To the Editor:

How nice that Richard Grenier [“The World’s Favorite Movie Star,” April] has discovered Clint Eastwood twenty years after the rest of America (outside of New York). Just to set the record straight, here’s the correct quotation from the last scene of Dirty Harry:

Eastwood to Andy Robinson (the Scorpio killer): “I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking, ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Now to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?”

Nitpicking, I know. Still, the lines are interesting because they repeat, almost word for word, a speech Dirty Harry makes to another criminal at the beginning of the film. But there are two differences: (1) Harry doesn’t shoot the first criminal (who, unlike Scorpio, is smart enough not to go for his gun), and (2) Eastwood delivers the first speech with irony (since Harry knows the crook won’t challenge him) and the second with contempt (since Harry wants to kill Scorpio). I’m not sure what that says about the legal philosophy of Dirty Harry, but it does attest to Eastwood’s acting ability (you’d have to see the film), which—if anything—Mr. Grenier underestimates.

A few additional comments: some time in the early 70’s, after the first Dirty Harry film, Eastwood gave a marvelous response to a reporter who asked if the series “glorified violence.” Eastwood replied that Dirty Harry “glorified competence.”

Mr. Grenier for his part is so interested in glorifying Eastwood that he excuses the most outrageous aspect of Sudden Impact: instead of shooting the mass murderer at the end of the film, Harry lets her go—because she’s a woman, and because her killings have been “justified” by flashbacks that reveal she was raped by the men she killed. Is Harry going soft on feminism? Maybe so, but it’s more likely that Eastwood and his writers are remarkably shrewd in covering all the bases.

Finally, the Dirty Harry films and Eastwood’s Westerns are both fantasies (at least for males) and black comedies. As fond as I am of Eastwood and his work, I’m dubious that they can sustain the weight of Mr. Grenier’s analysis.

Robert Asahina
New York City

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To the Editor:

Although I have not seen High Noon in many years, to my recollection its plot differs substantially from Richard Grenier’s summary, and the differences suggest that Mr. Grenier’s nostalgia for pre-Vietnam America has played a trick on his memory and caused him to misread the film’s ethical message by 180°.

As I recall, at the beginning of High Noon the sheriff (Gary Cooper), apparently a convert to pacifism, is about to hang up his gun and marry a beautiful, refined Quaker girl (Grace Kelly). But when news arrives that Frank Miller, whom the sheriff had captured, is out of jail and gunning for revenge, the sheriff, choosing between two principles, decides to meet the challenge. As a result, the sheriff’s Quaker bride prepares to leave town on the very train that will bring back Frank Miller.

Although the townspeople selfishly refuse to help their sheriff and leave him to meet Miller and his gang alone, Mr. Grenier is wrong to state that “all alone he guns them down, one by one. . . .” One person does come to the sheriff’s aid: his Quaker bride. When she hears the sound of gunshots, true love overcomes her pacifist scruples and she rushes back to the town. Obtaining a revolver from somewhere she shoots one of the outlaws in the back (at great emotional/histrionic cost) just as he is about to kill Gary Cooper. Only thus does justice prevail in the town. Then the sheriff throws away his badge and goes off with his Quaker bride.

High Noon and High Plains Drifter (which I’ve never seen; daringly I rely on Mr. Grenier’s summary) therefore have in common only the element of a gun fighter who more or less alone defends a town of cowards. Mr. Grenier should not be surprised that the kind of reviewer who liked High Noon didn’t like High Plains Drifter, because, aesthetic considerations aside, the cultural values of the films are quite opposed. High Noon gives very favorable play to pacifism. Although the sheriff and his Quaker bride compromise their pacifist ideals, they do so only in defense of other principles, and indeed among the characters of High Noon only they have any principles to defend, for the townspeople are ruthlessly caricatured as selfish vermin. Grace Kelly’s brave deed at the climax implies the moral supremacy of pacifists as more benign than others under normal circumstances, in a crisis more courageous and forceful, and always more steadfast in their commitments. When Gary Cooper contemptuously crushes his sheriff’s star and rides away with Grace Kelly, he chooses private pacifism over public law enforcement.

