelly (Detective Lester Ybarra), Frank Wood (Ben Harris), John Malkovich (The Rev. Gustav Briegleb), Colm Feore (Chief

James E. Davis), Devon Conti (Arthur Hutchins), Jeffrey Donovan (Captain J.J. Jones), Peter Gerety (Dr. Earl W. Tarr), John Harrington Bland (Dr. John Montgomery), Pamela Dunlap (Mrs. Fox), Roger Hewlett ( Officer Morelli), Jason Butler Harner (Gordon Northcott), Eddie Alderson (Sanford Cark), Amy Ryan (Carol Dexter), Denis O’Hare (Dr. Jonathan Steele), Kelly Lynn Warren (Rachel Clark), Colby French (Bob Clark), Geoff Pierson (S.S. Hahn), Reed Birney (Mayor Cryer), Peter Breitmayer (Chairman Thorpe), Lily Knight (Leanne Clay), Jeffrey Hutchinson (Mr. Clay), Mary Stein (Janet Hutchins), Asher Axe (David Clay). Colour. 141 min. Imagine Entertainment/Malpaso/Relativity Media. USA. Gran Torino (2008) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Bill Gerber, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: Nick Schenk; story by Dave Johannson, Nick Schenk. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: James J. Murakami. Art director: John Warnke. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens. Principal cast: Clint Eastwood (Walt Kowalski), Christopher Carley (Father Janovich), Bee Vang (Thao), Ahney Her (Sue), Brian Haley, (Mitch Kowalski), Geraldine Hughes (Karen Kowalski), Dreama Walker (Ashley Kowalski), Brian Howe (Steve Kowalski), John Carroll Lynch (Martin), Wiliam Hill (Tim Kennedy), Brooke Chia Thao (Vu), Chee Thao (Grandma), Choua Kue (Youa), Scott Reeves (Trey), Xia Soua Chang (Kor Khue). Colour. 116 min. Matten Productions/Double Nickel Entertainment/Gerber Pictures/ c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

255

Malpaso/Village Roadshow Pictures/WV Films IV/Warner Bros. USA/Germany. Invictus (2009) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Lori McCreary, Mace Neufeld. Screenplay: Anthony Peckham; based on the 2008 book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Phill Zagajewski, James J. Murakami. Art directors: Tom Hannam, Jonathan Hely-Hutchinson. Film editor: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens. Principal cast: Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela), Matt Damon (Francois Pienaar), Tony Kgoroge (Jason Tshabalala), Patrick Mofokeng (Linga Moonsamy), Matt Stern (Hendrick Booyens), Julian Lewis Jones (Etienne Feyder), Adjoa Andoh (Brenda Mazibuko), Marguerite Wheatley (Nerine), Leleti Khumalo (Mary), Patrick Lyster (Mr. Pienaar), Penny Downie (Mrs. Pienaar), Sibongile Nojila (Eunice), Bonnie Henna (Zindzi). Colour/B&W. 134 min. Warner Bros./ Spyglass Entertainment/Revelations Entertainment-Man Company/Malpaso/ Liberty Pictures. USA. Hereafter (2010) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: Peter Morgan. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: James J. Murakami. Art director: Patrick Sullivan. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Cécile de France (Marie Lelay), Thierry Neuvic (Didier), Jay Mohr (Billy), 256

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Richard Kind (Christos), Matt Damon (George Lonegan), Frankie McLaren (Marcus/Jason), George McLaren (Marcus/Jason), Lyndsey Marshal (Jackie), Myléne Jampanoï (Jasmine), Stephane Freiss (Guillaume Belcher), Joe Bellan (Tony), Bryce Dallas Howard (Melanie), Jenifer Lewis (Candace), Sean Bickley (Dr. Meredith), Marthe Keller (Dr. Rousseau), Paul Antony-Barber (Nigel), Selina Cadell (Mrs. Joyce), Jack Bence (Ricky), Derek Jacobi (himself ). Colour. 129 min. Warner Bros/Malpaso/ Kennedy-Marshall Productions/Amblin Entertainment. USA. J. Edgar (2011) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: James J. Murakami. Art directors: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr., Greg Berry. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Music: Clint Eastwood. Principal cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar Hoover), Josh Hamilton (Robert Irwin), Geoff Pierson (Mitchell Palmer), Gunner Wright (Dwight D. Eisenhower), David A. Cooper (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Ed Westwick (Smith), Naomi Watts (Helen Gandy), Judi Dench (Annie Hoover), Jack Axelrod (Caminetti), Jessica Hecht (Emma Goldman), Josh Stamberg (Stokes), Christian Clemenson (Schell), Armie Hammer (Clyde Tolson), Michael Rady (Jones), Ken Howatrd (Harlan Fiske Stone), Scot Carlisle (Williams), Geoff Stults (Raymond Caffrey), Allen Nabors (Appel), Ryan McPartlin (Lawrence Richey), William Bebow (Walters), Jeffrey Donovan (Robert F. Kennedy), Miles Fisher (Garrison), Dermot Mulroney

