Clint Eastwood (75 page)

It also gave him, of course, his signature moment, the line of dialogue with which he will forever be identified. One reason he says he kept returning to Dirty Harry is that he always got the good lines, and this one he recognized on the first reading of Joseph C. Stinson’s script as
“the
punch line of the picture.” Moreover, he liked the way it was contextualized. Preoccupied by yet another bawling out from his boss, Harry repairs to his favorite lunch counter for a cup of coffee and (unnoticed by most viewers) a study of a newspaper’s help-wanted ads. Focusing on them, he doesn’t notice that gunmen have the place under siege until his waitress, trying to send a silent signal, pours excessive amounts of sugar, which he doesn’t take, into his cup. He finally gets the message, exits, returns through a back door, gets the drop on the criminals and starts referring to himself in the plural. We? Who’s we? “Smith and Wesson and me,” he replies tightly. Much shooting, screaming and property destruction ensue, with Harry finally holding a gun on the gang’s leader while he, in turn, holds a gun to a hostage’s head, threatening to pull the trigger if he is not allowed to escape. It is then that the great moment occurs: “Go ahead, make my day.”

Strong as it was, Clint says, “I didn’t realize it would ricochet around
the world quite like it did.” Neither did the reviewers. Only
Time
’s Richard Corliss took significant notice of it. But it became a vernacular catch phrase in a matter of weeks, and then the president of the United States took it up. In March 1983, when Congress looked as if it might raise taxes, Ronald Reagan announced that he would happily veto the attempt and borrowed both the line and Clint’s hissed delivery of it to suggest his resolve.

That was fine with Clint—the picture was still in release. What is not so fine is the way it goes on haunting him. Autograph hunters use it when they thrust pen and paper at him. Emcees use it to introduce him. When he takes questions from the floor after appearances even at august forums like the British Film Institute people ask him to repeat it. A woman interested in carnal knowledge of the star once hired an airplane to tow a banner displaying the phrase over a golf course where he was playing.

Clint was more than usually ambivalent about
Sudden Impact
, perhaps because its impetus was a marketing survey, about which he is habitually contemptuous. This one, however, was more than usually objective. Someone was testing the possibility of Sean Connery returning as James Bond and asked respondents how they would feel about other stars reprising their most famous roles. Clint coming back as Dirty Harry turned out to be their favorite idea. “
So they [Warner Bros.] came to me and said I had to make another one,” says Clint. “They were ready to start that Friday.”

It took a few Fridays to come up with a story he liked—a story that, as it happened, had a very potent gimmick. But still … Dirty Harry again. Talking to Mailer on the set he said, “I thought I’d done all I can with it, and I might have. I don’t know. But everybody kept asking about it.” Years later he added, “It was a time in my life when I’d try the other things,” he says, “and the public didn’t flock to them.”

“Some stiff’s got himself a .38 caliber vasectomy,” a cop informs Harry Callahan as he arrives at
Sudden Impact
’s first crime scene, and, indeed, the corpse has two wounds—one in the genitals, the other in the brain. There will be others like him, but we soon understand that the killer is fragile, chilly Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), painter of haunted pictures and victim along with her sister of a gang rape many years ago. The sister has been rendered catatonic by the experience; Jennifer, as we can see, psychopathic—a “Dirty Harriet” as many reviewers could not resist calling her. Such suspense as the film has to offer lies not in Harry’s discovering the killer’s identity, but in his determining whether or not to arrest her. Since he is in love with her, it is not hard to guess his decision.

This character—a woman bent on masculine-style vengeance, and accomplishing it—had a certain originality. There had been nothing quite like her on the screen before (and rarely enough since), and the novelty of the idea, as much as Clint’s return to his signature role, accounts for
Sudden Impact
’s stunning popular success. Unfortunately, having determined to make this gesture, the film does not execute it as crisply as it might have. There is, as David Ansen wrote, “
the makings of a fascinating multi-level melodrama” here, but it doesn’t happen, perhaps, he speculated, because of mixed motives on Clint’s part: “Eastwood doesn’t want to let down his Dirty Harry fans, but at the same time he wants to take this character into deeper and murkier waters. The result is curious, a disquisition on the justice of revenge written with a spray can.” In particular, one feels, the conventional jocularities of the series mix very uneasily with the intensity of Locke’s character and the terrible nature of the wrong done her and her sister, which is quite unblinkingly recounted in flashbacks.

