by Marc Eliot
Ross’s short-term goal was to build up a roster of box-office talent, and the first star he wanted to bring over was Clint Eastwood, whose nonexclusive deal at Universal was not only ending but, according to Frank Wells, gone sour. Wells was one of the few industry people Clint trusted and with whom he shared his frustrations. When Wells found out about Dirty Harry, the script Lang had hesitated to give Clint, he jumped at it.
The same character traits that had turned off Newman and scared Sinatra attracted Clint, as they would give him the chance to display the element missing from Misty, the sense of inspired rage. Dirty Harry Callahan was ragingly antiauthoritarian, particularly in his relationship to the chief of police and the mayor of the city of New York, where the story was originally set.
In addition, the script contained a fair amount of violence that would allow Callahan to flex some familiar muscles and show he was still a macho tough guy who didn’t take shit from anybody—no man, no woman, and no criminal he considered a subspecies of the human race. Here, though, the script took on a deeper and more interesting twist. Unlike other villains Clint had faced down, especially in the spaghetti westerns, the psychotic killer Callahan sets out to track down is obviously linked to him. Clearly the sadistic woman-and-child-killer Scorpio (Andy Robinson) is, in some ways, a personification of the dark (or darker) side of Callahan himself, the murderous deep end he may have stuck his toe in but never actually jumped into. As film critic and historian Lawrence Knapp put it, “Harry’s pursuit of Scorpio is so intense, it becomes an aberration in itself, a sickness as profound as Scorpio’s. Scorpio is Harry’s doppelgänger.” Scorpio likes to leave cryptic notes and send the authorities on wild-goose chases, enjoying such games in the fever of his own sadistic madness. Callahan likes to play a life-or-death how-many-bullets-left-in-the-chamber-of-my-.44 game, a peculiar and no less sadistic one. Done once, Callahan’s game seems like a product of chance-and-capture as he corners a bank robber who momentarily thinks about reaching for his gun. It is an enjoyable sequence that allows the audience, at least for this moment, to identify with the hero’s unwavering strength, a modern-day Man with No Name. However, played a second time at the climax of the movie, with Scorpio himself on the receiving end, it becomes a psychotic ritual, an almost hypnotic reaction to his own sadistic lunacy, with his wounded prey helpless to do anything but play along until Callahan definitively blows him away.
This crazy cat-and-mouse game the two play ultimately decides whether Callahan’s “good” side will defeat the “bad.” (The outcome is something of a draw.) The film’s terrific and unexpected plot twists deepen Callahan’s character. Scorpio has kidnapped and murdered yet another victim, this one a young girl. Callahan tracks him to an empty stadium and traps him there (a neat metaphor for both the missing conscience in Scorpio’s head and the gladiatorial aspect to their titanic battle). Later Callahan is shocked to find out that the cold-blooded killer has been set free because his rights had been violated. His disbelief is cut with fury, and he begins to stalk Scorpio, confident the killer cannot stop himself from killing again. Predictably Scorpio (whose linear psychology brings his character and the film dangerously close to parody) goes on another murderous rampage, this time kidnapping a busful of innocent children. That gives Callahan the opportunity to corner and kill him once and for all, before he can be released by the law to kill again. The beauty (and the horror) of this aspect of the story is that the next time, Callahan becomes judge, jury, and executioner. Scorpio has taken a boy hostage, holding him at gunpoint. Callahan kills him, shooting just above the boy’s head; the force of the second shot from the .44 blows Scorpio into the swampy bay. Then Callahan shockingly hurls his badge into the swamp as well, and walks away, as the final credits begin to roll.
If Clint identified with the Callahans of the world, he also identified with the Scorpios, or at least with every Callahan’s fear that a Scorpio was lying in wait. That was, at last, the character he wanted to play. But not direct.
