Clint Eastwood (49 page)

Clint was unquestionably drawing on something of himself for this role, too. Like Dave, like any man who has known many women, the quality, and especially the staying power, of his feelings for them remain open to question. Something Susan Clark, his
Coogan’s Bluff
costar, said about Clint rings true, at least at this time in his life: “
Part of his sex appeal is the constant mystery,” she said. “How deeply does he feel? How deeply is he involved in life?”

That matter was certainly open for inspection in this performance. His response to Evelyn’s escalating possessiveness is slow and dim precisely because that emotion is as unimaginable to him as it is to Clint (recall his repeated public insistence that his own wife was entitled to the same freedom of movement that he enjoyed). Conversely, we understand that his withholding nature, his “mystery,” is one of the things driving poor Evelyn crazy. Initially alluring—we are all inclined to believe that our true love is the key that will finally unlock a withdrawn lover’s secret heart—it ultimately maddens even people whose sanity is less delicately poised than hers.

No less than in
The Beguiled
, he was offering a significant commentary on two of modern masculinity’s driving forces—its fear of entrapment by, and its need for mastery over, the female—acting out, if you will, the very bill of particulars repeatedly read out against men in formal feminist writing, in informal female conversation. Both of these traits are expressions of a larger one, namely self-absorption.

The basic trick of movie stardom consists of denying this (very hard for most actors to do), while conforming to the notion that fulfillment requires transforming romantic involvement with another. But in both these movies Clint dispenses with that fiction. There is no boyish vulnerability waiting to be discovered beneath these self-reflexive surfaces,
no subtle plea for sympathy, which is the signal most male movie stars send out. The passages in which Dave tries to show such needs to Tobie are, in comparison to the scenes with Evelyn, perfunctory.

The film has other flaws, notably those longueurs that are fairly typical of a first-time director. There is a long alfresco romantic passage, culminating in skinny-dipping and lovemaking between Dave and Tobie, that is both too lyrical and too languid in its pace. Driving into work one morning Clint happened to hear on the radio a recording of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack and fell in love with it. The record was out of print by that time, but he found a copy of it in a cutout bin somewhere, brought it in and insisted that it be used to underscore this sequence. Unfortunately, the piece ran something like four minutes, Pingitore could not find a way to shorten it (and was not much encouraged by the director to do so), and so the sequence was extended beyond its worth. The same thing happened with a sequence Clint shot at the Monterey Jazz Festival; he fell in love with the music and let it run on. Here, at Jennings Lang’s insistence, cuts were made, which Clint grudgingly accepted.

According to Pingitore, a certain amount of tension developed between Lang and Clint in postproduction. The picture, he recalls, was owned fifty-fifty by the studio and Malpaso, and “they were like the cattlemen and the sheepmen” disputing turf. “Someone should have had fifty-one percent,” he says. These squabbles, relatively minor and apparently creating no permanent rancor between Clint and Lang, nevertheless predicted larger disagreements with the studio.

These problems began early in 1971 as
The Beguiled
was being readied for release. It was obvious to Clint that it required special handling, which Universal had no capacity to provide. “If you had a couple of names and a formula, a middle-of-the-road project,” the studio was competent to handle it, he says, but “they didn’t know how to do anything with something unusual.” This was particularly frustrating to him, because Clint was in contact with two men who had much grander ideas about promoting it, Pierre Rissient and Bertrand Tavernier, French cineasts whose public relations firm in Paris specialized in promoting the work of foreign filmmakers. The former had worked as an assistant to such directors as Jean-Luc Godard; the latter had written extensively for journals like
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
and had directed some features. Their backgrounds gave them credentials with the critical press that other publicists lacked.

They particularly revered a number of older American directors whose work these influential publications had championed, and their work for them was a significant factor in extending beyond cult circles the critical recognition of auteurs like Howard Hawks, John Ford and Raoul Walsh. They were also enthusiasts for younger directors carrying on this tradition—Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel. It is not too much to say that in the period from 1965 to 1972 Rissient and Tavernier were crucial figures in sending the revisionist word on all these directors out from France to their cinematic coreligionists elsewhere, and from there into general cultural circulation.

Rissient knew Clint’s work from the Leone pictures, and sometime in the late sixties they met for the first time at the Universal commissary. Later, when
Two Mules for Sister Sara
opened in Paris, he helped promote it, and he recalls a lunch meeting there with Jennings Lang and Clint where, warmed by Lang’s bonhomie, Clint was apparently more outgoing than he had been on their previous meeting. Rissient found himself “
very, very surprised by his sense of humor. He could be quite nice, or sarcastic, and also you could make a joke and he would be very fast, you know, to catch it.”

Rissient, a large, bald, passionate figure, who seems always to be dressed in a loud, open-necked sport shirt that he does not tuck into his pants (it was his garb at the Academy Awards ceremony at which Clint won his best director and best picture Oscars for
Unforgiven
), took Clint’s work, first as an actor, then as a director, to heart, and their relationship has persisted for close to a quarter century. In the time since he and Tavernier closed their office (so the latter could return to directing), Rissient has become a benign, if slightly mysterious, figure, working the international festivals and cinematheques, discovering new filmmakers, promoting his old favorites, Clint among them.

When he saw
The Beguiled
he thought it Siegel’s “best film,” and proposed a showing at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1971—either in or out of competition, whichever he could manage. This would cost a little money, and it would mean delaying the movie’s release date, scheduled for early April, until after the festival, but Clint loved the idea. He craved this kind of recognition, and it was just what he thought the movie needed to establish itself with reviewers.

