Clint Eastwood (50 page)

In Lenny Hirshan’s view, the studio simply did not understand how deep Clint’s commitment to his films runs. “Do you have the right theaters? Is your ad campaign right? Are you spending enough on television? Are you supporting the picture—all that kind of stuff” interests him profoundly. He was not yet ready for a full-scale mutiny over these matters, but he was restless. And, at this moment, a project he had been tracking for some time, one that had eluded him twice before, suddenly presented itself again under the auspices of an old and highly trusted friend now working for a rival studio. He accepted it immediately. If it did not completely change his life, it unquestionably altered forever his status in his profession, and in the larger world beyond it.

I
t was Jennings Lang who first brought
Dirty Harry
to Clint’s attention, at least two years before it went into production. At the time Universal controlled the original screenplay by the husband-and-wife writing team of Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink and had, Lang said, offered it to Paul Newman, who turned it down on political grounds. “Well, I don’t have any political affiliations,” Clint said, “so send it over.”

He quickly saw what Newman was talking about, which was what everyone would be talking about once the movie was released: the attitude the script took toward the constitutional rights of accused criminals. At this time, a few years after the Supreme Court’s rulings in the
Escobedo
and
Miranda
cases, this was one of the issues by which Americans were defining themselves politically. Clint saw problems of narrative and characterization in the script as well. But he also saw in this story of a big-city police detective engaged in a deadly duel with a psychopathic serial killer the potential for a riveting movie. And he saw in that cop, Dirty Harry Callahan, a character who was uncannily right for him. He says he would have wanted to play him if he had been a Fourth Amendment absolutist.

Harry was not, in this early draft, quite the man he would become, but he was cool in crisis, hot in his anger at the vicious criminal he pursues—and in his contempt for the clueless municipal bureaucracy that frequently muddles that pursuit. Clearly a working-class guy, there was much class resentment in the rage Harry directed at his deskbound superiors, interested primarily in covering their asses while preventing him from doing his duty. To put it mildly, these were feelings Clint knew well but had never explored in a role. Moreover, he discerned “a sadness about him, about his personal life,” that he had not touched in his work either.

But somehow the script slipped away from Universal—going first to ABC’s film unit, then to Warner Bros., which is when Clint heard about it again. That studio, in decline throughout the sixties, was acquired in 1969 by Steve Ross’s Kinney National Service Company, a conglomerate soon renamed Warner Communications. This signified Ross’s commitment to reviving what was for him the most glamorous of his holdings. So did his appointment of a new management team headed by Ted Ashley, a powerful agent, with able, eccentric John Calley as head of production, and Frank Wells, who had been Clint’s close friend and attorney for many years, as head of business affairs (and, ultimately, studio president). It was Wells who called Clint, just as he was beginning work on
Play Misty for Me
, to ask him if he was still interested in
Dirty Harry
.

He was, but could not commit to it until he had finished
Misty
. Wells said he couldn’t wait. When it took over the studio, the Ashley regime had written down some $60 million worth of the previous management’s projects and even now, two years later, remained desperate for product. Besides, cop pictures—especially ones featuring roguish protagonists—were hot just then, and Warner Bros. was eager to partake of the heat. Siegel’s
Madigan
(which has several points of comparison with
Dirty Harry), Coogan’s Bluff, The Detective
and
Bullitt
had all been successful, and
The French Connection
, destined to be the biggest of them all, was going into production. This interest doubtless had something to do with the “law-and-order” furor of the Nixon years but it also had to do with filling a gap. For two great traditional (and psychologically related) pop figures, the westerner and the private eye, had all but disappeared from the screen—the former at best the subject of elegies, the latter largely ignored. There was a need to find a contemporary place for hard loners—traditional males, if you will—to live plausibly. And the most readily available wilderness, the concrete wilderness, suddenly seemed more interesting and dangerous than ever—“crime in the streets” being the operative catch phrase in this respect.

Thus it was that the trades announced, in the fall of 1970, that Frank Sinatra, who had been one of Ted Ashley’s agency clients and the star of
The Detective
, had been signed for the film. It was now retitled
Dead Right
, and Irvin Kershner was set to produce and direct it. In November, however, Sinatra withdrew from the picture; it was said he had hurt his hand in an accident and could not start the picture on schedule.

By this time, Clint was available. But when Wells called to re-offer him the project, he had to admit that the script had changed several times since his former client had last seen it. Clint asked Wells to send over whatever he had, and shortly thereafter “a whole mess of scripts” arrived at his office, “first drafts of this and that.” He didn’t like any of
them, but sought second opinions from Robert Daley and Don Siegel, who felt the Finks’ script offered the only worthwhile possibilities. Clint remembers advising Wells to “just keep those other scripts and do them under other titles,” so remote were they from the story he wanted to tell.

Everyone agreed the script still needed revisions. Clint asked Siegel if he would work with a writer on a revision of the Finks’ script with an eye to directing the film in the early summer of 1971. Siegel proposed Dean Riesner, but said he was not sure he was himself free to work on the project; his contract with Universal did not permit him to undertake outside assignments. Clint said he would speak to Lew Wasserman, and quickly secured Siegel’s release.

