It starts with a vulgar case of armed robbery. Three thugs break into a lunch counter, where, to their misfortune, Dirty Harry Callahan is in the habit of taking his absent-minded snacks. Tipped off, Callahan enters the coffee shop, is fired at, and returns the fire, putting two of the thugs permanently out of action. But a third thug is still on the loose, and grabs a waitress as hostage. Police sirens are beginning to wail outside, and the thug knows that his one chance of escaping now is to demand a getaway car and safe passage, keeping the waitress as his cherished hostage. His only problem is Detective Harry Callahan. The nervous thug clutches the waitress to him tightly, his pistol against her head. At a shot from the police he will kill his hostage, but not, of course, if a shot from the police blows his head off first. Carefully, Callahan raises his .44 Magnum until he has the criminal’s eyes in his sights. The thug is agitated. The waitress is, understandably, terrified. Callahan is suffused with a deadly calm. “Go ahead,” he says to the thug, who is still considering whether or not to attempt a getaway. “Make my day.” The criminal’s nerve slackens and he throws his weapon to the floor. It is over.
In one form or another, this scene is repeated several times in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series: Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, and now Sudden Impact, from which the above episode is taken. In every one of the scenes there is a criminal who has killed, attempted to kill, or is threatening to kill innocent people. In every one Eastwood, who plays a police detective in San Francisco, places his life on the line. In every one, there is the sardonic, icy challenge: “Try me.” “Do you feel lucky?” “Make my day.” Usually the criminal loses his nerve and surrenders. If not, Callahan blows his head to bits. For dealing with murderers, real or potential, in defense of innocent people, and acting entirely within the rules, Harry Callahan does not hesitate to kill. One might almost suspect he enjoys it. One can see why Clint Eastwood, the world’s biggest and most highly paid movie star for some fifteen years now, is not a particular favorite of the American Civil Liberties Union.
His ethic is not different from that of a soldier. Volunteer or conscript, the infantryman answers his country’s call. His life is placed in peril. At the orders of his captain, or in accordance with the ordinary rules of engagement, he kills the enemy, feeling no qualms—particularly if the enemy has been threatening to kill him or his comrades. It is the law of war, and also common sense. As for the heartlessness, even gratification, that the Clint Eastwood character demonstrates in destroying the social vermin who, he obviously feels, are themselves destroying the fabric of our society, I can only quote a French official’s comments on the special anti-riot force which in 1968 played a key role in containing the social turbulence that was thought to threaten the French Republic: “Well,” he smiled. “You have to find the right man for the job.” Harry Callahan, one feels, is the right man for the job.
But he is not the right man for the job as it is defined by the ACLU, which, starting from the admirable goal of defending civil liberties, now seems more concerned to protect the rights of suspected criminals (often avowed criminals) than the rights of law-abiding citizens. A friend of mine, who happens to be a former member of the National Security Council, has characterized this position as “the domestic equivalent of ‘Better Red than Dead.’” My own view is that the constant hedging-in of the power of the police to accomplish their mission, and of public prosecutors to obtain convictions, is worse than either “Better Red than Dead” or pure pacifism, both of which are rationally defensible positions for those who are willing to accept slavery or who actually desire a Marxist-Leninist regime. (The true pacifist, moreover, might well be prepared to sacrifice his own life, and that of his wife and children, rather than commit the, to him, monstrosity of taking the life of another human being no matter how bloodthirsty.) But my friend was basically correct. There is a link between the extraordinary reluctance of many on the Left to use U.S. military power anywhere in the world, even in self-defense, and the efforts of many liberals at home to inhibit the application of harsh penalties against even confessed criminals. Both groups (and they are often the same people) shrink from the use of force, and this shrinking, on a national scale, places in some jeopardy the nation’s ability to survive under its present institutions.
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Clint Eastwood, to judge by his films, has never had the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice, even rudimentary justice, and he has certainly had none whatever when its use is necessary to assure survival. This attitude has earned him, among some movie reviewers, a reaction that I think it only fair to call hatred. But the animosity of critics, often fatal in our times, has not stopped Clint Eastwood from becoming far and away America’s leading movie star—indeed, far and away the leading movie star of the entire world. The critics have their darlings, like Meryl Streep and Woody Allen, no movie starring either of whom has yet to break into the big money. But far aloft looms Eastwood. Eastwood is number one.
