Locke and Anderson soon married, living for a time in his boyhood room in his parents’ house, before moving to Los Angeles, where they settled in to what was described as “a Gothic townhouse.” She collected fairy tales in rare editions while he took up art, doing portraits and carving balsa-wood figurines to order. He also helped manage Locke’s career, which, excepting the 1971 horror hit Willard, did not prosper.
Living virtually as brother and sister they remained intensely dependent on one another. Indeed, at no point in her fourteen-year relationship with Clint did Locke ever move in permanently with him or totally abandon Anderson. At some point Clint bought a house where Anderson lived and Locke frequently stayed, and until 1979, when Maggie and Clint legally separated, Locke and Clint tried to maintain—not at all successfully—the fiction that they were, as the saying goes, “just good friends.”
They had been more than that, of course, from their idyllic early days on location. It is clear that theirs was an attraction of opposites. She had never known well such a traditional male. He had not known well a woman who combined the fey and the ambitious in quite her manner. To put it simply, he was not Gordon, and she was not Maggie, and each was ready to try a radical otherness. That he could wrap a strong, protective arm about her—a gesture not unknown or displeasing to him—was a given. That he could advance her career in ways previously unavailable to her was another given, and not displeasing to her.
In the years ahead Clint would provide Locke the range of roles the rest of Hollywood refused to grant her. But for the moment, he played her very close to what had become her type. Indeed, in her first scenes in The Outlaw Josey Wales there is an almost-addled quality about her. One feels that Laura Lee may possibly be arrested in some childish state, or that she may have been traumatized by some earlier incident, so silent, wide-eyed and ready to bolt does she at first appear. Eventually she’s able to shoot a marauding Redleg point-blank, and to lead shy Josey to seduce her, but even in this company of eccentrics she is distinctly an odd little creature.
As for Clint, he knew what his screen character had come to represent, and he had no desire to back away from the realism it embodied. In an interview published shortly after The Outlaw Josey Wales was released, he insisted, “I do all the stuff Wayne would never do. I play bigger-than-life characters, but I’ll shoot a guy in the back. I go by the expediency of the moment.” But he has since remarked that he also knew that for him “it was time to get back to a western that was sort of a traditional kind.” What he was trying to make sure people understood was that even though he was playing quite a conventional western figure he was still in his own mind the anti-Wayne, and that even though Josey Wales will eventually arrive in something like John Ford country, it will do so via a distinctly non-Fordian route.
Still, the fact remains that there is no “expediency” about Josey Wales; when it comes to gunfighting he is as punctilious as John Wayne or any other western traditionalist ever was. He’s quicker than most of them—almost magically so—but not once in this film does he take unfair advantage of an opponent.
By far the most famous of these sequences—a classic western face-off—occurs in a saloon where Josey, Laura Lee and the rest of their party have paused. A pair of bounty hunters observes him, and one of them enters the establishment, where this dialogue ensues:
“I’m looking for Josey Wales,” says the gunman.
“That’d be me,” says Josey, speaking from a deeply shadowed corner of the room.
“You’re wanted, Wales.”
“I reckon I’m right popular.” Pause. “You a bounty hunter?”
“Man’s got to do something to make a living these days.”
“Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy,” comes the reply that has entered into the canon of Clintisms. “You know,” he adds, “this isn’t necessary. You can just ride on.”
The bounty hunter thinks that over and leaves. But in a moment he returns. “I had to come back,” he says simply.
“I know,” Josey replies. A sense of resignation and regret flows between the two men. Whereupon Josey Wales blasts his nameless adversary to kingdom come.
It is the movie’s key scene. But it is not just the understated power of its dialogue that makes it memorable. Its darkness and claustrophobia constitute a conscious rejection of the plein air conventions typical of such confrontations. So does the palpable air of reluctance with which it is carried out. It’s as if both Josey and the bounty hunter are aware that it is mythic tradition—movie tradition, if you will—that compels them forward. They would both prefer to reject it, but they cannot.