(Colonel Schwarzkopf ), Josh Lucas (Charles Lindbergh), Zach Grenier (John Condon), Denis O’Hare (Albert Osborne), Damon Herriman (Bruno Hauptmann), Kahil Dotay (Elmer Irey), Lea Coco (Sisk), Emily Alyn Lind (Shirley Temple), Jamie LaBarber (Ginger Rogers), Adam Driver (Walter Lyle), Christopher Shyer (Richard M. Nixon), Larkin Campbell (H.R. Haldeman). Colour. 137 min. Imagine Entertainment./Malpaso/Wintergreen Productions. USA. Jersey Boys (2014) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Tim Headington, Graham King, Robert Lorenz. Screenplay: Nick Elice, John Logan; based on the 2005 stage musical with music by Bob Gaudio, lyrics by Bob Crewe, and book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Art director: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr. Film editor: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Principal cast: Christopher Walken (Angelo ‘Gyp’ DeCarlo), Freya Tingley (Francine Valli), Kathrine Narducci (Mary Rinaldi), James Madio (Stosh), Vincent Piazza (Tommy Devito), Mike Doyle (Bob Crewe), Steve Schirripa (Vito), Michael Patrick McGill (Officer Mike), Jeremy Luke

(Donnie), Steve Monroe (Barry Belson), Erica Piccininni (Lorraine), John Lloyd Young (Frank Valli), Erich Bergen (Bob Gaudio), Joey Russo (Joey Pesci), John Griffin (Billy Dixon). Colour. GK Films/ Warner Bros. USA. American Sniper (2015) Director: Clint Eastwood. Producers: Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Bradley Cooper, Andrew Lazar, Peter Morgan. Screenplay: Jason Dean Hall; based on American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Charisse Cardenas, James J. Murakami. Art directors: Harry E. Otto, Dean Wolcott. Film editors: Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach. Principal cast: Bradley Cooper (Chris Kyle), Sienna Miller (Taya Renae Kyle), Luke Grimes (Marc Lee), Kyle Gallner (Winston), Jake McDorman (Ryan Job), Brian Hallisay (Captain Gillespie), Sammy Sheik (Mustafa), Max Charles (Colton Kyle), Erik Aude (Thompson), Marnette Patterson (Sarah), Reynaldo Gallegos (Tony), Keir O’Donnell (Jeff Kyle). 22 & Indiana Pictures/Mad Chance Productions/Malpaso/Warner Bros. USA.

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

257

INDEX

ABC 29, 32, 66, 216n.126, 240n.46 Absolute Power 3, 14, 60, 138n.134, 166, 179–82, 185, 211n.66, 220 Academy Award 2, 17, 50n.14, 56, 64–5, 69, 79, 108, 110, 167, 171–2, 193, 189–90, 214n.105, 223–4, 232 acting 2, 10, 14–5, 20, 25–6, 28, 31, 36–7, 44, 50n.14, 61, 72, 87–8, 91, 100, 108–9, 111, 125, 127, 134n.66, 142, 145, 166, 171–2, 177–8, 185, 189, 192, 204, 206–7, 211n.66, 222, 224, 232, 237 ADA See Americans with Disabilities Act Adams, Amy 207 African-American 17, 77, 98, 117, 119, 132n.34, 170, 196–7 Alland, William 26, 49n.7 Alpert, Robert 121 Ambush at Cimarron Pass 28–9 American Sniper 206 Americans with Disabilities Act 230–2 anarchism 41, 221–3, 238n.13, 239n.17

258

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Any Which Way You Can 60, 121–2, 127, 209n.15, 234 archetype 10, 103, 150, Arnold, Jack 26, 30, 50–51n.15, 85n.51 Asian-American 155, 200 assisted suicide See euthanasia Attanasio, Paul 14 Aubrey, James 73–4 auteur 3, 5–6n.7, 7–12, 19–20n.7, 71, 87, 93, 161 Avalon, Frankie 68 Away All Boats 27 Bacon, Kevin 187, 189 Baehr, Ted 16–17, 233 BAFTA Awards 171 Bakhtin, Mikhail 106–7 Baldacci, David 179–80 Ballads of Madison County, The (CD) 178 Banks, Christina 17, 22n.38 Barra, Allen 40 Barton, Dee 89 Beard, William 8–11, 18, 145–7 Beckerman, Sidney 99

Beguiled, The 11, 60, 74–5, 79–82, 85–86n.67, 87, 91, 115, 122 Berardinelli, James 175 Berendt, John 180–2 Berenson, Marisa 164 Bergesen, Albert J. 146, 148 Berlant, Lauren 177 Berlin Film Festival 65 Bingham, Dennis 17, 103–5, 134n.67, 135n.73 biopic 3–4, 24, 151, 155, 164, 204, 206–7 Bird 1, 3–5, 8, 55n.71, 140, 151–5, 161, 165, 171, 178, 196, 199, 205, 207 Biskind, Peter 132n.44 Black, Dustin Lance 204 Blackie-Goodine, Janice 171 Black Panther Party 66 Bliss, Michael 17, 22n.38 Blob, The 32 Blood Work 2, 3, 5n.5, 186–7, 198 Blues Brothers, The 30 B movies 30 Boetticher, Budd 68, 70–2, 224 Bowman, James 27 Boyd, Jerry See Toole, F.X. Bradley, James 195 Braga, Sonia 165 Breezy 3, 60, 108–10, 112 Brickman, Paul 182 Bridges, James 40, 162 Bridges, Jeff 108, 110 Bridges of Madison County Memory Book, The 178 Bridges of Madison County, The 1, 3, 5n.5, 10, 11, 166, 175–80, 195, 211n.64 Broadway 62–3, 67, 69, 79, 121, 178, 205–6, 211n.64, 218n.153 Bronco Billy 3, 8, 97, 123–4, 127, 138n.133, 156–157n.7 Broyles Jr., William 195 Bujold, Geneviève 129, 209–210n.14

