Clint Eastwood (65 page)

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.”

“No,” she said, “I’m just a dumpy little movie critic, and I have to do that,” he quotes her, doubtlessly paraphrasing. She then went on to say that she needed to call attention to herself, “keep her ratings up,” as Clint puts it. “I understand completely,” he remembers saying. He also remembers her saying that she hoped they could meet sometime, which he continues to think is the most astonishing aspect of their exchange.

In his dogged way Clint continued to pursue the matter. A month later, in a lengthy interview in the
Village Voice
, he was heard to growl: “
She was taken by
Last Tango;
it seemed to be romantic to her. But for me, that movie was an affront to women.… I mean if buttering up a girl’s ass and giving it a probe job is romantic sex, or represents male tenderness, then I’m sorry, but I’m on a different plane from her. Higher or lower, depending on whose opinion. Jesus, how can she not see that as violent?” This was not an entirely unreasonable review of the reviewer, though it was not an entirely fair consideration of the movie, either.

As for
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, Clint is surprisingly equable about its initial dim reception: “I was still persona non grata then,” he said recently. But he was then—and remains—utterly confident of its worth. “I suppose if that story were being submitted to me today I’d feel the same way about it, and go after it with the same enthusiasm I did then. I don’t know if I can say that about a lot of the things I’ve done. I do believe that if I’d made that picture in 1992, in place of
Unforgiven
, it might have received the same amount of attention, because I think it’s equally as good a film. I think the subject matter of
Josey Wales
is timeless.”

So it has proved to be. At the time, Clint was consoled by the fact that European critics received it much more favorably than their American counterparts did. Gradually, over the years, others have come around to his view of it. In retrospective considerations of his career, it now tends to be regarded as a turning point—“his best work to date,” according to an admiring 1982 essay in
The New York Review of Books;
“the most ambitious and emotionally rich of the Eastwood-directed westerns,” as David Anson put it in 1985; “one of his best pictures,” David Thomson conceded.

Six years after its release it received a treasurable accolade—and a brief, smart reading—from an unlikely source. Orson Welles years before had approached Clint in Spain about appearing in one of his many unmade projects. Later he would approach him with his hopeless script
The Big Brass Ring
. Now he was making one of his many latter-day appearances
on Merv Griffin’s talk show, and the conversation turned to that summer’s releases with Welles saying something not very enthusiastic about Clint’s
Firefox
, to which he quickly appended praise for
The Outlaw Josey Wales
.

It brought applause from the studio audience, and agreement from the host, who is a friend of Clint’s. “
That was a wonderful film,” said Griffin.

“I suppose Clint Eastwood is the most underrated director in the world today,” Welles rumbled on. “I’m not talking about him as a star.

“They don’t take him seriously,” Welles added, “the way they don’t take beautiful girls seriously. They can’t believe they can act if they’re beautiful—they must be a little ugly to be taken seriously by men. And an actor like Eastwood is such a pure type of mythic hero-star in the Wayne tradition that no one is going to take him seriously as a director. But someone ought to say it. And when I saw that picture for the fourth time, I realized that it belongs with the great westerns. You know, the great westerns of Ford and Hawks and people like that. And I take my hat off to him. I’m glad to have had a chance to say that.”

Here, in an unexpected context, an appropriately admiring linkage—between Clint’s film and the tradition it grew from and commented upon—was made for the first time in public, and an appropriate irony regarding the overwhelming power of his image and its effect on critical opinion was observed. These were matters of obvious moment to Welles, who had endured analagous misunderstandings of himself and his work, and in the years ahead they would slowly, almost imperceptibly, become commonplaces in the critical (and popular) discourse surrounding Clint Eastwood and his work.

I
n every great star career there comes a time to signal in some completely obvious way that whatever the joke about you is, you’re in on it. In this matter, timing is everything; self-satire offered too soon suggests cynicism, too late it proposes cluelessness. Clint, now utterly secure in his stardom and freedom of choice, caught the moment perfectly. Four of the five movies he made between 1976 and 1980 offered broad, mainly comic variations on his screen character, each a little more radical than its predecessor until, finally, he had moved about as far as it was possible for him to get from Dirty Harry Callahan. The other film of this period,
Escape from Alcatraz
, went to the opposite extreme, toward a stark minimalism of characterization like that of the Leone pictures, but, if anything, darker and more enigmatic.

This shift was mirrored by a radical change in his private life. By the time the decade turned, his marriage would be over—though the formalities of its dissolution would not be completed until 1984—and his relationship with Sondra Locke, publicly denied for some years and always somewhat unconventional in its particulars, would become a central fact of his life. It would seem there was a contentment in the first years of this relationship that had been absent in the later years of his marriage and that surely contributed to the ease and good humor that is visible on the screen.