Clint might call this realism. We might label it, once again, “brutal frankness.” A critic might deplore its “self-consciousness.” But the point is the awareness of the traditions from which the film always operates, its determination that we share in its knowingness.
Take, for example, a line of dialogue that occurs after Josey and Jamie have killed their night-stalking assailants early in the film. They do not have time to bury them, which the youngster regrets. “Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms,” Josey replies flatly. The boy’s death, a few scenes later, is handled with a similar lack of sentiment. He has been in a bad way for some time, but as with Lightfoot before him, there has been no foreshadowing of his demise. The movie suggests that his chances of living and dying are about equal. When he does go, it is without preparation, without speechmaking. One minute he is chatting amiably with Josey; the next he is dead. It is marvelously shocking and marvelously casual at the same time, as real as the representation of death can ever be in a movie. And Josey’s response to it is both buried and harried (his enemies are in particularly hot pursuit at the time). In any event, what is there to say except what we already know? That every time he makes a commitment to anyone, the object of his affections will be taken from him by cruel chance. When he says, as he does more than once in the movie, “I don’t want no one belongin’ to me,” he is speaking from an emptied heart and bitter experience.
When, later, Josey is organizing his surrogate family to defend their new home, he instructs Laura Lee in the grim reality experience has taught him: “Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean, plumb mad-dog mean. ’Cause if you lose your head and give up then you neither live nor win—that’s just the way it is.”
He’s a hard man, this is hard country, and life is ever a hard thing. Josey never forgets it, and this movie never forgets it either. We achieve release from this knowledge only through the exercise of irony. Deeply withdrawn as he is, Josey has a sense of humor that is his—the movie’s—saving grace, maybe its moral imperative. Whenever anyone presents Josey with a plan, a prediction, a hope for the future, the most he will offer is some variation on the dubiously offered phrase that is his leitmotif: “I reckon so.” There is always something cautious and cautionary in the way he uses it: Don’t understand anything too quickly; don’t count on anything too certainly.
Most unheroic. Like his nasty habit of chewing tobacco. At the beginning of any significant action, and sometimes at the end of it, Josey always lets loose a stream of tobacco juice—a running gag (and a mechanical effect) that is also a release of tension and a signal of his humanity. Imagine that! A hero with a nervous habit. In its way, it’s as substantial a bit of revisionism as any Clint undertook.
Indeed, the best way of positioning this film is to measure it against some of John Ford’s traditional tropes. We may begin with the difference between this film’s and Ford’s films’ attitudes toward the frontier military establishment; in Josey Wales it is the source of disorder, not of order, of irrationality, not rationality, as it is in Ford’s. Compare, for instance, the meeting of Josey and Ten Bears and the one between John Wayne’s cavalry officer and an old Apache chief as their forces ride into battle in Fort Apache. Both bring together strong and respectful foes, but Ford’s ends in weary acknowledgment of their impotence to halt c
onflict. Fort Apache ends with another cavalry troop riding out to do battle with Indians all over again. Remember, too, that one of its sequels, Rio Grande, is, as Richard Slotkin has observed, a full-scale Cold War parable, in which the military is identified as the last best hope for the defense of American decency, its Indian enemies as thoroughly dehumanized, cruelly, deceitfully intent on destroying our way of life.
In Josey Wales, however, the Indian and the white man are, from the start, in perfect, contemptuous agreement about the blindness and stupidity of the government power that has marginalized them. Their problem is to find a way of making a separate peace, one that places them beyond the reach of blundering and duplicitous officialdom and its military servants.