Bumstead, Henry 171 bureaucracy 224–5, 227–8 Burton, Richard 60–2, 68–9 Buscombe, Edward 13 Bush, George W. 220, 225, 244 Butler, David 32 Callahan, Harry See Dirty Harry Canby, Vincent 16, 68, 81, 121, 128, 150 Cannes International Film Festival 17, 237 capitalism 107, 146, 223, 229 capital punishment 47, 55n.68, 168–9, 183–4 Carabatsos, James 149 Carlile, Clancy 125 Carlson, Michael 14 Carmel-by-the-Sea 219, 227 carnival 106–7, 121 Carter, Dan T. 117–18 Carter, Forrest (Asa Earl ‘Ace’ Carter) 112, 114, 116–19, 135–136n.112, 136–137n.112 Castelluccio, Frankie See Valli, Frankie Catena, Víctor Andrés 35, 39, 52–53n.33 Cattle Empire 29 CBS 28–9, 31–2, 51n.21, 52n.24, 26, 73, 134n.53 Chablis, Lady 181 Changeling 4, 169, 184, 189, 199, 200, 223 charisma 14, 48, 79, 80, 107, 202, 236 Chayefsky, Paddy 63–5, 67 Chernus, Sonia 111–12, 114, 118, 167 Christian Film and Television Commission 16, 233 Christian Science Monitor, The 151, 194 Cieply, Michael 131n.26 Cimino, Michael 108–10, 156–157n.7, 167

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

259

cinematography 15, 72, 103, 115, 171, 175, 185, 222–3 City Heat 189, 128–30 Cocks, Jay 13, 91, 93 Cold War 100, 109, 124, 184–5 Colombo, Arrigo (Harry) 42 Columbia Pictures 45 Columbine 19 comedy 24, 27, 32, 37, 40, 52n.24, 61, 65, 70, 72–3, 97, 99, 121, 129, 139n.145, 148, 156, 181, 234 commedia dell’arte 39, 53n.43 communitarianism 225 community 8, 17, 26–7, 40, 61, 101, 104, 106–7, 111, 141, 145–7, 187, 193, 195, 202, 221, 229 Connelly, Michael 186 conservative 17, 48, 95, 142–3, 150, 166, 186, 207, 223–7, 231, 233, 244 Considine, Shaun 67 Coogan’s Bluff 55n.71, 56–60, 80 Copelan, Jodie 28 Corman, Roger 42, 90 counterculture 98, 137n.115 Cox, Joel 171, 175, 190, 205, 207 Creature from the Black Lagoon 26 Cremean, David 221–3, 238n.13,15, 239n.17 Crist, Judith 14–5, 81, 109 Curtis, Billy 102 Cusack, John 181–2 Daley, Robert 89, 113, 116–8 Daly, Tyne 120 Damon, Matt 202–4 Darby’s Rangers 33 Dargis, Manohla 199, 201 Dead Pool, The 60, 138n.143, 155–6 death penalty See capital punishment Death Valley Days 28 De Laurentiis, Dino 43–4, 54n.57 Deleuze, Gilles 147 Democrat 70, 142, 219, 232–33 Denby, David 14, 129, 193, 205 260

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Dern, Laura 174 De Sica, Vittorio 37, 44, 54n.57 Detroit 200–1 DiCaprio, Leonardo 204–5 Dillman, Bradford 120 Directors Guild of America 113, 171 Dirty Harry 12–13, 16–17, 87, 92–98, 108–10, 128, 131n.26, 145, 150, 188, 205, 224, 226 Dirty Harry 8–10, 48, 104, 120–1, 124, 127–8, 165, 186, 193, 225, 227, 230, 236 disability 192, 229–33 Docherty, Cameron 235 Dollars trilogy 43, 97, 100, 224 Double Indemnity 24 Drake, Steve 232 Duvall, Robert 99 Eastwood, Alison 181 Eastwood, Clinton 24 Eastwood, Kyle 62, 126 Eastwood, Maggie Johnson 27 Eastwood, Ruth Runner 24 Ebert, Roger 68, 91, 94, 120–1, 125, 129, 151–2, 183, 186–7, 214n.106, 214–215n.110 ecology 117, 143 Edelstein, David 15, 192 Eder, Richard 14 editing 11, 20, 53n.42, 56–7, 71, 74–5, 171 Eiger Sanction, The 11, 15, 16, 108, 110–11 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 220 Elam, Jack 45 Eliot, Marc 54n.52, 66, 81, 84n.38, 88, 99, 108, 113–4, 136n.93, 165 Emerson, Jim 194 Emmy 151 Enforcer, The 153, 119–21, 129, 138n.143, 153 environment 14, 61–2, 70, 97, 142–6, 162, 244

