Authors: Richard Schickel
A send-up of sorts was perhaps intended, but that was not entirely clear, and, anyway, Clint was never particularly interested in espionage as a subject, whether spoofed or not; he had something else in mind at this time, so even though Bob Daley and Jim Fargo urged Clint to get the script, which already had been revised at least three times, and rewritten one more time, he ignored them. What he most deeply cared about was the project’s potential to realize his ideal of making movies in isolation with companies as small as feasible, enhancing efficiency by reducing distractions and wasted motion. Nothing could be more to his liking than shooting a film’s crucial sequences on a remote mountaintop in Switzerland, which would perforce limit cast and crew to a daring handful.
The idea was that everyone would do double duty. The actors, himself included, would help haul equipment and, whenever possible, do their own climbing. When that would be too dangerous the professional mountaineers guiding them would serve as stunt doubles and, as well, play small roles. Clint would direct the picture himself, eliminating yet another figure he deemed unnecessary from the production’s rolls—and, more important, from the mountain’s sheer walls. Finally some special equipment, notably lightweight, disposable batteries to power a specially adapted camera and recording gear (devised by Peter Pilafian, the soundman who doubled as occasional stuntman and camera operator), would be employed.
Something more than frugality (or proving a point) was on Clint’s mind. He was convinced that the authenticity of the climbing sequences, the lack of the fakery that had attended most Hollywood mountaineering movies, would redeem the narrative’s implausibility—which it did in the eyes of some reviewers and many moviegoers. In his postproduction comments one discerns pride in an adventure successfully undertaken, but also a sense that if he had it to do over again he would, at the very least, choose a different venue for his experiment.
Eiger
means “ogre” in German, and, at an early meeting with Mike Hoover, the climber-cameraman who was credited as climbing adviser on the film, and Dougal Haston, another alpine veteran, Clint was warned that it ranks with Everest and K-2 as one of the world’s most dangerous mountains. It had, at the time, claimed forty-one lives. After the two mountaineers were told what the script was going to require of them, Haston, a taciturn Scotsman, who had remained silent throughout, finally spoke up. “You’re out of your fucking minds,” he said.
According to Jim Fargo, the AD who was present at that meeting, they were told the Eiger is not technically difficult to climb. Its dangers stem from the fact that it is, as Fargo puts it, basically “a pile of rotting limestone,” making rock slides an omnipresent danger, and from its capacity to make its own weather, meaning that one can start out on a morning under a cloudless sky then find oneself, without warning, trapped in thick clouds or even a blizzard.
But Clint was not to be deterred. The book had specified the Eiger, and the Eiger it would be. The book had specified that Jonathan Hemlock was an expert climber, therefore Clint Eastwood would try to become one also. He may have begun to have regrets about the latter decision even before he got to Switzerland, when Hoover took him on a training climb in Yosemite. Clint had done a little rock climbing when he was a kid, but he was not prepared for the levels of difficulty Hoover was introducing him to, and about halfway up a rock face Clint “
flamed out” as Hoover later put it. “He looked up at me and said, ‘Gee, I don’t think I can make it.’ I said, ‘Well, Clint, you really don’t have much choice, do you?’ Then he reacted characteristically—he got pissed off. He pulled in his chin and gritted his teeth and with absolutely no technique at all, just blood and guts, he moosed his way up. No skill, no brains, just pure muscle. It was gruesome to watch.”
Before going to Switzerland, Hoover, Clint, George Kennedy (whose character is eventually revealed to be the villain) and a small crew shot a sequence, supposed to be a practice exercise for the main characters, in Monument Valley, where they scaled the Totem Pole, a rock spire 640 feet tall and only 18 feet in diameter, which provided one of the film’s most striking passages. The Navajo tribe, whose reservation encompasses the valley, had forbidden climbing on this formation, which has religious significance to them. Hoover, however, proposed that his little group would remove pitons and other hardware left by previous expeditions, thus restoring the rock to pristine condition. This gained him permission to make the ascent. When his party attained the top Clint insisted that the others be helicoptered off first, and one of his happiest filmmaking memories is of waiting alone atop the Totem Pole, watching the dying sun paint Monument Valley, John Ford’s favorite location, thus almost as revered by filmmakers as it is by the Navajos, in glowing reds and golds.