When Wells first floated the possibility of doing Dirty Harry and Clint expressed interest, Wells asked him what it would take to make it happen. Understanding that, after Play Misty for Me, he was not ready to direct a film this complicated and star in it as well, Clint replied without hesitation: Don Siegel. “I was the one who hired [Siegel] … When I came over to Warner, [the movie] … I got Siegel involved. My agreement with Warner Bros. was, ‘I’ll do it if you let me hire a director like Don Siegel and we’ll take this story back to its original concept.’”*
Although Clint could certainly have directed Dirty Harry, he had found the experience of Play Misty for Me both “exhausting and detrimental” to his acting. For now, at least, he preferred the next-best thing, his off-screen alter ego, Don Siegel. “Directing is hard work,” he told one interviewer. “You have to stay on top of everything all day long, and it can be tiring. I learned to pace myself. It’s not like acting, where you can stay up till one o’clock the night before work. As a director, I had to crash before eleven.”
Siegel was under contract to Universal, but Lang was all too happy to loan him out—he wanted to keep Clint happy (and get rid of the project) so that if the right property should come along, they could work together again. The deal was in place by that spring. The script had gone through numerous rewrites, including one by John Milius, but it was decided that the Finks’ version was still the best. It was the only one that included the “‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” sequence that would become one of Clint’s signature lines.
The brilliant cinematographer Bruce Surtees, whom Clint had personally requested, shot most of Dirty Harry’s exteriors at night,* accenting the movie’s noirish feel. The drop-in and pull-back of the opening and closing overhead shots of the city suggest a godlike observational point of view to the proceedings while at the same time offering a sense of randomness, as if anywhere the camera falls, it will find a story. This neat stylistic touch would eventually help define the look and feel of a “Clint Eastwood film.”
To be sure, the film also had a social and stylistic element, one that marked it at the time with political relevance. It was filmed at the height of the Vietnam War, nearly a decade after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. By then Americans had grown weary of the conflict and fearful that the lion’s roar from their once-mighty place in the international psyche as the Cops of the World had turned into a frustrated, frightened yelp, the hollow sound of a paper tiger. The Vietnam War would not be portrayed directly by Hollywood until years later; Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) would all look back at it. But in 1971 Dirty Harry confronted the supercharged anti-civil-rights, pro-Vietnam instincts of a faction of Americans (and anti-Americans around the world). Its memorable “‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” sequence put Callahan’s outsize, phallic .44 Magnum into the face of a black thief and dared him to test his luck and courage against the almighty white authority of justice, law, and order. The classic moment remains alive in the memory of anyone who has ever heard and seen it, even if it has lost its historical relevance. As an image of Callahan’s (and America’s perceived) dark sadism, it is cinematically timeless.
Echoing TV’s Joe Friday (Jack Webb in Dragnet) and Gene Hack-man’s Jimmy Doyle in The French Connection (1971), Callahan took the character of the American police officer farther and lower than anyone previously had in American motion pictures. Friday, as portrayed by Webb, was robotic in his joyless enforcement of the law, while Hack-man’s Doyle was societally embittered and equally joyless. Callahan, however, was more frightening than either because of the pleasure he got from torturing his “opponents.” In Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) Al Pacino’s antihero character, the little prince in jeans and long hair, takes on the establishment and (in a sense) wins; in Dirty Harry, Callahan is the establishment, and unless the means justify the ends (as went the big sell of Vietnam to the American public), then nobod
y really wins. Callahan’s toss of his badge into the river at the end of the film echoes Will Kane’s (Gary Cooper’s) gesture at the end of High Noon, released at the height of the Korean War, representing a rejection of the corruption, hypocrisy, and fear of establishment law and order.
But for Callahan, the similar gesture means something even more personal, the interior battle against his own ever-present, ever-threatening darkness. He may have killed off Scorpio, but in a larger and truer sense, both in classic mythology and in biblical wisdom, in great literature and especially in Hollywood movies, evil never really dies. Callahan’s toss of the badge is at best his declaration of the standoff, at least for now (as well as a perfect setup for a sequel, of which there would be four).
The decision to toss the badge was not an easy one. Clint and Siegel went back and forth on it, with Clint initially rejecting it. Early on Clint told Siegel he couldn’t do it because it would mean he was quitting the force. Siegel replied that it didn’t mean that at all, that it was a rejection of police department bureaucracy and all its fixed rules and hierarchy of authority. But Clint didn’t buy it. Instead he suggested that Callahan put his arm back as if to throw the badge away, hear the distant wail of approaching police sirens, put the badge back in his pocket, and head off. Siegel reluctantly agreed, and Clint, according to Siegel, mussed his director’s hair in happiness.
The day of the shooting of the final scene, however, Clint had a change of heart and decided to throw the badge in the water after all. (Perhaps he realized that he could never get rid of his own dark side by killing Scorpio or by tossing away the symbol of legal righteousness.) Siegel then told him they only had one prop badge—they would have ordered more if he’d known they were going to film the toss. To be able to reuse the badge as needed, Siegel had a black cloth put in the bottom of the swamp. But it proved unnecessary—he got the shot in one clip, with Clint tossing it with his favored left hand.
Dirty Harry was released in December 1971, only two months after Play Misty for Me (which had been delayed in postproduction by Clint’s difficulties in editing). Christmas is traditionally a time for lighter, more uplifting fare, and critics were almost universally negative about the film, but it broke box-office records, hitting number one its opening week and earning more than $18 million in its initial domestic release (and eventually nearly $60 million worldwide). In the New York Times, Roger Greenspun wrote that “the honorably and slightly anachronistic enterprise of the Don Siegel cops-and-crooks action movies over the last few years (Madigan, Coogan’s Bluff) takes a sad and perhaps inevitable step downward in Dirty Harry … Clint Eastwood’s tough San Francisco plainclothesman [is] pushed beyond professionalism into a kind of iron-jawed self-parody.” Newsweek dismissed it as a “right-wing fantasy,” while Time’s Richard Schickel praised Clint’s performance as “his best to date.” And Daily Variety condemned it as “a specious, phony glorification of police and criminal brutality.”
Pauline Kael, who inexplicably prided herself on seeing a movie only once lest she be given a privileged viewpoint apart from the ordinary viewer, launched a vicious attack on Dirty Harry, in many ways rougher than anything in the film. That her review came between the covers of the otherwise sophisticated New Yorker gave it added gravitas. “The film,” she insisted, “made the basic contest between good and evil … as simple as you can get … more archetypal than most movies, more primitive and dreamlike … with the fairy-tale appeal of fascist medievalism [italics added].” Whether pro or con, the film sparked reams of literature about whether Harry represented the best or the worst of early 1970s America, and as a consequence it became the must-see film of late 1971 and early 1972.
In August 1972 Clint and Maggie, along with John Wayne, Glenn Ford, and Charlton Heston, were invited to attend Richard Nixon’s “Western White House” reception just prior to his anticipated renomination at the Republican National Convention. Nixon fawned over Clint as if the president were the fan and Clint were the president. Clint, soft-spoken and smiling like a Cheshire cat, knew that he had, for sure, inherited a new mantle. Wayne had, until now, been the official western (movies and world) tough guy, but he had grown old and fat and was something of a self-parody as well as the proud darling of the extreme right wing. Clint was the one whose screen persona played fastest and loosest with civil rights and the Constitution itself when it came to enforcing law and order and who preferred a pickup truck to his Ferrari (at least according to his press releases). Here he was, rubbing shoulders with the power elite. Not long afterward Nixon appointed Clint—along with Judith Jamison, Edward Villella, Rudolf Serkin, Eudora Welty, and Andrew Wyeth—to a governmental panel on the arts and a six-year term on the National Council on the Arts, an advisory group to the revered and influential National Endowment of the Arts.