Escape from Alcatraz 12, 14, 60, 122–3, 128 Eskow, John 155 euthanasia 17, 193–4, 226 Evening Like the Others, An 44, 54n.57 Every Which Way But Loose 17–18, 121–2, 234 Family Plot 4, 187 Fargo, James (Jim) 113–14, 120–1 fascist 16–17, 94, 116, 176, 237 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 66, 204, 221 feminist 91, 109, 120, 129, 177, 208–209n.14 film noir 40, 41, 53n.47, 100, 105 Fine, Marshall 92 Fink, Harry Julian 93 Fink, R.M. 93 Firefox 1, 5n.5, 124–5, 149, 184, 207 First Traveling Saleslady, The 27 Fishburne, Laurence 188–9 Fisher-Eastwood, Francesca 182 Fisher, Frances 234 Fistful of Dollars, A 34–5, 37–42, 44, 47, 103, 226 Flags of Our Fathers 2, 5n.5, 124, 149, 189, 194–8, 227 Fleming, Eric 30–1, 34–5, 51n.21 Foley, Mark 231–2 Foote, John H. 157–158n.16 For a Few Dollars More 42–4 Foreman, Carl 45–6, 54n.61 Foundas, Scott 195, 201–2 Four Seasons, the 205, 218n.153 Fox News Channel 17, 194, 220 Francis in the Navy 27, 32 Francis the Talking Mule 27 Frayling, Christopher 41, 52–53n.33, 53n.n.45,47, 134n.62 Freeman, Leonard 46–7 Freeman, Morgan 2, 4, 167, 190–1, 201–2

French, Philip 97 frontier 47, 55n.68, 58, 72, 99, 114, 132–133n.44, 145, 166 Fuchs, Cynthia 183, Garner, James 32–3, 46, 52.n.n.25,26, 184 Gauntlet, The 9, 55n.71, 119–21, 124, 143 gender 13, 71, 80, 105 Gentry, Ric 7, 12 George, Chief Dan 115 Gershwin, Jerry 60–1 Giddins, Gary 154 Girl He Left Behind, The 32 Glassberg, Irving 26 Glazer, Brian 199 Goldberg, Mel 46 Golden Globes 65, 108, 172 Goldman, William 179–80 Golitzen, Alexander 60, 89 Gone to Texas 111, 116, 136n.93 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The 42–4, 54.nn.53,57, 244 Goodyear Television Playhouse 32 Gordon, Ruth 122 government 19, 102, 109, 111, 116–19, 145, 219-26 Gran Torino 146, 199, 200–1, 224, 226–7 Great Escape, The 32, 33 Greeley, Andrew M. 148 Green, Jack N. 115, 167, 175 Greenspun, Roger 15, 71–2, 75, 90, 93 Grenada invasion 149–50 Gross, Larry 182 Guattari, Félix 147 Gumbel, Andrew 233 Gunsmoke 28, 49n.12, 50n.15, 132n.n.35,42 Hackman, Gene 167–8, 170–2, 179 Haggis, Paul 190, 195, 197, 214n.105 Hall, Jason Dean 207 Hammer, Armie 204

c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

261

Hammett, Dashiell 40–2, 53n.47 Hancock, John Lee 173–4, 180–1 Hang ‘Em High 46–9, 55n.71 Harden, Marcia Gay 188–9 Harmetz, Aljean 14 Harris, Richard 34, 167 Harvard Crimson 94 Haskell, Molly 109 Haworth, Ted 78 Hays, Samuel P. 142 Heartbreak Ridge 11, 14, 124, 149–51, 171, 207 Heims, Jo 88, 90, 108 Helgeland, Brian 186, 188–9, 213n.91 Hereafter 4, 189, 202–4 hero 1, 2, 8, 9, 18, 25, 36, 40–1, 58, 70, 81, 96, 98–105, 114, 118, 132n.42, 133n.47, 140–1, 146–7, 150, 152, 157, 167–8, 170, 173, 176, 180, 184–7, 194–7, 200, 207, 224–5 Heumann, Joseph K. 144–6 High Plains Drifter 12, 14, 17, 53n.45, 60, 87, 97–8, 100–8, 114–15, 132–133n.44, 140–1, 145, 170, 203, 222 Highway Patrol 27 Hinson, Hal 165 Hispanic 99 history 2, 3, 7, 8, 13, 26, 38, 98, 112, 114–15, 117, 132n.34, 133n.46, 145, 147, 149, 180, 182, 189, 196–7, 200, 205–6, 237 Hoberman, J. 94, 204–5 Hollywood 2, 3, 7–8, 11, 17–18, 25–7, 32–4, 36, 40, 45–9, 50n.14, 52n.25, 54n.61, 56, 59, 60, 63–4, 66, 68, 71–3, 76, 80, 91, 100, 107–8, 112, 115, 117–19, 124, 127, 129, 139n.145, 145, 150, 155, 161–2, 173, 176, 179, 182, 184, 186, 188, 193, 196–8, 201, 204, 223–4, 227–8, 230, 233, 235, 237 Hollywood Reporter 32, 46, 81 Hollywood Ten 68 262