No such epiphany awaited him on the Eiger. Clint had decided that the hardest and most dangerous work on the mountain should be done first, and it went well the first two days. By midafternoon on August 13, 1974, when the light began to fail, they had virtually completed a sequence in which a rock slide imperiled the film’s climbing party. A wrap
was called, and helicopters were summoned to begin ferrying everyone back to Kleine Scheidegg, the 129-year-old hotel near the Eiger’s base, where the company was housed.
As this operation began, Hoover remembered that they had not got any shots from the climbers’ point of view as the boulders rumbled toward them. He thought he could grab these while the airlift continued. Armed with a handheld camera he rappelled down to the ledge where the day’s action had been staged, accompanied by a young but experienced climber, a twenty-six-year-old Briton named David Knowles, who had, like Hoover, attained the Eiger’s summit on a previous climb. His job was to prevent the rubber rocks being cast down on them by another mountaineer, Martin Boysen, from bouncing into the lens.
They made their shots and were gathering up their gear, Knowles telling an anecdote from a previous climb, when they heard the sound of a huge rock—nothing fake about it—heading toward them.
Hoover: “
It sounds real close and I instantly cover and crouch into the wall as close as possible. I hide my hands so as not to lose any fingers. Feel pretty good. It smashes into the small of my back and I almost black out as a smaller shower of rocks continues. I feel a weight on top of me. I can’t move my legs, so I pinch them and am so happy to feel the pain. Dave must be okay. But he’s on top of me—hanging upside down—dead.”
The rock had struck Knowles on the head. Hoover believes it happened so fast that his partner felt neither pain nor fear. Hoover himself suffered a mild pelvic fracture and severely bruised muscles. The remaining crew, Fargo among them, lowered a rope and pulled Hoover up to the point where the helicopter was making pickups. There was no time, however, to recover Knowles’s body before the light completely failed, and he was left where he had fallen until the following morning.
A wake was held, and Clint considered canceling the production. The climbers, however, urged him to go on. They knew the risks of their trade, ran them habitually and felt that moviemaking added nothing to them. For his part, Clint came around to the view that aborting the production would render Knowles’s death—not to mention all the hard and dangerous work that had preceded it—meaningless.
He soon found himself engaged in what remains for him the most frightening stunt he ever attempted. The situation is, literally, a cliff-hanger. He’s dangling on a rope over an abyss, and George Kennedy’s character has the drop on him. Clint is supposed to cut himself free and then fall—more properly seem to fall—some four thousand feet through the air, apparently killing himself (he does not, of course). Clint was, naturally, rigged with hidden ropes so that he would fall only a few feet,
disappearing under an overhang, out of the camera’s view. They did the shot first using a dummy that could be seen free-falling toward the pastures below. But they needed a closer shot of Clint heading in the same direction. It would be a fabulous shot, Clint remembers thinking. But, he adds, “I must say, psychologically it was tough.”
Dangling over an abyss, “I could see this pasture way down below, and I could hear the cowbells ringing, and I thought, Why am I not sitting out there with those cows sunbathing?” He thought too about another irony in his situation—he was hanging from a rope that could easily sustain ten thousand pounds of pressure but that, stretched taut by his weight, could be easily slashed with his knife. Despite his safety line (“I must have tested that rope ten times”), he found himself not entirely eager to cut the rope that was visible in the shot and that was indeed supporting his weight. But finally, willing himself to trust the hidden safety line, he cut himself loose and got for his pains a shot every bit as thrilling as he had hoped it would be. He describes himself as “drawn out,” for several days thereafter, “always coming and sitting downstairs.” Dougal Haston said to Clint, “‘I couldn’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘It’s against a mountain climber’s nature to cut your own line.’ ”
It is the climbing sequences of
The Eiger Sanction
that people remember, precisely because they are so visibly unfaked, and often so beautiful—perhaps the most effective such footage in a fictional film since the silent “mountain films” made by German filmmakers (Leni Riefenstahl among them) in the twenties. When it was released in the spring of 1975, a substantial number of reviewers felt that these passages went a long way toward redeeming a preposterous and totally unfelt narrative.
