American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  Clint’s intention was to develop the Siegel-Eastwood connection as an extension of the Leone-Eastwood one, to Americanize the spaghetti westerns and hopefully duplicate their phenomenal commercial success and restore Eastwood’s prime film persona as a soft-spoken, charming killer with a redemptive soul. Clint later claimed to have done his best acting to date in the film, especially in the scene where Sara removes the arrow from his shoulder. The sequence is done in medium close-up, and Clint had to play “drunk,” which Sara has gotten him, in order to extract the arrow, an unmistakably evocative scene. During it he softly sings a song, an unexpected choice that both quiets and deepens his character. Here the film defines itself as something other than a retroactively slick sequel; it reveals itself for what it really is, a love story. For Clint, this was a crucial step forward in his development as a romantic leading man whose box-office reach would take him beyond fans of action films and dopey musicals to include a wider audience.

  Women.

  Once Two Mules for Sister Sara was completed, Clint returned to Carmel and Maggie only long enough to repack his bags and take off again, this time to London and Yugoslavia. For the next eight months he would serve as one of the stars of MGM’s The Warriors, a film Clint was allowed to do because of his nonexclusive contract with Universal. The title was later changed to Kelly’s Heroes, and it was a satire protesting the Vietnam War. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) had been the first anti-Vietnam film, set in Korea to ease the pain. Kelly’s Heroes was set even farther back, during World War II, making its satire even more striking (and safer), set against the most hallowed, uncriticized war in American history.

  Clint agreed to make the movie for a number of reasons. Although he was a Nixon man, having voted for him in the explosive year of 1968, he rejected the president’s constant bombing of Vietnam as unnecessary, both politically and morally. In no way could Clint ever be described as a liberal, but neither was he ever a proselytizing Republican. The best way of describing his politics would be “pragmatic independence.” By 1970, after seven years of a blistering war that was going nowhere, he, like many Americans on both sides of the political fence, was simply fed up with it. The script of Kelly’s Heroes (in which he plays the title role) brought just the right amount of cynicism to the whole affair.

  Supporting him on-screen were Telly Savalas, who had made an impact a few years earlier as fellow inmate Feto Gomez in Burt Lancaster’s star-turning prison biopic, John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (1962); insult-comic-with-a-heart-of-gold Don Rickles, who had appeared in Robert Wise’s Run Silent Run Deep (1958, in support of Clark Gable), Robert Mulligan’s The Rat Race (1960), and a host of less memorable TV appearances before breaking into live late-night television on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the vicious but lovable stand-up-comic persona that finally made him a star; Donald Sutherland, coming off his portrayal of Hawkeye in M*A*S*H; and Carroll O’Connor, who later that year would find his best role as the bigoted but somehow lovable Archie Bunker in TV’s All in the Family. All these supporting players here planted the seeds of their coming personae (and Rickles the elements of the “wise guy” that he never fully realized on film) that helped focus the attention on Clint’s lead.

  He really wanted Don Siegel to direct, so much so that he had signed on to the film because Siegel had agreed to do it. But at the last minute Siegel had to pull out because of postproduction editing problems with Two Mules for Sister Sara—he and Rackin clashed over the editing. The picture was offered instead to Brian Hutton, with whom Clint had last worked on Where Eagles Dare. Although his aesthetic side may have hesitated to go with him, Clint’s practical side knew that Hutton’s films made money, and he approved his being assigned to the picture.

  But the addition of Hutton and the subtraction of Siegel upset the directorial skill needed to maintain the balance between satire and “clever caper.” Under Hutton, the film focused far more on the blocks of gold bullion than on the bombs and bureaucracy.

  In the end, Kelly’s Heroes looked more bloated than big, more bulky than expansive; the complicated location shoot went on for what felt like forever to Clint, although by all accounts the on-set chemistry was great. According to Rickles, Clint was easy and fun to work with:

  I worked on Kelly’s Heroes, with Clint Eastwood. They told me the shoot would take three weeks. It took six months. I also had a problem with the food. Everything was swimming in oil. Some of us became track stars as we broke the sound barrier to the bathroom. Bottom line, though, was that the cast and I became buddies. “You’d be great, Clint,” I told Eastwood, “if you’d ever learned to talk normal and stop whispering.” Clint gave me that Eastwood look and whispered something I couldn’t understand.

  After nearly eight months of shooting and postproduction in London, Clint was obliged to do some additional promotion for Paint Your Wagon and to log some pieces for the still-unreleased (and still unfinished) Two Mules for Sister Sara. When he saw the final cut of Kelly’s Heroes, he was particularly unhappy with something he had missed, a late-in-the-film parody of the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, reprised here with Clint, Savalas, and Sutherland. It confirmed for Clint how far off the film had gone, and he attributed it to the loss of Siegel as its director: “It was [originally] a very fine anti-militaristic script, one that said some important things about the war,” Clint said later, “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. When it was finished, the picture had lost its soul. If action 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. It’s not an accident that some action movies work and others don’t.