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Holmlund, Christine 12 Honkytonk Man 1, 3, 5n.5, 125–7, 205 Hoover, J. Edgar 66, 204–5 Hornaday, Ann 202 House Un-American Activities Committee 18 Howard, Alison P. 234 Howe, Desson 154 Hunter, Tim 102–3 Huston, John 4, 14, 161–4, 176, 208n.3 Hutton, Brian G. 61–2, 66, 72–4 Ibbetson, Arthur 62 ideology 8, 10, 13, 17, 72, 97 Indian 36, 38, 46, 55n.68, 58–9, 67, 98, 100, 115, 117, 137n.n.113,115, 225 individualism 8, 17, 121, 123, 144, 223, 225 In the Line of Fire 171–3 Invictus 4, 161, 199, 201–2, 207, 217n.145 Iraq 19, 206–7, 215n.119, 219–20, Iwo Jima 195–7 Japanese Imperial Army 197 Jardine, Gail 13 jazz 2, 15, 24–5, 66, 78–9, 125, 129, 151–5, 159n.35, 135, 190, 205, 213n.88 J. Edgar 4, 55n.71, 60, 161, 189, 204–5, 207 Jersey Boys 205–7 Joe Kidd 12, 97–9, 108, 156–157n.7, 238n.9 Johnson, Mark 174 Johnson, Mary 229–32 Jolie, Angelina 199 Jolly Film 33–4, 42, 52n.29 Jones, Kent 3–4, 5–6n.7, 7 Jones, Tommy Lee 184–5, 187 Jousse, Thierry 170

justice 17, 47–8, 95, 100, 104–5, 145–6, 168, 182–4, 220, 225, 234–5 Kael, Pauline 1, 8, 13–14, 16–17, 19n.n.6,7, 20, 94 Kamp, Irene 78–9 Kapsis, Robert E. 11–12, 236–7 Kastner, Elliott 60–1 Katz, Ephraim 125 Kauffmann, Stanley 192 Kaufman, Ken 184 Kaufman, Philip 20, 112–6 Kawin, Bruce F. 97 Kehr, Dave 8, 101 Kellner, Douglas 17 Kelly’s Heroes 60, 72–5, 138n.141 Kennedy, Burt 162 Kennedy, George 110–11 Kennedy, Kathleen 203 Kennedy-Martin, Troy 72, 74 Kerkorian, Kirk 73 Kitses, Jim 17, 70, 101, 105, 133n.47, 168–9, 238n.13 Klausner, Howard 184 Klavan, Andrew 182 Klein, Andy 185 Knapp, Laurence F. 10–11, 20n.n.13,14, 57, 82n.2, 103–5, 112, 114, 134n.68, 165–6, 171, 209n.17 Korean War 149, 200 Kronsberg, Jeremy Joe 234 Kurosawa, Akira 34, 40–2, 52n.23, 54n.53, 181 Lacan, Jacques 104, 107, 134n.67 Lady Godiva of Coventry 27, 155 LaGravenese, Richard 175, 177 Laine, Frankie 29, 50n.14 landscape 10, 58, 67, 70, 90, 98, 124, 141, 146–7, 149, 167 Lang, Jennings 75 Lee, Spike 17, 151, 155, 159n.35, 196

Lehane, Dennis 188 Lehnert, Richard 154, 159–160n.44 Leonard, Irving 46 Leone, Sergio 13, 33–45, 48, 52n.23, 52–53n.33, 62, 98–9, 101, 104, 107, 114, 172, 221–3, 236, 238n.13 Leone, Vincenzo 36 lesbian 76 Letters from Iwo Jima 2, 5n.5, 16–17, 124, 149, 194–8, 200, 216n.131, 227 Levy, Andrew 232 Lewis, Geoffrey 110, 122 liberal 17, 70, 94–5, 128, 136n.110, 170, 193, 219, 223, 226–7, 233 libertarian 109, 119, 142, 170, 219–27, 229, 244 Linney, Laura 179, 188–9 Locke, Sondra 55n.71, 108, 112–3, 120–1, 127–8, 172, 234 Lorenz, Robert 198–9, 203, 205, 207 Los Angeles 26, 88, 121, 170, 186, 191, 199, 218n.153, 232–3 Los Angeles Times 16, 151, 176, 228–9 Lubin, Arthur 26–7, 32 Macdonald, Andrew and Gina 39, 41 Mackenna’s Gold 45–7, 54n.61 MacLaine, Shirley 69–72, 75, 77 MacLean, Alistair 60, Magnificent Stranger, The 34, 42 magnífico extranjero, El See Magnificent Stranger, The Magnum Force 17, 60, 108–9, 110, 128, 138n.143 Mailer, Norman 126 Malkovich, John 172 Malpaso 10–12, 44–9, 55n.71, 57–8, 60, 63, 66, 75, 79, 82, 88, 96, 110–11, 116–17, 129, 143, 167, 173–4, 203, 234 Maltz, Albert 68, 77–9 Mandela, Nelson 4, 201–2 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