There were, naturally, some nastier notices. One of these, by Joy Gould Boyum in
The Wall Street Journal
, called it a “brutal fantasy,” criticized it for locating its villainy in “homosexuals and physically disabled men” and despised its glorification of what the reviewer called “the All-American warrior hero.” In a way, she had come closer to the point of this curious exercise than anyone; its dangerous making had largely been impelled by the director’s desire to pose a distinctly masculine challenge to his own courage. In that sense, it is the only time this most reasonable filmmaker flirted with something like unreason.
Clint freely admits this “probably wasn’t the best film I ever made,” but it was a movie on which one man had lost his life and many others, including himself, had risked theirs, and precisely because that was so he wanted a response from the studio that acknowledged this harrowing effort. But once again, the marketing and promotion people registered puzzlement over his work. This is in itself puzzling. After all,
The Eiger
Sanction
was visibly an uncomplicated action-adventure film, with nothing about it that challenged its star’s image or the audience’s expectations. Yet at meetings he found people asking him, “How do you think we ought to do this thing?” and heard himself replying, “I’m here asking you. What do you need? I’ll do it.” He also found himself saying, “not out loud, but to myself, and later to Bob Daley, ‘Well, what we do is we don’t release any films here for a while.’ ”
That could not have been easier for him at this point. He had fulfilled his Universal contract. Frank Wells had been “making overtures” for Clint to come to Warner Bros. and, most important, Clint had a project in hand in which he believed passionately and that he was not about to let Universal mishandle.
So early in 1975, some months before
The Eiger Sanction
went into profitable release, Clint put in a call to Wells. He asked him, half jokingly, if he could guarantee that no tour buses—the studio tour being one of the many petty annoyances one puts up with at Universal—would ever come chugging by his door. Wells laughed and assured him that the studio had no tour and no plans for one. All right, then, how would they like it if Clint moved to the Warners lot? They would, Wells told him, like it very much. “By the way,” Clint remembers saying, “I have this western I’m interested in.…”
B
ased on the work of a thoroughly disreputable author, marred in its making by a disharmony unduplicated by other Eastwood productions, the occasion on which Clint entered a relationship that would radically change his personal life,
The Outlaw Josey Wales
turned out to be, for all of these distractions, the most completely satisfying movie he had yet made—and, as one looks back over his career, one of the best films he ever made. Sweeping in the variety of space and emotion it encompasses, it is explicitly reconciliatory in the message it offered a socially fractured nation and implicitly reconciliatory in the way it blended the manners and morals of the traditional western with those of the revisionist school.
The film’s basic story came to Clint’s attention in the form of a scrawny, badly printed little novel called
The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales
, bearing the imprint of a publishing firm in Gant, Alabama, that no one had ever heard of. Hundreds of such unsolicited offerings—books, scripts, treatments—poured into the Malpaso office every year, and the normal procedure, as it is everywhere in Hollywood, was to return them unread within twenty-four hours, a quick turnaround being the first line of defense against the meritless plagiarism suits that often follow the release of successful movies. But this volume was accompanied by an ingratiating note from the author, whose name was Forrest Carter. It spoke of Clint’s “kind eyes” (not a phrase normally applied to them) and prayed that they would look in that spirit on his humble offering.
Something in this plea tweaked Bob Daley’s sympathy, and he resolved to give it a glance. A few weeks later, he found himself with nothing to read over dinner (he was a bachelor between marriages at the time), so he took Carter’s little volume home with him. He found himself completely hooked; he finished the book in one sitting.
As the movie would later retell the story, Josey Wales is a farmer trying to live peaceably on the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil
War. But in the pretitle sequence, Northern raiders, Redlegs, burn out his farm and kill his family (his wife is played by Bill Wellman’s daughter, Cissie, his son by Kyle Eastwood). He joins Rebel guerrillas and fights through the war with them. When it is over, Fletcher, the Rebel leader (John Vernon), believing an honorable surrender has been arranged, unknowingly leads them into a massacre by the Redlegs. Josey and a young soldier named Jamie (Sam Bottoms) are the only survivors. Though the latter is seriously wounded, they head for Texas where they understand other Southern sympathizers have taken refuge. Wanted men, war criminals as their enemies see them, they are pursued by Terrill, the obsessed Redleg commander (Bill McKinney) and by the guilt-stricken Fletcher, always trying to temper Terrill’s passions. The young man soon dies, and Josey proceeds alone. A bitter, silent figure in a forbidding landscape, his sole desire now is to avoid further commitments that might lead to further losses and betrayals.