by Marc Eliot
The first thing Clint did was take the script to his more powerful agent at William Morris, Leonard Hirshan, who, like any good WMA rep, did not like projects coming to his clients from outside sources. It was a question less of ego than of packaging. Putting agency writers together with in-house actors gave the agency a voice in virtually every aspect of a production. Hirshan’s first inclination was to pass on Hang ‘Em High. He wanted Clint instead for a production called Mackenna’s Gold, an ensemble action film whose cast would be headed by Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif. Clint read the script for Mackenna’s Gold, and it left him cold. Being part of an ensemble, he felt, would be a step backward for him, a return to the ensemble style of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or, worse, Rawhide.*
Clint insisted he was going ahead with Hang ‘Em High. He believed the back-to-back financial successes of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More—the latter received even worse reviews than Fistful but so far grossed $4.3 million in its initial theatrical run, nearly a million dollars more than Fistful—could get the film funded by Krim and Picker at UA. He was right. Once the deal was set, he approached Ted Post, one of his favorite Rawhide directors, to make the film.
On December 29, 1967, production began on Hang ‘Em High, Picker and Krim released The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; all three films in the trilogy had been released in the space of a year. It set off a tsunami of debate among the more esoteric critics, who either loved it or hated it but could not ignore it. Mainstream critics like Charles Champlin complained in the Los Angeles Times that “the temptation is hereby proved irresistible to call The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, now playing citywide, The Bad, the Dull, and the Interminable, only because it is.” Pauline Kael, the high priestess of film criticism writing from her perch at The New Yorker far above the world of the common man, pronounced the film “stupid” and “gruesome” and wondered why it was called a western at all. Time magazine sniffed its nose too, after minimally acknowledging Leone’s stylistics, giving Leone a good spanking for daring to encroach on that most holy of American turf, the movie western.
The New York Times’s first-string film critic Renata Adler wrote in the newspaper’s January 25 edition:
“The burn, the gouge, and the mangle” (its screen name is simply inappropriate) must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre. If 42nd Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism, this film, which opened yesterday at the Trans-Lux 85th Street and the DeMille, is an entire supermarket … it lasts two and a half slow hours … there is a completely meaningless sequence with a bridge—as though it might pass for “San Luis Rey” or “Kwai.” Sometimes, it all tries to pass for funny.
The film would fare no better in later years, after Adler’s departure from the Times and a string of exceedingly esoteric film critics increasingly turned their noses up at Clint, until the arrival of Manohla Dargis in the first years of the new century, a film reviewer who did not automatically dismiss Clint by definition (of the times, of his genre, of the so-called fashions of the times). The New York Times, however, would continue to push its more standard party line. In its television section, whenever The Good, the Bad and the Ugly showed up, it ran the same one-line blurb year after year that, while acerbic and condescending, was, in truth, not that far from what Clint himself felt about the film: “Snarls, growls, and a smattering of words. Clint treading on water, on land.”
Only Andrew Sarris, in the Village Voice, was willing to admit that there was something to Leone and his trilogy. Sarris, a forerunner of the “auteurist” movement in American film criticism, derived from the French Nouvelle Vague critics a highly controversial assessment of American movies; he was then considered a rebel (but ironically is rightly revered today as a reactionary). His auteur theory celebrated genre films and the directors who made them as more purely cinematic and personal than the corporate, impersonal, and therefore indifferent product of the old industrial studio system. Having seen the trilogy before it opened, he wrote a two-part “think piece” that appeared in the Voice on September 19 and 26, 1968, called “The Spaghetti Westerns.” It explained the Leone films’ box-office success in terms of their auteurist appeal—something to which the other critics were completely blind—and he allowed the trilogy, and Leone, to enter the world of the hip (or the hipster), such as it was. If it still wasn’t okay to laud the films at cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue, after Sarris it was the essential stuff of coffee shops and kitchen counters.
The New York cultural scene, Sarris wrote,
remains basically hostile to westerns even as precincts of camp … The western, like water, gains flavor from its impurities, and westerns since 1945 have multiplied their options, obsessions and neuroses many times over … What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality … Strangely, Leone has moved deeper into American history and politics in his subsequent [films following Fistful of Dollars]. I say strangely because an Italian director might be expected to stylize an alien genre with vague space-time coordinates, like the universal Mexico that can be filmed anywhere on the Mediterranean for any century from the sixteenth to the twentieth … The spaghetti western is ultimately a lower-class entertainment and, as such, functions as an epic of violent revenge.*
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly packed movie houses to the tune of $6.3 million in its initial domestic release. With his star rising like a rocket, Clint was finally able to put together the funding for Hang ‘Em High. To ensure that it became the film he envisioned, he formed his own production company, Malpaso (Spanish for “bad pass,” or “bad step”), named after a creek on his own property in Monterey County, to function as his producing umbrella. “I own some property on a creek in the Big Sur country called Malpaso Creek,” Clint told Playboy magazine:
I guess it runs down a bad pass in the mountains … My theory was that I could foul up my career just as well as somebody else could foul it up for me, so why not try it? And I had this great urge to show the industry that it needs to be streamlined so it can make more films with smaller crews … What’s the point of spending so much money producing a movie that you can’t break even on it? So at Malpaso, we [won’t] have a staff of 26 and a fancy office. I’ve got a six-pack of beer under my arm, and a few pieces of paper, and a couple of pencils, and I’m in business.*
With a staff consisting of himself, Robert Daley as the resident producer, Sonia Chernus as story editor, and one secretary, he felt ready to make the film he wanted, the way he wanted, and maybe even make some real money doing it. Hang ‘Em High became Malpaso’s first release.†
*The other four segments and their directors were: “The Witch Burned Alive” directed by Luchino Visconti; “Civic Sense” (aka “Community Spirit”), directed by Mauro Bolognini; “The Earth as Seen from the Moon” (aka “Earth Seen from the Moon”), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini; and “The Girl from Sicily” (aka “The Sicilian”), directed by Franco Rossi.