  Kelly’s Heroes actually opened June 23, 1970, just one week after Two Mules for Sister Sara, which got much better reviews. None was more laudatory than the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s, which declared that “Two Mules for Sister Sara is a solidly entertaining film that provides Clint Eastwood with his best, most substantial role to date; in it he is far better than he has ever been. In director Don Siegel, Eastwood has found what John Wayne found in John Ford and what Gary Cooper found in Frank Capra.”

  Both films ran simultaneously during the summer, something Clint wasn’t happy about. He felt he was competing with himself and he wasn’t entirely wrong. “Why should I open across the street from myself?” he complained to Jim Aubrey, the head of MGM, with whom Clint had butted heads before, at CBS. Nonetheless, both films proved successful at the box office, and with Paint Your Wagon still in theaters, three Clint Eastwood films were playing at the same time. Ironically, Paint Your Wagon proved the biggest hit of the three, its $7 million initial gross nearly doubling Two Mules for Sister Sara’s $4.7 million and well ahead of Kelly’s Heroes’s $5.2 million. (Two Mules was ultimately more successful than Kelly’s, as its ratio of cost-to-gross was much less.)

  Clint should have been thrilled by his triple-header summer, with across-the-board hits and theaters all over the world filled with his image, but none of the three even came close to what he wanted to do in pictures, what he thought he could be, and what he thought he could earn. Instead, each had moved him closer to the ordinary mainstream and the bottom line of popular movie appeal—and taken his edge away.

  He was still looking for the film that could cut him loose. He thought he found such a project in a script that Jennings Lang had sent to him during the making of Kelly’s Heroes. Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan and adapted into a screenplay by Albert Maltz (the onetime blacklisted, reformed alcoholic writer who had done the same for Two Mules for Sister Sara), the script for The Beguiled was impossible for
Clint to forget. He read it in a single night and had anticipated yet another grizzled-hero western, but early in realized that it was much more. Perplexed, he asked Don Siegel to read it and give him his opinion. Siegel said he loved it, and on that assessment Clint decided to do it.

  The story tells of John McBurney (Clint), a badly wounded Union soldier who is discovered by a ten-year-old girl named Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin) while she is picking mushrooms near the broken-down school-house where she lives. She brings him back to the house, where headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) offers him shelter. Eventually several students, including Amy and Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), realize that if they let him go, he will certainly be captured and killed by the Rebel army. So to save his life, they make him a prisoner, confining him to the schoolhouse. At first McBurney does not realize what is happening, distracted by the apparently easy seductive powers he enjoys over many of the seemingly willing schoolgirls and their sexually repressed headmistress.

  All of this takes a (literal) bad turn when Edwina sees him making love to one of the girls and vengefully pushes him down a long flight of stairs. The fall reinjures his bad leg, and the headmistress decides it must be amputated. When McBurney awakens and realizes his leg is missing, he angrily accuses all the girls of doing it to keep him their prisoner. Eventually, though, he becomes the sexual master of them all, picking and choosing each of the girls as he pleases, using and abusing them until they plot to kill him with poison mushrooms.

  But before they can, McBurney dies of a heart attack (although they think at first they have indeed killed him). Afterward they erect a shrine to him to acknowledge how he has changed all of their lives forever.

  The film’s metaphor for devilish (or Christian) imperfection, McBurney’s broken leg, is double-edged, symbolizing at once the inability (or unwillingness) to be free, physical injury (crucifixion), and moral defection (less than whole). The film’s very loose retelling of the Christ tale—a man walks among us, is killed, is worshipped and immortalized by the very group that planned to kill him—is also one of the devil, of sexual passion, physical imprisonment, and moral domination.

  However one chooses to read this unusual and absorbing film, 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 his most autobiographical to date.

  Even before Clint returned from Yugoslavia, the studio had assigned Julian Blaustein to produce, a decision that Clint, through Malpaso, meant to do something about. He had had enough of assigned studio “help,” and just before production began on The Beguiled, Malpaso boldly dismissed Blaustein. Clint went to Don Siegel to convince him to direct, and Maltz to work on the script. Universal did nothing to stop any of these moves.

  But, despite several rewrites, Maltz could not get down on paper what Clint was looking for. He wanted, more than anything, to have McBurney’s dark side emphasized and, in turn, the girls’ as well. He was interested in shadows, not in sunlight, a choice that would make an even stronger contrast between the Sex Machine with No Name and the women who are both enthralled by and eventually driven to kill him. He envisioned the school as a metaphor for the dark chambers of the soul.

  When Clint and Siegel could not make Maltz go as dark or as deep as they wanted, they enlisted the services of Irene Kamp, who had helped create the moody, jazz-framed script for Martin Ritt’s 1961 Paris Blues, a film that held strong appeal for Clint. He loved the subtle way the script moved, and the open and frank adult sexuality among its four leads.