The first question director, writer and star addressed was locale. The Finks’ story had been set in New York, but Siegel, having done two
policiers
there recently, did not want to return so soon. Seattle seemed a fresh possibility, but one Sunday in December, Clint and Siegel both happened to catch the TV broadcast of the last football game the San Francisco 49ers played in antique Kezar Stadium, and it suggested the same idea to them: An abandoned stadium would be the perfect lair for their killer, an empty, floodlit football field the perfect arena for a violent confrontation between detective and prey. Siegel liked San Francisco; he had used it effectively in
The Lineup
, also a story about murderous stalkings, twelve years earlier. And so they visited San Francisco, where they were assured they would be able to shoot in the stadium before demolition began and convinced themselves they could offer a view of the city different from that of
Bullitt
, which had recently offered a highly picturesque vision of it. They looked no farther.

Riesner and Siegel worked on the script for six or seven weeks, making their largest contributions to its last third, excising an ending in which the psycho attempts to hijack an airplane, replacing it with a simpler and more powerful sequence in which he abducts a school bus full of terrified children. Clint recalls that in the first draft Harry was older and wearier, therefore warier with his tongue because he was closer to retirement. He says that for a time he considered aging himself somewhat for the part, but that idea disappeared as the new draft took shape.

This went smoothly enough, though Siegel (who “always needed an opponent,” as Clint later put it, “either the studio or a producer”) at one point threatened to quit when John Calley sent him a memo comparing scene by scene the Riesner and Fink scripts, to the advantage of the latter. Siegel claimed that it required Clint’s intervention to back the production chief off. It’s hard to determine now who is responsible for what in the final screenplay, on which all three writers shared credit, but Clint disputes the claim to authorship that John Milius, then early in his
curious career as an unabashed macho-anarchist gun nut (and one of the few truly interesting modern Hollywood characters), has advanced. Milius wrote one of the drafts Kershner worked on (he insisted on part of his pay being a new Purdy shotgun and refused to start work until it was delivered) but Clint says that, at most, “we might have taken a few good items John had in there.”

Given a seven- or eight-week schedule that, as Clint says “seemed like an eternity” in comparison to the B-picture timetables he was used to, Siegel responded with a craftsmanship and conviction unusual even for him. This powered the film beyond its humble genre origins to blockbuster status, making it the largest and most immediate commercial success its star had so far experienced. That, in turn, had a transformative effect on Clint’s career, finally, indelibly incising his image on the moviegoing mind, and also making him instantly, iconographically, identifiable even to people who don’t go to the movies much.

For all its clarity, this image was at the time, and for many years thereafter, subject to radically contradictory readings, so much so that the conflict over its meaning became the central issue of Clint Eastwood’s public life. That he did not intend this to happen, that much of what was darkly inferred about Dirty Harry Callahan and the actor who played him was based on the shakiest of suppositions, not to mention certain overheated political metaphors of the moment, does not diminish the force of this controversy or the persistence of its afterlife.

In order to understand this phenomenon it is necessary to disentangle the several strands of which it is composed—the movie and the character Clint played in it as both were intended, how they were perceived by the huge audience that responded so hungrily to them and how they were understood by that influential minority of one, Pauline Kael, whose curious review of the film caused a sensation in politically fastidious circles at the time and continued for a long time to condition all subsequent responses to the film and, to a degree, Clint’s career.

The movie is not complex structurally; it simply recounts a duel to the death between a psychopathic serial killer, who calls himself Scorpio and chooses his victims at random, and Clint’s professionally disaffected yet increasingly obsessive Harry Callahan. Caught between them are the police and municipal hierarchies, who are inclined to pay Scorpio the ransom he demands to cease his depredations and equally inclined to ignore Callahan’s instincts, which tell him that this is a criminal who cannot be bought off. Eventually we will see that hunter and prey
are virtually doubles, with only the thinnest margin of sanity separating them.

The film’s first act is largely devoted to establishing Callahan’s character, situating him in his milieu and enlisting our sympathy for him. In this passage Scorpio is seen as no more than an increasingly menacing shadow, albeit a perversely intelligent one. Callahan, on the other hand, is richly drawn as a kind of classic American knothead-hothead, ever at odds with conventional wisdom, for that matter conventional good manners, yet cunning and dedicated and therefore invaluable to the powers he serves. He is very funny in his brutally frank way, and very busy. This opening act, essentially a succession of short, punched-up confrontations, both verbal and physical, intersperses scenes showing Harry in rebellious confrontation with his bosses with action sequences in which he foils an attempted bank robbery and an attempted suicide, engages in a spectacular rooftop gun battle with Scorpio and gets himself comically mistaken for a Peeping Tom. The idea, of course, is to show the hectic pressures of a cop’s working life and to establish the fact that in the heat of the action a policeman does not always have the luxury of consulting the rule book.

In the second act the mood darkens, and the tension ratchets up. For now Scorpio announces that he has abducted a fourteen-year-old girl and buried her alive, with an air supply sufficient to sustain her for only five hours. He will provide information about her whereabouts in exchange for $200,000. From his messages it is clear that he has raped and tortured the girl. Harry is charged with delivering the ransom, Scorpio engages him in a long, cruel chase, in the course of which Harry’s partner is almost killed, and Harry and Scorpio at last confront—and wound—one another. The latter escapes, but Harry tracks him to his Kezar Stadium hideout and in the center of its floodlit gridiron beats out of him information about where he has hidden his victim. She is, however, dead when the police arrive.

The film’s last act begins with Harry being reprimanded for his failure to respect Scorpio’s civil rights and learning that the criminal has been released from custody because of this failure. Harry’s argument that a girl’s life was at stake and that there was no time for legal niceties is contemptuously dismissed. Now, astonishingly, Scorpio hires another criminal to beat him up, painfully manufacturing evidence for the charge of police brutality he brings against Harry.