†UA eventually dropped it into a few test markets in America in March 1969, as a courtesy to De Laurentiis. It managed to snag a couple of rightfully dreadful reviews. UA quickly pulled it, and it has not been seen commercially in the States since, making it one of the few films in the Eastwood canon that has been seen by almost no American audiences. Clint’s segment occasionally shows up in its entirety on YouTube.
*The first film was made in 1968, Cera una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West), starring Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Claudia Cardinale. Charles Bronson played the role of Harmonica that Leone had originally offered to Clint. Leone often said that he had cast Clint in A Fistful of Dollars because he looked like Henry Fonda, then later cast Fonda because he looked like Clint Eastwood. A Fistful of Dynamite, starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn, was made in 1971. Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods, was completed in 1984.
*Or so it was reported. The circumstances of his death and the
fate of his remains are cloudy to this day. Unsubstantiated reports persist that he was eaten by a crocodile. He was to have been married two days after his death.
*Shortly after the box-office success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Production Code was replaced by Jack Valenti’s ratings system. United Artists then agreed to distribute A Fistful of Dollars in America. Also, the Kurosawa-rights issue had finally been resolved.
*Duck, You Sucker (1971) was also known as Giù la testa, and A Fistful of Dynamite, and Once Upon a Time … the Revolution. James Coburn appeared in the role of John Mallory, originally intended by Leone for Eastwood.
*The screenplay was by Carl Foreman, based on a novel by Heck Allen. Foreman had been nominated for an Academy Award for his 1952 script for High Noon, then was blacklisted in the 1950s. One of Foreman’s comeback films was The Guns of Navarone (1961), directed by J. Lee Thompson. So Mackenna’s Gold was considered an important film, and Hirshan pressured Clint, unsuccessfully, to accept a role in it. The film was released in 1969, without Clint, directed by J. Lee Thompson.
*Clint was well aware of the critics and said in his February 1974 Playboy interview: “I’ve been treated well—flatteringly so—by the better, more experienced reviewers, people like Andrew Sarris, Jay Cocks, Vincent Canby and Bosley Crowther. Judith Crist, for some reason, hasn’t been knocked out over everything I’ve done—or anything I’ve done, as a matter of fact. I think she liked [the porn film] The Devil in Miss Jones, but she thought Beguiled was obscene … everybody’s entitled to his opinion.”
*According to Arthur Knight, who interviewed Clint for Playboy in February 1974, the walls of the Malpaso office were “decorated with posters; looming in one corner is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Eastwood—which, like his best-known screen characterizations, is curiously one-dimensional and strangely ominous. The most bizarre object in his private office, though, is a three-foot-high, balloon-shaped, shocking-pink, papier-mâché rabbit piggy bank.”
†“The three [Leone] films were successful overseas,” he said in the 1974 Playboy interview, “but I had a rough time cracking the Hollywood scene. Not only was there a movie prejudice against television actors but there was a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie was sort of taking a step backward. But the film exchanges in France, Italy Germany Spain were asking the Hollywood producers when they were going to make a film starring Clint Eastwood. So finally I was offered a very modest film for United Artists—Hang ‘Em High … I formed my own company Malpaso, and we got a piece of it.”
SEVEN
Clint’s American version of the Man with No Name in Hang ‘Em High, 1968, the first film produced by his production company, Malpaso.
I think I learned more about direction from Don Siegel than from anybody else … he shoots lean, and he shoots what he wants. He knew when he had it, and he didn’t need to cover his ass with a dozen different angles.
—Clint Eastwood
Clint’s vision of Malpaso as a self-contained, in-house movie production company that he owned and operated in the ser vice of his own career would take a little longer to realize than he had anticipated. Although his success in Hollywood via the Leone trilogy was impressive, he still did not have enough clout to be able to make his own movies independently, and he knew even less about running a company. For the time being, he would still have to rely totally upon studio financing and therefore remain in the service of others. He brought in Irving Leonard to be Malpaso’s president and watch the books and act as Clint’s personal business manager.
