Clint Eastwood (58 page)

By the time he finished work on
Breezy
, which was released in November 1973, Clint had two new scripts nearly ready to go and was committed to a June start date for one of them,
Magnum Force
, the first of the
Dirty Harry
sequels. In the meantime, however, he endured, and survived unscathed (except in his own mind), one of his unhappiest public appearances. He agreed to appear on the Academy Awards broadcast on March 27, 1973. With
High Plains Drifter
scheduled for release three weeks later it couldn’t hurt. And besides, this was the first substantial acknowledgment of his rising status by establishment Hollywood.

Clint is never entirely comfortable when he is obliged to disport himself before large audiences on formal occasions, but on the appointed evening he was more or less calmly in his place, down front in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with Maggie beside him, when a harassed Howard Koch, the show’s producer, suddenly materialized before
him. Charlton Heston, one of the program’s four hosts, and the one supposed to open the program, was missing (a flat tire on the freeway), and it was now just minutes from airtime. Would Clint fill in for him? No, no, he demurred, he was not prepared, and besides, “
Where’s Gregory Peck and all those guys?”—Hollywood’s designated dignitaries. Unavailable, said Koch. But what would I say? Clint asked. Just read whatever the TelePrompTer has on it, Koch pleaded. Oh, go ahead, Maggie chimed in. Oh, all right, Clint finally said, and permitted himself to be hustled backstage, seconds before the orchestra struck up the overture. A couple of minutes later he was shoved on stage.

The desperate Koch had forgotten that the opening monologue was full of jokes tailored for Heston, mostly revolving around his screen impersonation of Moses in
The Ten Commandments
. Clint gamely started in on them, but soon found himself squinting unhappily at the prompter, visibly distraught. “
It’s not good writing to begin with, but at least it has some relevance to Heston. With me it made no sense, and I’m drying up.” He was also hearing the hearty guffaws of his pal Burt Reynolds riding over the nervous titters of the audience. He was rescued, rather rudely, by Heston, who practically straight-armed him away from the microphone in order to launch into what was left of his dismal routine. Exiting rather shamefacedly, Clint asked someone backstage for a beer; a six-pack was produced and he recalls chugalugging most of it before slinking back into the auditorium.

Meanwhile, the most memorably disastrous of all Academy Award broadcasts rolled on. Marlon Brando was nominated for best actor for
The Godfather
and favored to win—Hollywood welcoing a prodigal home. The actor, however, left his appearance in doubt, until just before airtime, when a woman calling herself Sasheen Littlefeather (her real name was Maria Cruz, and she had once been named Miss American Vampire) appeared in the lobby, announcing herself as Brando’s surrogate. Dressed in tribal regalia, she engaged Koch in a spirited negotiation about the four-hundred-word speech Brando had given her to read in case he won. It was a polemic about the condition and treatment of Native Americans, with particular reference to their portrayal in the movies. The producer said it was too long and informed her that he would cut her off after two minutes. She, of course, protested, and Koch found himself hoping against hope that one of the other nominees would upset Brando.

No such luck. He won as predicted and “Littlefeather” made her way to the stage, where, maintaining considerable dignity amid boos and catcalls, she improvised a shortened version of his speech, concluding on a conciliatory note: “I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon
this evening, and that we will, in the future, meet with love and understanding in our hearts. Thank you for Marlon Brando.”

There was no applause, and Michael Caine, who was one of the hosts, came on to say that if a man had a message to impart he ought to have the gumption to deliver it himself. Finally, it was Clint’s turn to present the best picture prize—as it happened, to his friend Al Ruddy, producer of
The Godfather
. By this time he was back to himself, and ironically suggested that perhaps it might be dedicated to “all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns over the years.”

Still, after the show Clint told Koch, “Howard, I’m never coming back here again.” What if you get a nomination sometime? the producer asked. Well, in that case.… But Clint thought this a remote possibility. He didn’t make that kind of movie. In the years ahead he talked occasionally, with a certain asperity, about all the great figures—Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, so many others—who never won an Oscar and had to wait into old age to collect the honorary statuette traditionally presented the Academy’s
refuses
. He also took to imagining the time when his turn would come. “
I’ll be so old they’ll have to carry me up there.… ‘Thank you all for this honorary award’ and splat, goodbye Dirty Harry.”

Things worked out more happily than that, of course. He won his two Oscars for
Unforgiven
in 1993, returned the following year to present the best picture award to his friend and occasional colleague Steven Spielberg and came back again in 1995 to accept the honorary Irving Thalberg Award, all without geriatric incident. But until 1993 he continued to reject all offers to appear on its award show.

Reincarnating Dirty Harry turned out to be less simple than it might have been. Clint remembers John Milius calling him when he was on location doing
High Plains Drifter
to pitch an idea for the sequel. The activities of the so-called death squads in Brazil had begun to be heavily reported in the American press, and the writer was, as Clint puts it, obsessed with the subject. These secret, extralegal bands of right-wing policemen functioned as vigilantes, executing political opponents they could not legally apprehend. They had initially regarded themselves as idealists, preposterous as that may seem, but had quickly succumbed to corruption, becoming hit men for hire to anyone with a grievance and money. What if, Milius asked Clint, Harry Callahan’s San Francisco police department found itself harboring such an organization? Clint was immediately enthusiastic. The story was novel, and it would give his
character a chance to establish unequivocably his antifascist credentials. He and Milius quickly made a deal.