He took the idea to Lew Wasserman and was turned down. “Absolutely not,” he remembers Wasserman saying. “I won’t put any money in that. I won’t get involved in that.” The mogul had something of the old studio arrogance about him; he and his executives always knew best: Their collective wisdom always had to take precedence over the whims of mere “talent.” “I didn’t know how to overcome that,” Clint says, “the
infighting and so on.” But it surely shadowed his hope of making inexpensive, somewhat offbeat movies requiring hand-tailored marketing and distribution.

The way
The Beguiled
was handled justified this anxiety: “They did no promotion, they just let it escape.” Escape, as it were, under false pretenses—such campaign as the studio mounted suggested that the film was some kind of Civil War military drama. In Universal’s defense it might be argued that, quirky as the picture was, it is hard to imagine what sort of campaign might have worked for it.

This was a point Vincent Canby stressed in his
New York Times
review. It had, he wrote, no natural audience: It was not for action fans, not for horror cultists, since it lacked any element of the uncanny, not for general audiences, since it was so grisly. Its “
very fancy, outrageous fantasizing” (he particularly mentioned a three-way sexual encounter Miss Farnsworth imagines between herself, McBurney and Edwina), he guessed, would “strike horror in the hearts of those Siegel fans who’ve made a cult of his objectivity,” while “people who consider themselves discriminating moviegoers, but who are uncommitted to Mr. Siegel, will be hard put to accept” what he thought were improbable twists of plot and characterization. The upper-crust movie audience tended to tolerate odd blends of terror and erotica only when they carried a certain European cachet, as, for example,
Repulsion
had. (Canby also said Clint “simply by reacting well has become an important actor of movies.”)

Some of the other reviewers were more enthusiastic.
Time
’s Jay Cocks offered a brief, sophisticated appreciation of Siegel’s style and called it “the most scarifying film since Rosemary birthed her satanic baby.” In Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of the
Times
said that the “fortuitous collaboration” between Siegel and Eastwood “reached fulfillment” in a film that was “a triumph of style, totally engrossing and utterly convincing.” These were representative of the best overall set of notices an Eastwood picture had yet received.

It’s doubtful that a Cannes showing would have improved
The Beguiled
’s reviews or its box-office takings. But it would have improved Clint’s relationship with the studio, which was now, on his part, a wary one, and soon to deteriorate further. For the release of
Play Misty for Me
in the fall of 1971 was also uninspired. “They had a brilliant preview of it in San Jose,” he recalls. “People were just screaming out of their seats,” but this response meant nothing to the marketing department. They “still didn’t handle it—they just kind of let it out.” At the time Clint was retaining Warren Cowan, the legendary Hollywood publicist, to help him compensate for the studio’s inattention, and he asked Cowan what
he should do. “I said, ‘
Let me add two words to the title,’ ” the press agent later recalled. “He said, ‘What words?’ and I said, ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s.…’ ”

“A good little scare show,” Jay Cocks called it, and that was about as good as it got for
Play Misty for Me. Newsweek
’s Paul Zimmerman criticized Clint for an inability to “discriminate between the really good stuff and the draggy scenes that kill the suspense.” Roger Greenspun was particularly harsh. Clint, he said, had made “
too many easy decisions about events, about the management of atmosphere, about the treatment of performance—including the rather inexpressive one of Clint Eastwood … who is asked to bear more witness to a quality of inwardness than his better directors have yet had the temerity to ask of him.”

That he was actually not trying to play inwardness, but rather self-absorption (quite a different matter), did not occur to this reviewer. Like his colleagues, the film put him somewhat at a loss. If you could not fairly compare
Play Misty for Me
to a Hitchcock film—though it certainly did invoke one of Hitchcock’s major themes, the intrusion of violently irrational disorder on a serenely untroubled universe—what could you compare it to? We can now see, to films as yet unmade. For some of the major elements of future Eastwood movies—their directness of address, their plainspoken psychological realism—are present in this movie’s best passages.

Obviously, no one could see that at the time, any more than they could see
Fatal Attraction
sixteen years in the future. Yet when that mighty, trashy hit appeared in 1987, critics eagerly pointed out its debt to
Misty;
interestingly, it was the
only
source they could cite. This, in turn, suggests what should have been obvious at the time: that this was a highly original movie, one that in its central role reversal duplicated no previous film and proved itself to be unduplicable without risking suggestions of plagiarism.

This the public seemed to acknowledge. For despite Universal’s lackluster distribution and the general critical dimness about it,
Play Misty for Me
did quite decent business. This was both a vindication and a disappointment; it did better than the studio brass had predicted, not nearly as well as its star and director thought it could. Clint remembers getting a call from the manager of the cavernous Cineramadome in Hollywood, where the picture was succeeding despite its inappropriate venue, begging him to intercede with the studio. It was insisting on pulling the movie in favor of a good, but ill-fated, family movie. “Can you do something about that?” the man asked. “The audience just keeps coming.” Clint got a similar report from the owner of a large chain of California theaters. He, too, was under pressure to replace
Misty
with
newer products and wanted to keep the film on his screens. In both cases Clint says his pleas were contemptuously dismissed.

Finally, despite its travails,
Play Misty for Me
returned something over $5 million in domestic rentals, and counting its overseas, television and home video sales, at least doubled that amount eventually, which meant that Malpaso’s back-end percentage probably exceeded what Clint’s normal salary might have been. In other words, he had won his gamble. And, in a sense, Universal lost it.