If High Noon was “one of the greatest of the classic Westerns” as Mr. Grenier proclaims it, then the Middle American moviegoers of 1952 must have had some sentiments that Mr. Grenier would deny to them. Film hero John Wayne, however, did not share Mr. Grenier’s and America’s fondness for High Noon. In fact, he detected a pinkish tinge in it. In a May 1971 Playboy interview Wayne declared High Noon “detrimental to our way of life” and boasted (bulwark of liberty that he was) of “having helped run Foreman [Carl Foreman, screenwriter of High Noon] out of this country.” Yet Wayne’s summary of High Noon, like Mr. Grenier’s, makes no mention of the sheriff’s pacifist bride. Wayne regarded the cowardice of the townspeople as in itself “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

So perhaps Mr. Grenier should consider the possibility that High Plains Drifter, whatever its intention, may really accept and propagate the terms of a hostile depiction of America as a nation of cowardly self-seekers. Cynical movies about towns not worth defending do not encourage people to defend their communities.

Bruce A. Heiden
Ithaca, New York

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Richard Grenier writes:

Given the abuse which so many film critics have heaped on Clint Eastwood, he will no doubt be thrilled to hear that Robert Asahina finds that I (who compare him with Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper) have “if anything” underestimated his acting ability. But Mr. Asahina seems to have mistaken my general purpose. Some months ago I wrote an essay on Ingmar Bergman [“Bergman Discovers Love,” COMMENTARY, September 1983] without giving anyone the impression that I thought I was “discovering” him fresh from Sweden. My purpose with Eastwood, as with Bergman, was to place him in his historical context, to explain his major themes and the eccentricities of his career (which made him a giant star abroad years before his films were even known in the U.S.). Now it is my view that Eastwood’s overriding themes are justice—including vigilante justice—valor, and the legitimacy, when necessary, of violence. Mr. Asahina does not agree? Since I know him to be an astute critic himself, let me entice him into offering an analysis slightly more extensive than the statement that the Eastwood films are simply “fantasies” and “black comedies.” After all, Panizza’s Council of Love is surely a black comedy. Are we just to let it go at that?

I refer Bruce A. Heiden, first, to a moderate-sized dictionary. The one I have at hand describes pacifism as being “nonresistance to violence.” I grant Mr. Heiden freely that I neglected to mention in my summary of Gary Cooper’s High Noon that the sheriff (Cooper) is taking a Quaker wife (Grace Kelly), and that in the heat of battle “true love overcomes her pacifist scruples” and she guns down one of the outlaws. But how Mr. Heiden can construe this as bringing greater glory to pacifism escapes me entirely.

For what then is Mr. Heiden’s Perfect Pacifist? Let us say he is an Englishman and voted in 1933 for the resolution of the Oxford Union not to fight “for king and country” (this is presumably the phase when the Perfect Pacifist displays what Mr. Heiden calls his “moral supremacy . . . under normal circumstances”). Next, Hitler attacks—strengthened in his confidence by the actions of such as our Perfect Pacifist. Millions die. When France falls the French pacifists go over to the Nazis almost to a man. But let us grant Mr. Heiden his fancy. Let us assume our English Perfect Pacifist fights Hitler like the very devil. But when peace comes, “always more steadfast in his commitments,” he returns to his earlier mode, pledging never to defend his country, once again displaying his “moral supremacy . . . under normal circumstances.” What is this but some kind of sanctimonious, and dangerous, charade?

Mr. Heiden will be surprised to hear that I am not a surrogate of John Wayne, who in any case objected to High Noon not because it gives a “very favorable play to pacifism” (which it does not), but because it portrays the citizens of almost an entire American town as cowards. Wayne’s personal antipathy toward Carl Foreman (a former member of the Communist party), comes from a different source in any event. But it might also surprise Mr. Heiden that, radically opposed as they were in their political views, Foreman was no more a pacifist than Wayne. Long after the fact, Foreman set forth an allegorical interpretation of High Noon according to which it was all really the story of the Hollywood Ten (a meaning certainly missed by the American public when the film was released). The Hollywood Ten, Mr. Heiden will recall, were not pacifists. Gary Cooper, one of the country’s more militant anti-Communists of the period, made still another demonstration of the fundamental irrationality of Quaker pacifism in his celebrated The Friendly Persuasion (1956), uncredited at the time but written, we now know, by the blacklisted “uncooperative witness” Michael Wilson.

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