The other script Clint had in hand was Michael Cimino’s
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
, a marvelously eccentric caper-cum-buddy picture set in Montana. It was submitted to him on a Friday—Cimino was also a William Morris client—and he optioned it the following Monday. “I just liked the oddness, the crazy characters,” Clint remembers. “Michael must have written it in some hallucinative state.” It needed some polishing, Clint thought, and he also had to consider the nonnegotiable condition Cimino had attached to the script’s sale—that he be permitted to direct the film, which would be his first feature (a graduate of Michigan State with an MFA in painting from Yale, he had been a successful director of commercials in New York and had cowritten
Silent Running
in 1971).

Now, however, a problem arose. Sixty pages into his screenplay for
Magnum Force
, Milius was offered his first opportunity to direct—his own script for
Dillinger
. He asked Clint to find someone else to finish the
Dirty Harry
project, and Clint, in turn, asked Cimino to do so. The latter set aside rewrites on
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
and completed Milius’s script with no apparent difficulty.

The film’s basic situation is straightforward: All over San Francisco distasteful people—drug dealers, mobsters and so on—are being eliminated. No one much mourns their passing, but, well, murder is murder, and something must be done about it. Suspicion briefly falls on Harry Callahan, with his well-known predilection for taking the law into his own hands. But Harry, as we also know, tends to shoot from the hip (and the lip), usually when he’s angry and under pressure. These well-planned crimes are more like executions than murders—and do not fit Harry’s MO. Eventually he discovers that they are the work of a group of young policemen—neatly turned out, chillingly correct in manner and very competent.

An old partner, Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan), and a new one, a black man named Early Smith (Felton Perry), are both murdered by the death squad, and, needless to say, this rivets Harry’s attention, which is more and more focused on Lieutenant Neil Briggs, played by Hal Holbrook (in a nice bit of off-casting) with an American-flag pin in his lapel and a deadly primness in his manner. Harry has initially underestimated him as just another one of his bureaucratic nemeses, but it soon becomes clear that Briggs is more dangerous than he looks, that he is, in fact, the organizer and leader of this Americanized death squad.

The movie’s tag line, which Harry keeps muttering in this situation, is “A man’s got to know his limitations,” but the arrogant and selfrighteous
Briggs does not. He lures Harry into a car, ostensibly to discuss the case, then draws a gun on him and orders Harry to drive them to what is obviously intended as his execution site. This—as a hundred movies have taught us—is a mistake. It is a good idea, never recognized by villains, to shoot first and talk later.

In this case it provides a moment for what passes in context as a philosophical exchange. It begins with Briggs expressing disappointment that Harry hasn’t joined his secret service. “I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me,” Harry says with mild and comical formality—it’s the movie’s most resonant moment, since the line is obviously addressed as much to
Dirty Harry
’s critics as it is to Briggs. The lieutenant responds with a historical analogy: “A hundred years ago in this city people did the same thing,” says Briggs. “History justified the vigilantes. We’re no different. Anyone who threatens the security of the people will be executed. Evil for evil, Harry. Retribution.”

To which Harry replies: “That’s fine. But how does murder fit in? When the police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it gonna end? Pretty soon you start executing people for jaywalking, then executing them for traffic violations. Then you end up executing your neighbor because his dog pissed on your lawn.”

“There isn’t one man we’ve killed who didn’t deserve to die,” says Briggs. “Yes there is—Charlie McCoy.” Briggs has no answer for that, but he asks Harry what he would have done in the situation. “I’d have upheld the law,” Harry replies.

“What the hell do you know about the law?” Briggs snaps. “You’re a great cop, Harry. You had a chance to join the team. But you’d rather stick with the system.”

“Briggs, I hate the goddamn system. But until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it.”

This, of course, elicits contempt from Briggs. Harry’s a dinosaur, on the verge of extinction—just moments from it, in Briggs’s eager view. But, of course, it is Briggs who is nearing the end. The climactic dockyard chase, quite well staged, involves motorcycles and concludes on the flight decks of two moored aircraft carriers—with Harry dispensing first with Briggs’s acolytes, then the lieutenant himself, in a well-timed, quite spectacular, car explosion.

One could argue that
Magnum Force
proves that it makes no difference what the political subtext—if any—of an action film is. If its violence is expertly enough staged, and comes at satisfyingly regular intervals along a fairly suspenseful plotline, people will accept it happily and heedlessly. Certainly it helped establish the value of sequels, those franchise properties, especially in the action genre, which have become
such a dominant force in Hollywood’s recent economic history. For when it was released in the 1973 holiday season,
Magnum Force
surpassed
Dirty Harry
’s grosses. Cimino recalls being told that it returned more money to the studio in its first weeks than any previous Warner Bros. film.

Curiously, this success did not rub off on the film’s director, Ted Post, who to this day remains unhappy, not to say bitter, about that outcome. His troubles began on the set, where, he says, he found Clint to be a changed man since
Hang ’em High
. Formerly he had been treated as a mentor; now he felt he was being treated as a hired hand.

A visiting reporter caught the essence of this revised relationship, without sensing its underlying tension. She observed Clint working out a camera angle with cinematographer Frank Stanley while Post stood by saying, “
Whichever way you want it.” She then quoted Post: “He hasn’t changed since I first knew him. He was just the same in
Rawhide
days, always supplying imaginative ideas. I’m not an auteur director. I’m interested and happy working with someone who collaborates and contributes.”

One can almost hear the gnashing of teeth. For there were few equivalents on this picture to the “Clintus-Siegelini” give-and-take, and Post deeply resented it when Clint took over the direction of several scenes or countermanded some of his suggestions to other actors. At one point, Post remembers Clint saying to him, “
You have to learn to let go,” which particularly outraged him.