Clint used Leonard’s business savvy to flex Malpaso’s newborn muscles. The final decisions were mostly Clint’s, but they were shaped, refined, and delivered by Leonard. UA had initially wanted a name director for Hang ‘Em High to ensure that their investment would be well protected, shot in a commercial fashion, and kept within budget. Picker and Krim thought that either Robert Aldrich or John Sturges, both action directors, could do the job. Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), an ensemble war movie heavy on testosterone, made him a top choice, as did Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960).
Clint’s choice, however, was Ted Post. Post had directed only two theatrical features, both quickies that created not so much as a ripple of interest (or revenue),* twenty-four Rawhide episodes, and dozens of other TV episodics and was, according to Clint’s way of thinking, especially good with dialogue, which most episodic television is. The primary difference between film and TV in the 1960s was that film was about what the audience saw and TV was about what it heard. Having never had much dialogue to deliver on either Rawhide or the Leone trilogy, Clint wanted someone who could help him handle the wordy Hang Em High script. The job went to Post.
Once Clint’s choice of director was on board, casting for the rest of the picture went relatively quickly. Post hired veteran character actor Pat Hingle, twitchy bad boy Bruce Dern (whom Clint had befriended in the years when they were both knocking about in Hollywood trying to find work), Ed Begley, always dependable to play a dangerous old loony, and Charles McGraw. Not coincidentally, all had appeared in episodes of Rawhide that Post had directed.
For the female lead, Clint wanted Inger Stevens. Women had not been much of a factor in the Leone trilogy, except to act as symbolic Madonnas in the films’ heavily suggestive faux religiosity. Hang ‘Em High emphasizes the Madonna theme via Rachel (Stevens), a local businesswoman who nurses Jed Cooper (Clint) back to health after he is nearly hanged in the opening scenes, a violent graphic depiction that recalled Leone.* A good-time prostitute (played by Arlene Golonka) completes the triangle. According to Post, by the end of the film Golonka had become another notch on Clint’s real-life sexual gun belt: “She [Golonka] began to like him very much … then, very very much, et cetera. When we got to the love scene, they had already found their way together. At the end of the picture she came over to me and said, ‘Anytime you do a picture with Clint and there’s a part in it, call me.’” On the other hand Stevens, a tall, statuesque blonde with a sophisticated air, was not all that eager to work with Clint, regarding him as something of a philistine.
The film was shot relatively quickly and under budget—something that would become one of Malpaso’s trademarks inside the industry. It was filmed on location (something else that would also come to define a Malpaso picture) in the Las Cruces territory of New Mexico, with the interiors done at MGM studios in Culver City, California. The plot followed the Leone blueprint—for most of the film Clint pursues the men who tried to kill him and kills them instead in a spectacular shoot-out and, ironically, a suicide-by-hanging of the man who had tried to lynch Cooper, Captain Wilson (Begley).
Released in the summer of 1968, following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and during the self-destructive Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Hang ‘Em High’s star-powered, testosterone-driven blood and gore was a welcome dose of adolescent action escapism and cleaned up at the box office, grossing approximately $7 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, nearly a half-million more than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Unlike some films that have to find an audience, Hang ‘Em High, made for approximately $1.5 million, took off from day one and became the biggest-grossing film in UA’s storied history, a tribute to the times and to Hollywood’s newest action star, Clint Eastwood. It went into profits almost immediately, and established both Clint and Malpaso as power players in the independent film scene of 1970s Hollywood.
Some critics bemoaned the fact that the Man with No Name had taken on a real identity, “Americanized” and softened for a broader appeal; but most believed that westerns were still best (meaning most popular) when made in Hollywood in English with gorgeous women and familiar-faced villains. Archer Winston, one of the more popular daily New York City print critics, called the film “a western of quality, courage, danger and excitement, which places itself squarely in the procession of old fashioned westerns made with the latest techniques.” Even the N
ew York Times (Howard Thompson this time, in place of Crowther, who was on the way out after his grossly negative reading of Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde), which had had no use for the Leone-Eastwood movies, begrudgingly admitted that “Hang Em High has its moments.” But the Times still didn’t get Clint: “Most unfortunate of all, Mr. Eastwood, with his glum sincerity, isn’t much of an actor.”
But he was enough of a star to ensure that his films made money, and the bottom line was the only critique that mattered to Jennings Lang, the head of Universal. Following the completion of Hang ‘Em High, Lang offered Clint a cool $1 million to star in his first “big” (i.e., fully studio-financed) American major studio film, the fish-out-of-water Coogan’s Bluff, to be directed by Alex Segal, about an Arizona horseback deputy assigned to bring back a murderer hiding out in New York City.
Writer Herman Miller originally conceived the script as a two-hour pilot for Universal TV, but Lang ordered it revised for a big-screen feature and assigned the task to Jack Laird. As it happened, both Miller and Laird were Rawhide alumni.
Lang had convinced Hirshan that Coogan’s Bluff was the perfect vehicle for Clint’s next film, and when Clint signed on, pending script approval, Lang took Miller and Laird off the project—reportedly Clint did not like their version. They were replaced by a succession of writers assigned to tailor the script to Clint’s satisfaction.* Once the script met with Clint’s approval, director Alex Segal was the next to go, replaced, at Clint’s insistence, by Don Siegel. How that happened is a story only Clint should tell:
