Clint Eastwood (52 page)

He rescheduled the scene for a night shoot, reasoning that it would be more dramatic and that working in the off-hours would reduce crowd and traffic-control problems, described what he had seen on TV to Surtees and asked him to duplicate it. The DP responded happily, throwing a harsh, artless light on the scene. And so, with searchlights darting nervously behind him, Harry is craned up to the balcony where
he distracts the jumper first with a comic-sickening description of the mess he is about to make, then with a wry complaint about all the paperwork he’s going to create for the detective. The mise-en-scène Clint created, along with the casualness of the dialogue, so at odds with the suspenseful situation, refreshes a familiar situation. And after he intercepts the jumper’s lurching leap and brings him safely to earth, it gives Callahan a chance, finally, to explain his nickname to Gonzales; it is because he gets “every dirty job that comes along.”

“
The studio allowed six nights for this shot,” Clint contentedly told
Life
reporter Judy Fayard. “I told them I could shoot it in two. So I’ll finish it in one—really stick it in and give it a twist.” He was as good as his word. When he wrapped at 5:30 a.m. and flopped into his canvas chair after a night of crawling around on his hands and knees and wrestling with the jumper six stories up, “not a single wrinkle shows in his sharply pressed suit,” Fayard wrote.

The analogy is self-evident: If Harry Callahan were a movie star or director this is how he would operate. And vice versa, of course: If Clint Eastwood had been a cop he would have worked his cases Callahan style. No point in denying it—there were some quite unmediated aspects of the actor in Harry Callahan.

You can read something of his nature in his mistrust of the production bureaucrats’ projections; in his opinion, they simply lacked the set smarts he and Siegel had gathered shooting miles of film. You can read it in the compulsion to straight-ahead action: Don’t futz around; just pipe some light up there and get on with it. Finally, there’s the open dislike of the men in suits, sitting around in their big offices, acting grand, playing abstractedly with other people’s lives.

All of this you can see yet more clearly in one of the film’s early sequences, when Callahan is summoned to the mayor’s office to answer questions about the still-developing Scorpio case. The dialogue goes like this:

“All right, let’s have it.” “Have what?”

“Your report. What have you been doing?”

“Oh, well, for the past three-quarters of an hour I’ve been sitting on my ass in your outer office.”

Consternation is registered by John Larch, playing the chief of police, and Harry Guardino, playing Harry’s immediate superior (both of whom, incidentally, are excellent, as is cold-eyed John Vernon as the mayor). The latter contemptuously ignores the sally. He is too self-important to acknowledge it.

It’s highly doubtful that Clint Eastwood and Lew Wasserman ever
had an exchange like that; they’re both too smart for it. But had Clint ever imagined such a transaction—with Jim Aubrey, perhaps? One had better believe it. Even his good friend Frank Wells, who had been among the executives insisting that the jumper sequence required several days’ work, was not immune to Clint’s distrust of noncombatants. Wells was visiting the set one day when Siegel was doing a shot in which Scorpio, eluding pursuit, slides down a banister. The first take looked fine to the director, and he moved on. “How come he’s only doing it once?” Wells asked Clint. “’Cause he knows what he likes when he sees it” came the brusque reply.

Which is pretty much the way things went on this production. Despite the logistical problems posed by shooting in a big and busy city—certainly the most daunting Siegel and Clint had encountered in the course of their collaboration—they stayed ahead of schedule. It cannot be stressed too firmly: This emphasis on brisk efficiency, on getting the job done without dithering over fine distinctions, is more than a matter of pride; it is a morality. And that morality informs the morality of this movie as surely as any abstract political considerations do.

With Harry memorably established, the business of the film’s second act is to put a face on Scorpio as he moves out of shadow into closer—ultimately hand-to-hand—conflict with Dirty Harry. This face belonged to Andy Robinson, a young actor trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a Fulbright scholarship and discovered Off Broadway playing the title role in an adaptation of
The Idiot
. Looking younger than his years (Robinson was then in his early thirties) and naturally soft featured, he suggested infantile premortality and proposed evil as a kind of colic, rendering him helplessly restless, implacably angry. Since this was the actor’s first movie, he had no image to defend, so there was an astonishing purity in his malice that suited the movie’s moral scheme perfectly. Not for a nanosecond does he suggest some mitigating explanation for his behavior.

It was perhaps overclever of the filmmakers to give him the clothes and manner of a hippie dropout. Yes, in the San Francisco of that moment this was a good disguise. And, yes, it would surely have appealed to Scorpio’s perverse nature. But this made it look as if the moviemakers agreed with those who perceived in the counterculture a real, possibly bomb-throwing, threat to the status quo: Asked recently, if he had known in advance the liberal hubbub
Dirty Harry
was going to cause, whether he would have permitted Scorpio to use a peace symbol as a belt buckle, Clint sighed deeply and replied, “No, probably not.”

But costuming aside, when Scorpio commits the kidnapping that begins this act, and we learn the full extent of its sadism, the moral complexion
of the movie alters radically. The stalking sniper is surely a dangerous figure, but he kills quickly and cleanly, with profit and the pleasure of spreading chaos (which forensic psychiatry tells us is the most common motive for serial crime), the driving forces behind his actions. A sicko he may be, but he is not yet beyond the reach of rational understanding. The vile crime against the child places him, in Harry Callahan’s eyes, in our eyes, entirely beyond the pale.