It is also instructive to measure Josey Wales against what many regard as Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers. Both, obviously, concern a man whose domestic tranquillity has been shattered by the sudden depredations of murderous and rapacious raiders. Both trace his long search for redemption. But Ford’s film is marred by an irredeemable racism, in which Indians are portrayed either as hopelessly lost in savagery or childishness. Worse, obsession is portrayed in Ford’s film as a trait, if not heroic, then, in the circumstances, forgivable. In Josey Wales, obsession is portrayed as dehumanizing, the force, whether it be expressed in political or racial terms, that has robbed this hero of everything he holds dear, and from which he desperately runs. (In this connection one thinks of Clint’s comment that probably the hardest thing for him to attempt as an actor would be “a religious zealot; it would be fun to play, but I would be playing without an identification.”)
These attitudes, too, are very clearly set forth in the long exchange between Josey and Ten Bears. Whether we understand theirs to be metaphorically a discussion of the greatest of American issues, the race issue, or of the need for rapprochement between classes and generations in post-Vietnam America or even of the Cold War, the message is clear: We really have no choice but to knit up the vast American family and live together harmoniously.
This point is underscored by the film’s final, and most remarkable, confrontation between Josey and his pursuer, Terrill. Catching him alone, Josey advances on the man who massacred both his family and his comrades in arms, who has pursued him so unjustly and implacably, his face contorted in a terrible rage, both pistols drawn. But when he triggers them, over and over again, their hammers fall on empty chambers.
His rage can be read as a need to wreak his vengeance with his bare hands. But it is also possible to see that this man, too, is being offered a choice between a deed of life and a deed of death. For we understand that Josey will be satisfied by a metaphorical victory and that his opponent need but acknowledge it in order to be freed. We read astonishment in Terrill’s face—and finally a desperate assertion of his irredeemable nature. He draws his sword, Josey grasps it, they struggle briefly and then Terrill is run through with his own weapon.
In the film’s coda, Josey also achieves mutual forgiveness with the last of the pursuers, his old commander, Fletcher, who pretends to believe that the man he is confronting is a “Mr. Wilson,” pretends to believe a story that Josey Wales has gone to Mexico. Fletcher says he thinks he’ll follow him there and tell him that the war is over. “What say, Mr. Wilson?” “I reckon so,” comes the reply.
This film has one final subtext that should be mentioned: It is palpably a meditation on celebrity. Josey Wales begins his life within this narrative as an anonymous figure. But as he proceeds along his path, making one vivid assertion after another of his prowess, he becomes a public figure, a source of rumor, legend and awe, creating—without entirely meaning to—an image almost like that of a movie star in that it simultaneously distances and entrances his public. In time, and again like a movie star, he becomes aware of his new position and of the effect he has on others; it becomes a factor in the calculation of his actions. To some degree, all gunfighter movies (which, besides being a saga of redemption and resettlement, Josey Wales also is) partake of these themes—his reputation always precedes the quick-draw artist, is always a source of his strength in that it has the effect of staying or making tremulous the hands of his adversaries, a source of vulnerability that encourages people who want to make a similar name for themselves to challenge him.
Precisely because this film toys so frequently with this theme, it suggests a final comparison with yet another John Ford film—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that movie a tenderfoot, played by James Stewart, is credited with ridding a terrified town of a particularly hateful bad-man. As a result, he goes on to a distinguished political career while the man who actually did the deed, played by John Wayne, sinks into destitution and anonymity. When many years later the truth about this occurrence is about to be revealed, those in the know agree to bury it. And a frontier editor speaks what has become perhaps the most famous line in the entire Ford canon: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In other words, provide the populace with a lie—all right, a myth—that will help people to live their lives more securely, more gracefully. Ford, naturally, believed that. So did Wayne; it was the source of his quarrel with Clint. Both Ford and his star must have known that the entire westering saga, as it has been told and retold through the movies, through all of our popular culture, is a gigantic lie. But that was always all right with them. It was, they thought, a useful lie, something to guide Americans through the troubles and ambiguities of twentieth-century life.
Josey Wales does not want to live within that lie. It is too brutal, too costly, too hard on a man caught in its toils. And Josey Wales, the movie, does not want to live within it either. It wants to suggest that a man may escape from the falsehoods that have grown up around him. And find a satisfying life in a modestly defined ordinariness, even if that requires a change in identity.
The Outlaw Josey Wales as it finally emerged on-screen in the bicentennial summer of 1976 offered a middle ground between western revisionism and western traditionalism. In effect, the sometime spaghetti-western star pulls back from the brutal demythologizing of those films (and Peckinpah’s as well) but stops well short of embracing Ford’s sentimental conservatism. This was a shrewd career move for Clint. The film’s careful attention to genre formalities reassured older classicists in the audience who had remained dubious about him; the toughmindedness of the action satisfied the younger portion, which had been his chief support.
As westerns go, as movies go, The Outlaw Josey Wales is obviously a very rich text, but also one that is not particularly difficult to read. Yet the critics scanned it with maddening superficiality. To them, it was either just another western or, worse, just another Eastwoodian bucket of blood. By and large they did not review it so much as they used it to confirm their worst expectations of Clint.
Mostly they thought it was too long (135 minutes). And everybody, whether their opinion of the film was favorable or unfavorable, missed all of the movie’s most interesting points. There was no comment anywhere about its pacifist subtext, its relationship to genre traditions, the variant Clint was offering on his own screen character. “A prairie Death Wish,” wrote one. “Simplistic … fun and games,” said another. In The New York Times Richard Eder, a slumming drama and literary critic, claimed Clint’s chaw represented the full extent of a characterization in which the actor “seems to be thinking and feeling nothing, and is therefore almost invisible to the camera.” Perhaps the oddest of these reflections was offered by Jack Kroll of Newsweek, who scarcely reviewed Josey Wales at all, so delighted was he by a conceit called “Erb-Man,” a neologism he concocted from the initial letters of the last names of Clint, Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson. He defined this creature as cool in manner, catatonic sexually, indecisive when it comes to action and practicing “an oddly abashed form of machismo,” signifying “the confusion in contemporary masculinity.” Worse, he said, Erb-Man made B movies disguised as A movies and were not nearly as effective in them as the likes of Chester Morris and
Richard Dix.
There are times when the willful failure of reviewers to observe what is actually taking place on a movie screen ceases to be a minor annoyance and becomes something like a minor sin. The personae in question here have virtually nothing in common; The Outlaw Josey Wales is visibly not a B picture in design or intent, and the need to keep its director-star trapped in disrespect is inexplicable.
There were, of course, reviewers who responded to Josey Wales. Kevin Thomas, who pursued Clint’s early career sympathetically and intelligently, in the Los Angeles Times, called it “an imaginatively and eloquently devised” epic that was also “a timeless parable on human nature.” At the end of the year The Outlaw Josey Wales actually found its way onto Time magazine’s ten-best list. Such views were then still in the minority, however.
Pauline Kael did not review the film, but a couple of months before it opened she made a speech at Filmex, a festival then held in Los Angeles, and called Clint “the reductio ad absurdum of macho today.” In his opinion, this constituted gratuitous violence to his reputation, and he made a regrettably naive response to it. He quoted a psychiatrist friend to Mary Murphy, the Los Angeles Times gossip columnist, to this effect: “He says Kael actually feels 180 degrees the opposite of what she says and that often a man or woman obsessed with preaching great morality is more interested in amorality.”
Oh, dear. Intellectual wrangling—not to mention psychological theory—is not an Eastwoodian strong point. Asked to comment by the columnist, Kael replied, “Eastwood’s response is perfect … in fact, it’s sublime.”
Apparently, however, the exchange had a larger effect on the critic.
For a little later she called Clint up. “I hear you’re angry with me,” he recalls her saying.
“Well, I was just having some fun,” he replied, not wanting to admit that a goat had been gotten. “I didn’t imagine you really meant it.”
Clint Eastwood Page 47