  Kamp worked closely with Clint, adding nuance upon nuance to the script to make it more adult, more complex, and ultimately more personal. Still not completely satisfied, however, Clint turned to Claude Traverse, one of Siegel’s longtime associates. In the end, Clint may have felt a man had to do the final draft. Maltz, meanwhile, so objected to anyone else working over his script that he took his name off it, using “John B. Sherry” as his on-screen credit (Irene Camp, as “Grimes Grice,” shared the official on-screen credit).

  Shooting on The Beguiled began in early April 1971, on location on a plantation in Baton Rouge, where the original novel was set. Among Clint’s hand-chosen cast of female schoolgirls was Jo Ann Harris, who quickly became his newest on-set romance. Neither one made any secret of their affair (which would burn brightly and then die out by the last day of production), and filming progressed smoothly and without incident. Then Lang, who had not seen the finished script before the film started production, loudly protested that he hated the ending. For the first time Clint Eastwood would die on-screen, an ending that was radically different from the novel and that made an already dark film that much darker. But, Clint (via Malpaso) by contract had the last word, and the ending stayed the way he wanted it.

  The film opened late spring and bombed at the box office, grossing less than $1 million in its initial domestic release. Journalist James Bacon complained that Universal’s advertising campaign had totally missed the meaning of the film, promoting it “as another spaghetti Western.” In the few interviews he gave to promote it, Clint mused that his character’s death was the problem, or that blind faith was a subject too dark for most audiences.

  Reflecting on the film’s failure, Don Siegel had this to say:

  Eastwood films are almost always released like a scatter-gun: play as many theaters as possible and the money pours in. Great. But it should have been recognized that a picture like The Beguiled needed to be handled differently. After winning a number of film festivals and acquiring some great quotes, it should have opened in a small theater in New York … It would have played for months, maybe a year … it would have grown slowly by word of mouth from a small start into a very successful film. [Releasing] the film [the way they did] was a brilliant way of ensuring its failure.

  Clint’s intention to make more personal movies that somehow also appealed to the mainstream was proving harder than he had thought. To interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky, Clint explained why he had wanted to make the movie and to shape it the way he had:

  Don Siegel told me you can always be in a Western or adventure, but you may never get a chance to do this type of film again … it wasn’t a typical commercial film, but we thought it could be a very good film, and that was important … I think it’s a very well-executed film, the best-directed film Don’s ever done, a very exciting film. Whether it’s appealing to large masses or not, I don’t know … [The studio] tried to sell it as if it were another western. People who go in expecting to see a western are disappointed and people who don’t like westerns—but who might like Beguiled—don’t go because of the ad. [They claimed that] the only way the film could do really well is if we could draw on those people who don’t ordinarily like “Clint Eastwood” as well as those who do. People who like Clint Eastwood won’t like Beguiled because I get offed.

  There was some talk of submitting The Beguiled to Cannes, but Lang objected, and the film disappeared quietly and has been seen only rarely ever since. If it really was a career misstep for Clint, it was a good one, at least as far as he was concerned.

  Although about to turn forty-one, an age considered “old” for a leading man, or at least “older” by Hollywood’s standards, Clint felt younger than ever. With this, his first big-time flop coming as it did so soon after the death of Irving Leonard, he decided the time was finally right to take complete creative control of his career. He intended to direct the next film himself, to ensure that anything that went up on the screen looked exactly the way it did in his head.

  *Roy Kaufman and Howard Bernstein had been brought together to form their accounting firm by Leonard. Their first client was Clint Eastwood.

  *Universal may have balked at the idea after Taylor’s previous film, Joseph Losey’s Boom!, costarring Richard Burton, bombed at the box office and she refused to reduce her seven-figure asking price to appear in Two Mules for Sister Sara.

  NINE

  Dirty Harry
, 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. I stored away all the mistakes I made and saved up all the good things I learned, and now I know enough to control my own projects and get what I want out of actors.

  —Clint Eastwood

  The last deal Irving Leonard put together before he died was the one that meant the most to Clint. Leonard had set up Play Misty for Me so that Clint would be able, for the first time, to direct as well as star in and produce the film, all under the auspices of Malpaso.* Timing has a way of accentuating changes—in this instance the departure of Don Siegel, who had become his unofficial creative partner and, more than Sergio Leone, his directorial mentor. It may be seen as the teacher giving way to the student, or the father stepping back to allow the son to take over the family business. The father-son aspect had a deep resonance, as Clint lost not only both Leonard and Siegel but his real father as well.

  After moving from the Container Corporation to Georgia-Pacific, Clinton Eastwood Sr. had retired from the box and paper business and moved to Pebble Beach. While getting dressed for a day on the golf course, he dropped dead of a heart attack in July 1970. He was sixty-four years old.