He moves farther and farther beyond it as things develop. For when Harry is obliged, against his better judgment, to deliver the ransom to Scorpio, the psychopath leads him from phone booth to phone booth, at each of which the detective gets a call telling him his next destination, the idea being both to madden him and to delay rescue of the victim until it is too late. When, eventually, they confront each other, the ski-masked Scorpio, who is armed with a submachine gun, gets the drop on the detective and brutally beats him. Only an intervention by Chico, who has been trailing Harry, prevents him from being killed, though Chico is himself grievously wounded in the encounter. In the confusion, however, Harry manages to drive a knife into the psychopath’s leg. He then traces Scorpio to his Kezar Stadium hideout and in a superbly handled sequence at last lays hands on his foe and brutally beats information about the abducted girl’s whereabouts out of him as he whines for mercy.

But it is, as we know, a bad collar. Not only does the victim die, but Scorpio goes free, and Harry is contemptuously chastised for his actions. “You’re lucky I’m not indicting you for assault with intent to commit murder,” the district attorney informs Harry. “Where the hell does it say that you have the right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? I’m saying the man had rights.” To which Callahan replies rather sullenly, “Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.” To strengthen this point, a law professor from notoriously liberal Berkeley is brought in to reiterate Harry’s crimes against civil liberties.

This letter-of-the-law legalism is not entirely persuasive. The Miranda Rule has been interpreted to apply only to formally charged suspects being held in custody. Since Harry was in hot pursuit of a criminal who had, putting it mildly, resisted arrest, a certain leeway on this point probably would have been allowed. Besides, it would have been the suspect’s word against that of a police officer as to how he had acquired the wounds that here serve as his passport to instant freedom. No matter how punctilious the authorities were in upholding his Miranda rights, it seems likely that a real-life Scorpio would have been held in jail for some time and would surely have stood trial for his assaults on the policemen
if not for the murder of the girl. He might yet have got off on a technicality—but not this quickly and easily. The scene in the DA’s office, the scene that would eventually provide the heart of the argument against the movie, is logically tenuous and crudely tendentious—a little too deliberately provocative, in short.

At this point, however, the movie had not yet plumbed the depths of Scorpio’s depravity. Now comes the brilliantly perverse sequence in which he pays another criminal—as it happens, a black man—to beat him up. His aim is to display these wounds, claim Harry inflicted them and charge him with police brutality. When his hired assailant does not bring sufficient fervor to his task Scorpio goads him on with racial epithets. This is, as Kael says, a “virtuoso” plot development, so far as one can determine without precedent in any form of crime fiction, its sheer boldness overcoming its whacked-out improbability. Called upon to answer this new charge, Harry is contemptuous:

“Anybody can see I didn’t do that to him.”

“How?”

“ ’Cause he looks too damn good.”

After that, it is on to the school-bus hijacking and the movie’s conclusion. It’s a good scary sequence—the terror of the children, Scorpio’s escalating frenzy, Harry’s grim pursuit and jump onto the bus, all superbly orchestrated by Siegel. Clint felt he had to do the jump himself, since the camera was so close on him he could not be persuasively doubled. It was Clint, too, who suggested the film’s final location—the rock quarry where the bus, out of its hysterical driver’s control by now, crashes through a chain-link fence to be halted, finally, by a huge gravel pile. He remembered the bleak site from childhood drives with his parents, when they would take the ferry from Oakland for outings in Marin County.

Scorpio, cornered, his back to the water of the quarry’s sump, confronting Harry and his .44 Magnum, grabs a boy who has been fishing here as a shield, but Harry is not to be denied. He fires, wounding Scorpio, the boy escaping during the exchange of shots. Now the situation duplicates the one earlier in the picture, a wounded criminal on the ground, his gun just out of reach, wondering whether the policeman looming over him has any rounds left in his gun. It was, Clint says, his idea to reprise his first-reel speech at this point, but, of course, in an entirely different tone—“double pissed” as opposed to “foxy.” This time, of course, his opponent goes for his gun. And this time Harry does have a bullet left—more than one in fact.

A full and gratifying circle having been described, Clint was hesitant to gild the sequence more. The script originally called for him to throw his badge away, which added a reprise (once again of Gary Cooper’s
concluding gesture in
High Noon
) to a reprise, and long before they went on location Clint objected to the action. However angry he was at his superiors, Harry would not quit what he knows is the only possible job for him. Siegel thought he could, given his temper, given the way he had been hampered by authority, but he proposed a compromise: Harry would pull out his badge, study it, make as if to throw it, then put it back in his pocket. It was not quite so strong a closing shot, but it would do. Clint thought it struck just the right ambivalent note.

But on location, preparing to do this scene, Clint suddenly relented. He came to Siegel and offered to throw away his badge after all. He thought now that Siegel was right; it offered the decisive note the picture needed to strike at the end. At the practical level this change of heart nonplussed Siegel. If he had known Clint was going to discard his shield he would have had the prop man order a handful of backup badges for repeated takes. Having none, he ordered a cloth sunk under the water, to aid recovery if needed. But even with Clint throwing left-handed, Siegel got a perfect take on the first try.

On July 23, 1971, not long after
Dirty Harry
wrapped, Judy Fayard’s piece ran in
Life
—as a cover story, no less, the first major American magazine to accord Clint this distinction. The cover line may have been snide (“The world’s favorite movie star is—no kidding—Clint Eastwood”) and its rationale may have been dubious—Fayard cited a poll of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and his number-two standing in the latest Quigley poll of exhibitors (behind Paul Newman, but ahead of John Wayne and Steve McQueen)—but it was the act, not the facts, that was important. By risking that week’s all-important newsstand sales on his image, the fading but still-powerful magazine altered perceptions of him. Up to now, given the odd route he had followed to stardom, the media had treated him as a curiosity, very possibly a short-lived one.
Life
, in contrast, was suggesting that an authentic force, perhaps even a new sociocultural icon with whom everyone was now obliged to reckon seriously, had been born.