263

Manes, Fritz 143 Manis 18 Man With No Name, The 10, 16, 24, 33, 38, 43, 48, 64, 104, 112, 114, 201 Margolis, Jon 176 Marxist 40 masculinity 8–9, 91, 105, 121, 129, 165 Maslin, Janet 126–7, 154, 177–8, 183 Mast, Gerald 97 Mathews, Jack 151 Maverick 32–3, 52n.n.25,26 McGilligan, Patrick 25, 28–9, 35–7, 49n.n.3,6, 52–53n.33, 66, 83–84n.28, 99, 112–14, 132–133n.44, 143, 149–50, 187, 228, 235 McQueen, Steve 32, 46 melodrama 3, 24, 44, 52, 63, 81, 91, 96, 102, 128, 149, 204–5, 232 Mérigeau, Pascal 12 Metz, Christian 104 Metz, Walter 1, 165 MGM 45, 61–2, 73 MGM British Studios 62 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 3, 180–2, 187, 204 Mifune, Toshirô 39 military 13, 26, 33, 61, 73–4, 101–2, 109, 149–50, 164, 197, 206–7, 219 Milius, John 109, 124, 130n.15 Miller, Herman 57 Million Dollar Baby 2, 3, 5, 16–17, 166, 178, 189, 190–4, 214n.n.105,108, 214–215n.110, 226, 232, 233 Mills, Donna 88–9 Miracle at St. Anna 17, 196–7 misogyny 80, 92 Mister Ed 32 moral 3, 13, 18, 40–1, 55n.68, 57, 73, 75–6, 87, 94, 97–99, 103–5, 118, 128, 146, 148, 166, 173, 178, 264

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

183–4, 191, 207, 225, 227, 233, 236–7 Morgan, Peter 203 Moriarty, Michael 141, 143 Motion Picture Exhibiting 81 Murakami, James J. 200, 205, 207 Murray, Robin L. 144–6 Mystic River 1–5, 16–17, 166, 178, 187–92, 200 myth 3, 7, 9, 10, 72, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105–6, 114, 147, 166, 171, 173 NASA 184 National Board of Review 65 National Enquirer 234–6 National Society of Film Critics 172, 192 Native American See Indian NBC 27, 52n.n.24,26 Negro See African American Never Say Goodbye 27 Nevers, Camille 170, 237n.1 Newsweek 68, 94, 131n.20 New York City 58, 116, 153 New York Film Critics Circle 192 New York Film Festival 188, 199 New York Times 14–16, 68, 71, 75, 81, 90, 93–4, 109–10, 117, 121, 126, 128, 131n.26, 137n.115, 150, 154, 175–7, 183, 186, 193, 195, 199, 219, 226, 233, 237 Niehaus, Lennie 153–4, 175 Nixon, Richard M. 94, 204–5, 220, 224 Obama, Barack 217n.147, 243–4, 201–2, O’Brien, Daniel 30, 32–3, 51n.n.21,22, 59, 83n.7, 135n.83, 165 O’Hehir, Andrew 205 Oliansky, Joel 151 Once Upon a Time in America 53n.39

Once Upon a Time in the West 44–5, 53n.39 Orr, Christopher 200 Oscar See Academy Awards Outlaw Josey Wales, The 8, 11–12, 85n.67, 87, 111–16, 118–19, 123, 127, 133n.47, 136n.93, 156–157n.7, 225 Ox-Bow Incident, The 47 Paint Your Wagon 60, 62– 8, 74–5, 84n.30, 127 Pale Rider 11, 17, 60, 85–6n.67, 100–1, 114–15, 130, 140–8, 156n.1, 156–157n.7, 157n.8, 167, 170, 205, 237 Panavision 62 Papi, Giorgio (George) 42 Paramount Pictures 195 Parker, Chan 151–3 Parker, Charlie 4, 8, 24, 151–5, 159n.37, 159–160n.44 parody 94, 150 patriarchy 80 Peckham, Anthony 202 Peckinpah, Sam 19–20n.7, 52n.24, 65, 97, 108, 131n.31, 222 Penn, Sean 188–9, 224 People 119 Peoples, David Webb 5n.3, 167, 171 Perfect World, A 4, 11, 172–5, 180–1 persona 2, 9–11, 20n.13, 30, 37, 59, 80, 104, 114–15, 117, 134n.67, 135n.73, 140–1, 147, 165–6, 180, 183, 201, 226, 235, 237 Per un pugno di dollari See Fistful of Dollars, A Peters, Bernadette 155–6 Petersen, Wolfgang 172–3 Piano Blues 189–90, 205 Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief 198, 216n.132 Pinewood Studios 60 Pink Cadillac 60, 155–6, 167, 208n.12

Plantinga, Carl 18 Play Misty for Me 11–12, 15, 60, 83n.9, 87–91, 108, 205 politics 70, 97, 117, 119, 127, 142, 146, 193, 202, 219–23, 227–9, 236–7, 240n.36 Pomeroy, Herb 154 Positif 203 Post, Ted 17, 31, 43, 47, 49–50n.12, 50–51n.15, 108, 110 post-traumatic stress disorder 124, 169, 209n.33, 227 Previn, André 64, 66 propaganda 17 psychology 8, 58, 80, 114, 129, 149, 152, 183 PTSD See post-traumatic stress disorder Quinn, Justin 223–4 racism 17, 116, 155, 202 Rackin, Martin 69–71, 77 Rainer, Peter 15, 185 Ratboy 55n.71, 60 Rawhide 28–31, 33–6, 42–4, 46–7, 49–50n.12, 50n.14, 50–51n.15, 51n.21, 52n.29, 54n.61, 57, 60, 67, 73, 79, 83n.9, 87, 97, 108, 126 Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites (LP) 51n.21, 67 Reagan era 9, 149 Reagan, Ronald 127, 139n.145, 142, 149–50, 217n.145, 220, 224 Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, The 111, 116 Red Harvest 40–2, 53n.45 Reed, Rex 68, 200 Republican 94, 142–3, 219–20, 222, 224, 227, 231, 233, 243–4 reputation 2, 14–15, 40, 45–6, 61, 66, 68, 152, 191, 222, 234–7 revenge 38, 97, 101–2, 105, 111, 114, 127–8, 148, 166, 171, 180, 188, 223, 225, 228, 230, 233 Revenge of the Creature 26 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

265

revisionist western 100, 115, 156n.7, 168, 225 Rich, Frank 175, 193, 219, 233 Richie, Donald 41 Riesner, Dean 58, 83n.9, 88, 90, 93 RKO 27–8, 34 Roach, Gary D. 205 Robbins, Tim 188–9, 194 Rodriguez, Rene 199 Rolling Stone 94, 178, 186, 199, 235 Rookie, The 60, 165–7, 171 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy) 28 Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner 190 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 1, 151, 155–6 Rosenberg, Tom 190 Roth, Marcie 232 Russo, Rene 172 Ryan, Michael 17 San Francisco 24, 92–4, 112, 120, 123, 128, 131n.26, 223, 230 Sarris, Andrew 19–20n.7, 57, 91, 192, satire 74, 94 Saturday Evening Post, The 49–50n.12 Savannah 180–2, 187 Saxon, John 99 Sayre, Nora 110 Schenk, Nick 200 Schickel, Richard 1, 7–8, 13, 25, 27, 30–1, 35, 38, 45, 47, 49n.3, 53n.42, 54n.61, 59, 65–6, 79, 81, 82n.3, 83n.17, 84n.38, 85n.53, 91–3, 113, 118–19, 125–7, 138n.142, 174 Schiff, Stephen 182 Schifrin, Lalo 60 Schotz, Fred 232 Schwarzbaum, Lisa 185 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 9, 15, 219 Scorsese, Martin 189, 213n.100 Scott, A.O. 186, 192 Scott, Jay 151 Seattle 25, 49n.6, 192–3 Sessions, George 142 266

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

Seven Samurai 34, 42, 52n.23 sexism 91, 121, 236 sfida del samurai, La See Yojimbo Shannon, Jeff 192, 214–215n.110 Sharon, Steve 155 Sheehan, Henry 148, 168, 187 Sheen, Charlie 165 Sherman, Stanford 234 Shryack, Dennis 143 Siegel, Don 12–13, 32, 55n.70, 56–60, 69–72, 74–82, 82n.3, 83n.7, 89, 93–7, 122–3, 222, 238n.13 Siskel, Gene 173 Slotkin, Richard 72, 85n.48, 97, 100, 114–15, 131n.31, 132n.35, 133n.46, 156–157n.7 Smith, Paul 5–6n.7, 17, 71 socialist 222 South Africa 4, 202 Space Cowboys 2–3, 5n.5, 15, 52n.25, 184–7 Spacey, Kevin 181–2 spaghetti western 36, 41, 48, 52n.23, 82, 134n.62 Spang, Ron 175 spiritual 96, 103, 105, 141, 146–8, 203–4, 222 Sragow, Michael 1, 5n.3, 14 Stanley, Frank 110 star 1–2, 8, 10, 12, 14–15, 25, 27, 28–31, 32–3, 35–8, 41, 43–6, 48–9, 51n.n.21,22, 57, 59–61, 65, 67–8, 73, 78–9, 81, 87, 89, 91, 94, 107–8, 112–14, 121, 123, 128–9, 152, 161, 164, 167, 174–8, 185, 187, 190, 194, 204, 215n.119, 219, 223, 229, 233, 235–7, 244 Star in the Dust 27 Stars Fell on Henrietta, The 60 Stern, Tom 198, 205, 207 Stevens, Stuart 243 Stinson, Joseph 129 Straczynski, J. Michael 199 Streep, Meryl 175–8

Streghe, Le See Witches, The Stroud, Don 59 stunts 48, 59, 61, 152, 155, 165, Sturges, John 12, 32, 52n.24, 98–9, 212n.82 Sudden Impact 1, 5n.5, 16, 92, 127–9 138n.143 supernatural 97, 101, 103, 114, 124, 141, 143, 171, 202 Surtees, Bruce 12, 80–1, 89, 103, 114–15, 123, 141 Surtees, Robert 59 Swank, Hilary 190–2, 194, 226, 233, Swindle, David 224–7 symbol 47, 78, 95, 96, 104, 146, 152, 168, 201 tabloid 118, 234–6 Taubin, Amy 166, 172 Taylor, Charles 14, 192 terrorism 17, 22n.38, 119, 225 Tessari, Duccio 35, 39, 52–53n.33 Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser 55n.71 Thompson, Howard 109 Thompson, J. Lee 45 Thompson, Richard 102 Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 108, 110 Tidyman, Ernest 102 Tightrope 12, 128–9, 138n.134, 237 Time 64, 91, 93 Tiomkin, Dimitri 29, 50n.14, 54n.61 Toole, F.X. 190 Toronto Globe and Mail 151 Townsend, Charlotte 228 Traverse, Claude 78–9 Travers, Peter 178, 186, 199 Trouble with the Curve 207 True Crime 2, 5n.5, 16, 166, 182–4, 185–7 Tucker, Tanya 234 Tuggle, Richard 12, 123, 128 Tunis, Kimber 62 Turan, Kenneth 16

TV Reader’s Digest 27 Twentieth Century-Fox 27 Two Mules for Sister Sara 59, 60, 68–74, 77, 80, 98, 156–157n.7 Unforgiven 1–4, 5n.n.3,5, 17–8, 47, 60, 115, 133n.47, 146, 156–157n.7, 165–72, 178, 184–5, 188, 209–210n.35, 214n.108, 222–3, 226–7, 238n.9 United Artists 43, 47 Universal Pictures 75, 88 University of Southern California 125 Valli, Frankie 205–6, 218n.153 Vandehei, Jim 230 Van Horn, Buddy 60, 103, 122, 155, 165, 208n.12, 209n.15 Variety 72, 90, 94–5, 109, 119, 130, 131n.26, 138n.141, 235 vengeance See revenge Venora, Diane 152, 182 Viertel, Peter 162–3, 208n.3 Vietnam era 9 Vietnam War 73, 97–8, 101–2, 115, 119, 124, 133n.46, 149–50, 156n.7, 158n.28, 169, 207 vigilante 46–8, 94–9, 109, 128, 145, 165, 229 Village Voice 91, 94, 109, 154, 195, 236 Vincenzoni, Luciano 43 violence 2–3, 17–9, 39, 41, 47–8, 62, 76, 80, 91, 93, 95–8, 100, 102, 105, 107, 115, 121, 131n.26, 133n.52, 145, 155, 168, 170, 174, 180, 186, 188, 195, 209n.35, 227, 237 Virginia Tech 19 Volonté, Gian Maria 38, 222 Wallach, Eli 43, 45 Waller, Robert James 175–9 Walsh, David 16, 183 c h ron i c l e s of a m e r i c a

267

Walter, Jessica 88–9 war film 138n.133 Warner Bros. 27, 29, 56, 96, 111, 113–14, 129, 131n.26, 141, 190, 203, 234 Warner Bros. Presents 32 Warren, Charles Marquis 28–9, 49–50n.12, 50n.14 Washington, Ned 29, 50n.14 Washington Post 14, 154, 165, 175, 202, 215n.119 Wasserman, Lew 88 Watanabe, Hiroshi 198 Watanabe, Ken 198 Watergate 119 Waters, Maxine 232 Wayne, John 9, 29, 34, 97, 101, 107, 132–133n.44, 197, 236 Webster, Ferris 108, 110, 114, 123 Weis, Johnny See Volonté, Gian Maria welfare 119, 226, 233 Wells, Frank 111–12 western 1–3, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27–30, 32–7, 39–45, 47, 49–50n.12, 50n.14, 50–51n.15, 56, 58, 62, 64–5, 68–70, 72 78–9, 84n.38, 88, 97–102, 107–8, 111, 112, 115, 117, 123, 125–6, 132n.n.35,42, 132–133n.44, 134n.62, 141, 143–5, 147, 149, 156–157n.7, 164, 166, 167–9, 172, 221–25, 236 See also revisionist western; spaghetti western

268

th e cinema o f clint e as t wo o d

West Point 28 Where Eagles Dare 60–2, 66–8, 72–3 Whitaker, Forest 4, 152, 161 White, Armond 17 White Hunter Black Heart 1, 3, 5n.5, 9–10, 14, 161–5, 167, 171 Willbern, David 177 William Morris Agency 45, 112, 116 Williams, Robin 175 Wilson, Michael Henry 203 Winston, Archer 72 Witches, The 43–4 Wood, Robin 101 World Socialist Web Site 16, 183 World War II 2, 4, 17, 27, 49, 60, 68, 72, 153, 166, 173, 177–8, 194, 196–7, 199, 207 Writers Guild of America 50 Yamashita, Iris 197 Yeaworth Jr., Irvin S. 32 Yojimbo 34, 38–42, 52n.23, 53n.45 Žižek, Slavoj 107, 135n.81 Z., Mickey 232 zum Brunnen, Diane 230–2