Not a bad score for Clint who, on the strength of Play Misty for Me and Dirty Harry, had topped Wayne, McQueen, and Newman to become the top-grossing star in the world.*
*Clint may have wanted to only produce and direct, but at Lang’s and Lew Wasserman’s insistence, Universal demanded he star in the film as well. Because Clint was untested as a director but one of their biggest box-office stars, Lang saw his on-screen appearance as an insurance policy on the film’s success. To seal the deal, Clint, via Leonard, agreed to give up his usual acting salary in return for a percentage of the profits.
*The album was released by Atlantic Records, and Clint reportedly paid a “modest fee” for its usage. The single then became a hit all over again after its use in the film.
*The three spaghetti westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—were the centerpiece of the schedule. In fact, they had never gone out of commercial exhibition and were often shown together on a triple bill with the advertising slug: “How would you like to spend eight hours with Clint Eastwood?” Prior to this showing, the three films as a unit had already had a total of fifteen major U.S. “revivals” since 1968.
†He was prevented from building on the site that had once been an Indian reservation until he reached an agreement with the Regional Coastal Zone Conservation Commission to hire a professional archaeologist to gather and classify any Indian antiquities found on the land. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 24, 1973.
*Clint never believed Sinatra’s story about his hand injury. “Probably just bullshit,” he told Jeff Dawson of the Guardian, June 6, 2008.
*Interestingly, one of the film’s most memorable scenes, looking like none of the others, is a suicide-intervention sequence early on, wherein Callahan rescues a lunatic perched on the edge of a building ready to jump. Siegel fell ill on the day it was scheduled to be shot, and Clint directed it himself.
*Surtees had been the cinematographer on Coogan’s Bluff (uncredited), Two Mules for Sister Sara (uncredited), The Beguiled, and Play Misty for Me, and he would go on to direct the cinematography on several future Clint Eastwood films.
*According to the forty-first annual poll of theater owners by Quigley Publications. Wayne had dropped to fourth place in this, his twenty-third appearance on the highly influential poll. Coming in second behind Clint was George C. Scott, then Gene Hack-man, Wayne, Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, and Goldie Hawn. After Clint’s appearance on this list the Academy invited him to be a presenter of the Best Picture Oscar on its 1973 awards broadcast. Besides his appearance in second place in 1970 and 1971, Clint had appeared in fifth place in 1968 and 1969. Also in 1972 Clint had another, dubious honor when Mad magazine spoofed his spaghetti westerns as Fistful of Lasagna and For a Few Ravioli More.
TEN
Movie poster for High Plains Drifter, 1973
We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody’s become used to saying, “Well, how do we handle it psychologically?” In [the old] days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting bac
k, and you’d be left alone from then on.
—Clint Eastwood
On the heels of his fabulous success with Dirty Harry—without the sure hand of Leonard to guide him, and on the advice of the less visionary, more bottom-line-oriented Bob Daley—Clint signed on once more at Universal, via Malpaso, to star in a John Sturges film, Joe Kidd, a pale-faced imitation of the Leone westerns, with a script by Elmore Leonard. Sturges was a journeyman director who had had a string of early successes: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), and most notably The Great Escape (1963). Joe Kidd was made amid the groundswell of controversy created by Dirty Harry and slipped in and out of theaters early in 1972 without stirring much interest in either audiences or critics. It was perhaps just as well; the film didn’t work on any level and remains one of Clint’s least-remembered movies, but the money was good, and it did give him a chance to work with one of his old army buddies, John Saxon, whose screen career had never blossomed into anything memorable or lasting.
High Plains Drifter was something else again. It too came via Universal, in the form of a nine-page treatment written by Ernest Tidyman. Tidyman, a pro, had written both the original novel and the screen adaptation for Gordon Parks’s 1971 seminal Shaft, and the Academy Award–winning adapted screenplay of The French Connection, for which the previous year he had won an Oscar, the Writers’ Guild Award, and the Mystery Writers Edgar. He wrote High Plains Drifter specifically with Clint Eastwood in mind, certain he would not be able to resist the temptation to both star in and direct the script.
