Clint Eastwood (53 page)

The solid box-office performance that fall of
Play Misty for Me
tended to confirm that impression, and, in Clint’s mind, so did Warner’s hopeful attentiveness as
Dirty Harry
moved through postproduction. Its executives drew director and star into their marketing plans, treating them not as wayward “talent,” but as intelligent adults with something to contribute to this effort. Says Clint: “They called us over and said, ‘We want to show you guys what we got, kind of get your enthusiasm,’
and they had this whole layout of stuff, how to release it and promote it, and it seemed so progressive compared to what they were doing at Universal.” To this day he keeps on his office wall one of the posters that was eventually rejected. The headline reads: “Dirty Harry and the Homicidal Maniac. Harry’s the One with the Badge.”

Clint began thinking that perhaps Warners was the place for him. He also began thinking
Dirty Harry
“could be a successful movie.” Even so, he was quite unprepared for the public’s response to it, let alone the critical controversy it engendered. By the time it was ready for a sneak preview at Graumann’s Chinese, Clint was on location near Bishop, California, shooting
Joe Kidd
. He remembers a phone report from someone at the studio telling him “the place just came unglued; people were going crazy,” as the audience cheered Harry on.

Similar responses greeted the picture as it went into release during the 1971 Christmas season, where it far outstripped the other holiday releases, eventually returning some $22 million to the studio in domestic theatrical rentals alone. Critical reaction was much more measured. Roger Greenspun in
The New York Times
found it “
a sad and perhaps inevitable step downward” from Siegel’s previous police dramas, with Harry an “iron-jawed self-parody” of the dutifulness Siegel had previously celebrated. He noted, but brushed off, Harry’s carelessness about civil liberties, insisting instead that it was the film’s failures of “credibility” that fatally flawed it. Others linked the film to a readily discernible upsurge in violent movies, yet another attempt to test the limits of the rating system that had replaced the Motion Picture Association of America’s tattered system of prior restraint, the production code, three years earlier.

The only completely positive review in a major publication came from
Time
’s Jay Cocks. He observed that the film was “
bound to upset adherents of liberal criminal-rights legislation,” but went on to say that reinforced the movie’s theme: “that both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world.” Citing the film’s “desperate awareness that … the only end of movement is pain,” Cocks also implied a notion that action films, because of their highly conventionalized nature, create a set of moral imperatives—perhaps even a moral universe—all their own, to which the standards by which we judge other movies only awkwardly apply. He placed
Dirty Harry
on his magazine’s ten-best list for 1971.

He was alone not only in his praise for the film, but also in his writing about it as something more than lowlife entertainment, worthy of sustained attention. The movie opened on the same day as Sam Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs
, which, given the director’s reputation and the film’s
particularly vivid rape scene, seemed to require much more sober thumb sucking. Certainly nothing in these early considerations predicted Kael’s vicious assault on the picture.

One still gropes for some rational justification for it. All one can say with certainty is that at the moment, she, like many of her colleagues, wanted her readers to stop and think about the increasingly bold portrayal of violent behavior on the screen. Two weeks earlier she had been forced to come to grips with Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
, two weeks later she was obliged to contemplate
Straw Dogs
, and both disturbed her as deeply as
Dirty Harry
did. One needs to consult those pieces to discover the full context of her outrage.

Discussing Kubrick’s film she had written that “
we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure,” that directors like him were “desensitizing us” to its horrors. At the same time she was aware of “an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship.” Obviously, this placed the responsible reviewer in a difficult position: One did not want to give aid and comfort to forces that had for decades juvenilized American movies; at the same time, one did not want to endorse that which one found distasteful merely because it was chic and challenged the “squares,” as Kael called them. Her strategy was to substitute passionate analytical contempt for censoriousness. She concluded her review by asking: “How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

Dirty Harry
became her next case in point. In its way it was a more difficult one. Her arguable objections to
A Clockwork Orange
had been based on its chilly eroticizing of violence, but that argument was inapplicable here. We knew there was an erotic element in Scorpio’s choice of a kidnapping victim, but aside from a briefly held long shot of her nude corpse being lifted out of her tomb, nothing of the torments he inflicted on her were shown or even discussed in detail. The film was as discreet as anyone could wish when it came to linking sex and violence. But as a serious critic with a reputation for burrowing “deeper into movies” Kael would not simply register her squeamishness about the film and let it go.

She did not charge the film with vigilantism, an issue that has preoccupied its latter-day commentators. She obviously recognized that many, if not most, of the heroes in American popular fiction and film are in some sense vigilantes, obliged eventually to take the law into their own hands because the organizations charged with enforcing it are too dumb, numb or crooked to do so effectively.

But fascism, with its implication of racism—that was hot, strong stuff. And never mind that it misconstrues Harry’s character and the movie’s intent. The dictionary defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement or regime … that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” There is nothing in that definition that fits Harry Callahan. He has nothing to say, exalting or otherwise, about nation; he is, as we have seen, color-blind when it comes to race, and the only opposition he wants to suppress is the criminal class; if he actually favored “centralized, autocratic government” or regimentation, his relationship with the paramilitary structure he serves would be—shall we say?—somewhat less contentious than it is.

As a scholar named Eric Patterson would argue a few years later, crime is a pretext, not a text, in this movie and its sequels: “
The real target … is the power structure in which the Eastwood character is enmeshed.” His rage is directed against “the mayors and police commissioners who are concerned primarily with protecting and perpetuating their own power, and who perceive Harry Callahan and others like him simply as a means to those ends.” If, he says, the films endorse certain “reactionary policies,” they also “embody an element of protest against exploitation which is surprisingly radical.” Read in this way Harry’s indifference to
Miranda
and
Escobedo
becomes logically explicable; they sound to him like more bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, yet another incomprehensible—and uncomprehending—memo from on high.