Yet because the film was rather interestingly shot—Clint’s camera glides very coolly here, almost hypnotically—a certain tolerance for it was displayed in some critical quarters. David Denby in
New York
made the most salient point. Reviewing
Sudden Impact
in tandem with
Uncommon Valor
(a movie about a mission to rescue Vietnam MIAs that succeeds) he called both of them “surprisingly well-made” and identified the secret not just of their success (Ted Kotcheff’s film was the unpredicted hit of the season), but of all such works: “
They make contact with a stratum of pessimism that runs very deep in this country—a sort of lumpen despair that goes beyond, or beneath, politics. In these movies, America is a failure, a disgrace—a country run on the basis of expediency and profit, a country that has betrayed its ideals. The attack is directed not merely at liberals or ‘permissiveness’ but at something more fundamental—the modern bureaucratic state and capitalism itself.”

Better late than never, this acute analysis of the new style in subversion. Better late than never the recognition that accrued to Clint as a “
feminist filmmaker.” It was a writer named Tom Stempel who advanced this idea at a moment when, seemingly, its time had come. His piece established a line that would be followed, especially by sympathetic feature writers, many of them women, to this day. Writing in the Los Angeles
Times
, Stempel was himself reacting to an article about strong heroines in recent films that had omitted mention of Locke and
Sudden Impact
. This oversight, he said, was the result of Clint’s macho image; critics just didn’t think to look in his movies for powerful female figures or were so preoccupied with him that they ignored them. He then proceeded to offer a list of such women, including, of course, Jessica
Walter’s mad stalker in
Misty
and Tyne Daly’s female detective, but adding to it Locke’s
Gauntlet
and
Bronco Billy
characters, Kay Lenz’s Breezy and, more interestingly, the strong older women played by Ruth Gordon and Paula Trueman in, respectively, the
Which Way
films and
Josey Wales
, as well as the disparate Native American women in the latter picture and in
Bronco Billy
. It was an impressive, wide-ranging gathering.

Asked about the piece, Clint gave what would, with only small variants, become a practiced response: “
It’s very simple. I’ve always been interested in strong women. When I was growing up the female roles were equal to the men, and the actresses were just as strong as the actors. Now, in a lot of movies, you seem to have half a cast. The guy will be a big macho star. The woman will be a wimp. Women in the audience don’t like that, and I believe men don’t either.”

He blamed this situation on his fellows. Men, he said, have the final decision in most movie casting and cast mainly for looks. “They cast an interesting man, and then for the woman they go for a model, a centerfold girl.” He went the other way, he said in later reflections on this topic, out of simple self-interest. If he had a good actress in a strongly written part it made his job as a leading man that much easier; he had someone to share the burden with.

Something more than feminist sympathy was at work here; masculine ambivalence also contributed to his attitude. The joke among the guys in the Universal talent program, when they were asked to do certain kinds of scenes, was “Time to take my Man Pills,” meaning time to go kick down a door and treat a woman rough. Clint always thought that was a stupid movie convention insisted upon by the sort of insecure, overcompensating males who, then as now, hold the front-office jobs in Hollywood. As we have long since observed, masculinity was a much more vexed topic for Clint. By the late eighties he was telling Carrie Rickey: “
As far as the tormented male thing goes, maybe I’m interested in it because it’s an obsolete thing—masculinity, I mean. There’s very few things men are required for, except maybe siring. I guess I’m interested in the insecurities that keep outsiders outside.”

In 1983 he bought a script by Richard Tuggle called
Tightrope
, which brought together the most visibly and darkly tormented male he had yet played and an extremely strong and hugely sympathetic feminist figure, a rape counselor named Beryl Thibodeaux (very well played by Geneviève Bujold). She is obliged to engage directly and tensely with
Clint’s Wes Block, a New Orleans vice-squad detective, in an investigation of a series of sex crimes that becomes, as well, a metaphoric investigation of certain dark aspects of male sexuality.

There was originality in this concept. In movies, the flaws plaguing a hero are generally old-growth, the result of some long-ago wrong or trauma. But Wes Block is dealing with a live one, and a nasty one, a sexual issue that has arisen out of recent events in his life and is driving his nighttime behavior. Divorced and bitter about it, single-parenting his two daughters and happy about that, he is keeping his sex life rigidly separated from his home life, and rigidly separated from his moral sense as well. Not so his professional life. As a vice cop he knows where all the pretty bodies are cribbed, and he knows, too, which ones will submit to bondage, to the control he needs to reassert over women since his wife has slipped, as one might put it, the bonds of matrimony.

A psychopath is sadistically killing prostitutes, and seems to know, as well, that Wes shares his kinks, albeit acting on them in a much milder manner. There is even an attempt—not long or very persuasively pursued—to make us believe that Wes might just possibly be the killer, which in at least one draft Tuggle says he tried to stress more forcefully. (Changing his voice slightly, Clint did loop some of the lines spoken by the killer before we see his face, hoping to set up a few ambiguous resonances.) What emerged instead was a plot in which the murderer is identified as a former police officer Wes once arrested, with these new depredations designed first to frame Wes, ultimately to place his loved ones in deadly peril.

These are the elements, perhaps, of a slightly better than usual
policier
. Two factors transform them and the film into something more memorable. The first is Clint’s willingness to play a character actually in the grips of an unsavory obsession, someone not just suspected or falsely accused of it, but actually acting on it. It is the same impulse (taken further) that permitted him to play the undone and nearly undone womanizers of
The Beguiled
and
Play Misty for Me
. It is, as well, a crucial, though generally unobserved, element setting Clint apart from his peers. As William Goldman once put it: “
Here is one of the basic lessons a screenwriter must learn and live with: Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now.”

Asked at the time how he dared break this most basic rule of above-the-title life, Clint was self-dismissive: “
Just too dumb, I guess.” Sure. But wouldn’t the notion of “brutal frankness” cover the case more accurately?
Tightrope
may represent the largest, certainly the most obvious, payoff on that habit of mind.

Clint insisted on changing the story’s locale from the scripted San
Francisco to New Orleans, in part to avoid confusion with the
Dirty Harry
films, in part because he liked the latter’s funkiness. They shot in real New Orleans brothels, baths, sex shops and so on, in one of which, he recalls, the crew was afraid to touch the walls and furnishings for fear of contracting disease. The talk in this movie is as real as the settings, with a solid ring of quotidian truth about it. It is, for example, a film that acknowledges the propensity of children to ask astonishing, embarrassing questions. “Daddy, what’s a hard-on?” one of Wes’s kids pipes up, out of nowhere, as they are riding innocently along in a car one day. It is also a film in which, chided for turning down the offer of a male prostitute—“How do you know if you haven’t tried it?”—the hero replies, “Maybe I have,” and you don’t entirely dismiss the possibility.

These contrasting exchanges mark the far ends of the psychological tightrope Wes teeters upon. It is Beryl’s function to help him clamber down from this wire where he has strung himself out, and it is in their well-written and -acted exchanges, in the edginess with which they come closer to one another, that the movie finds much of its distinction. They meet professionally, and he uses the excuse of wanting to get her insights into the mind of the killer to pursue her. One day, he visits a self-defense class she conducts for women, watching quietly, unobserved by her, as she demonstrates against a dummy various karate moves they might apply to an assailant, climaxing with a sharp kick to the testicles. The manikin’s eyes light up, its tongue lolls out of its mouth, and the tennis balls representing its genitals go bouncing across the floor toward Wes. He picks one up, holds it out to her and with his sweetest little-boy smile says, “Hi.”