Kael’s case against the rest of the movie is similarly overstated and more deviously argued. By making Scorpio motivelessly malign, a figure beyond the reach of ordinary sociopsychological explanation, the film makes “
the basic contest between good and evil … as simple as you can get … more archetypal than most movies, more primitive and dreamlike,” imparting to it the “fairy-tale appeal” of “fascist medievalism.” By this she meant that it showed crime to be the product of inexplicable wickedness, “without specific cause or background.…”

This, she argues, sends a deliberately perverse message. For if evil is in fact beyond human comprehension, a sport of nature, then by implication we are all licensed to kill without compunction or regret when we encounter it. If, on the other hand, “
crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice”—conditions for which everyone is obliged to bear a burden of guilt—then its artistic representation must engender in us some “sympathy,” some “responsibility” for the criminal.

Yes—if this were a remake of
Knock on Any Door
or
Dead End
. Or,
possibly, if that black bank robber had turned out to be Harry’s chief antagonist. But none of that is true. Nor is this least “dreamlike” of fictions by any means the first to present us with a villain whose monstrousness passed all rational understanding. What psychological explanation can we offer for the doctors Moriarty and Marbuse? Or, for that matter, lago and Richard III? In certain contexts we have always relished characters who proclaim their wickedness in a large and fiery hand and are relieved when they fail to excuse themselves with tales of “deprivation” or “social injustice.” They speak to our instinctive understanding that from time to time figures transcending our customary definitions of good and evil appear in our lives, or, anyway, in our tabloids. In the modern world, they are often serial killers like Scorpio: the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer, to name a few of the many strange creatures who have swum up from the murk of modern life and are not to be explained adequately by poverty or parental abuse.

There is something uncharacteristically prissy, almost social workerish, in the language Kael uses to address this issue. It reflects an ambivalence about the movie audience and about the people who make movies that runs unresolved through the entire body of her work. She understood, better than most, that movies affect us “
on sensual and primitive levels” and are therefore “a supremely pleasurable—and dangerous—art form.” So even though she was a populist, she was ever a nervous one. In 1969 when Lawrence Alloway curated a retrospective exhibition entitled
The American Action Movie: 1946–1964
at the Museum of Modern Art, he observed in the accompanying monograph that action pictures embrace “
a pragmatic willingness to kill when that is required by the situation and a highly developed short-term skepticism about moral principles.” He identified this attitude as part of the nation’s “covert culture,” which he rather nicely defined as that generally unspoken collection of “shady habits, archaic responses and conflicting impulses that are sufficiently general to form patterns of related ideas and images.” The action movie, Alloway observed, consistently drew on, and catered to, this culture, and he noted—with near-comic mildness—that “there seems to be a greater interest in violence in the mass audience than is tolerable to elite critics of society.”

Kael could not accept a vision of the mass audience that acknowledged a certain raw and honest realism in some of its otherwise execrable tastes. She preferred to see it as essentially innocent, unable to defend itself against exploitation by a motion-picture industry, toward which she always took a Manichaean stance. Utterly bereft of moral and aesthetic aspirations this system, as she saw it, corrupted not only its audience, but all whom it employed. Or almost all. For within it there
toiled a few people whose artistic integrity was exemplary, lonely rebels pursuing their singular visions, struggling against desperate odds to function as true artists, in the process often rendering themselves unemployable. These few, these brave unhappy few, she always championed.

Donald Siegel, unabashed maker of bluntly, unapologetically violent B pictures, a man who, despite a Cambridge education, seemed never to question the values of the covert culture, was not one of them. Clint Eastwood, up out of television and spaghetti westerns, this new lowbrow favorite who had yet to demonstrate qualms or regrets about doing harm to people on-screen, was not one of them either. By their works Kael knew everything she needed to know about them, which was that they stood for all that she loathed about the hateful system that had corrupted the medium she loved and was forever threatening the masses that she both idolized and patronized.

If this seems an overly schematic representation of Kael’s position, one need only study her review of Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs
. He was the only western revisionist to rank with Leone, and it is possible to argue that finally a serious critic had to side with one or the other—the starkly, darkly romantic Italian or the lushly elegiac American. Kael had long since chosen the latter (which may have made Clint guilty by association with the former), for he was her kind of rebel angel, a hugely talented director and often a very sympathetic figure, wearing, especially around his more impressionable admirers, an air of soft-spoken victimization.

He was, as well, a self-destructive alcoholic whose contentious relationships with producers were legendary and, to some, a further earnest of his integrity. He was often out of work, and when he did work he was always having his pictures taken away from him and recut by other hands. Nor was he always careful in his choice of material, which, indeed, became increasingly incomprehensible in the later years of his career.

Be that as it may, Kael’s agony as she confronted
Straw Dogs
was clearly visible. On its face, it was everything she despised; the story of a wimpish mathematician living in rural England whose wife is raped and sodomized by village yobbos and who in avenging her reclaims his manhood. It is a thoroughly nasty (and thoroughly riveting) piece of work—talk about eroticizing violence!—expressing at least as many of the covert culture’s values as
Dirty Harry
did (the woman, for example, seems to invite the rape, then eventually relaxes and enjoys it, virtually parodying moronic males’ suppositions about sex crimes). But there was, Kael argued, a higher purpose at work here. Peckinpah wanted us “
to dig into the sexiness of violence,” she said, while exhibiting a worked-out “aesthetic of cruelty.” His slow-motion representations of bad behavior
“fix the images of violence in your imagination,” “make them seem already classic and archaic.” Thus, in her mind, was “a fascist classic” born—a statement of authentic belief on the part of an authentic artist, as opposed to the “greedy, opportunistic” fascism of those hacks Siegel and Eastwood.