Every year thousands of the nation’s theater owners vote for the most popular movie star. Not only did Eastwood top the list for 1983 but he is the only living star to have made the top ten a full sixteen times—bringing him even with Clark Gable, and snapping at the heels of Gary Cooper. The only member of the Great Dead still out in front is the Duke himself, John Wayne, who, when once asked to guess who would succeed him, answered with his laconic smile, “Eastwood . . . my only logical successor.” As for money, after Every Which Way But Loose (1978), a film Eastwood said ironically he had made for “the bare-knuckle subculture,” he walked away with an estimated $15 million, making him the world’s highest paid actor.
I have written more than once in these pages that with the loss of the giant mass audience to television, and with both TV and Broadway now considered by almost universal accord to be dross, the cinema has been forced almost willy-nilly into becoming the “class act” of the popular entertainment world. Its audience, compared with that of its competitors, is young, affluent, and educated, centering roughly on the university, pre-university, and post-university sectors of the population. Yet, true though this may be for the bulk of films produced by Hollywood, it is obviously not true for the films of Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, and Clint Eastwood.
Everyone in the movie industry knows that Eastwood and Reynolds have a “regional” appeal—so-so at best in New York (where the critical community is centered), but colossal draws in the West and South. My own observations of the crowds that turn out to see a new Eastwood movie in small industrial or agricultural towns near liberal-arts colleges, compared with those that turn out in the same towns to see a new film with Jane Fonda, lead me to think that there are virtually two nations, each easily recognizable by manners and speech. Jane Fonda draws the “university” crowd. Eastwood draws the skilled industrial workers, farmers, men who if they no longer work with their hands come from a different America from the Vassar that produced Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep. Another devoted bloc of Eastwood supporters—a fact not widely realized outside the movie industry—is American blacks. Perhaps one reason for this is that blacks are the first to suffer from increased inner-city crime, and they (if not all their leaders) tend to have extremely severe law-and-order attitudes.
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What you see in Clint Eastwood is pretty much what you get. You would think someone named Clint Eastwood would be named something like Clinton Eastwood, and that’s exactly what his name is: Clinton Eastwood, Jr. His genealogy is also not far off the mark: English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, a close approximation of an amalgam of this country’s original stock. Born in San Francisco in 1931 in extremely modest circumstances, Eastwood was a child of the Depression. His father, Clinton, Sr., could not find steady work and traveled from town to town, holding a series of temporary jobs, taking his wife and little son and daughter with him. Eastwood estimates that they moved so often that in his first ten years of schooling he must have attended ten different schools, making him something of a loner, a wanderer, another throwback to an older America when the country was filled with men roaming the land, looking for work and a place to build a new life. Finally his father found permanent employment in Oakland, California, and Eastwood attended Oakland Technical High School.
Eastwood’s early relationship with his family offers a simple clue to his attitudes toward life and toward his country. He once said in an interview, “My father, always kept telling me, you don’t get something for nothing, and although I rebelled, I never rebelled against that. . . . I always got along great with my parents.” And also: “I think my parents and my grandmother—she was quite a person, very self-sufficient, lived by herself on a mountaintop—probably had more to do with my turning out the way I am than any educational process I may have gone through. . . . I was lucky to have them.”
All his life Eastwood has worked. He has cut timber, baled hay, fought forest fires, labored more than a year as a lumberjack in Oregon. He has worked a blast furnace for the Bethlehem Steel Company in Texas, worked for Boeing in Seattle. Drafted into the army, he managed to work part-time as a stevedore. When the Korean war broke out, Eastwood was teaching other young soldiers how to swim. “My name just didn’t come up,” he says; in a fluke, he was the only man in his outfit not shipped to Korea. But he still managed to crash in a U.S. Navy bomber in a routine mission off the California coast, escaping death narrowly.
After the army, Eastwood enrolled in Los Angeles City College in business administration, earning his way in an ever-lengthening list of spectacularly non-upwardly mobile jobs: gas-station attendant, janitor, digging foundations for swimming pools. He had been nagged for years by friends to make a try at acting in movies, and he finally went to Universal Pictures, asked for an appointment, took a test, cold, and to his surprise was offered a job as a “contract player”—at $75 a week. His first part was a minor role in Revenge of the Creature. He was soon promoted to $100 a week, but, in time, Universal decided Clint Eastwood just didn’t have what it takes and dropped him. By 1958 he was back to digging swimming pools.
Like politicians, actors need to be lucky, and later in the same year, by sheer chance, Eastwood caught the eye of an executive of CBS-TV while having lunch with an employee of the company’s story department. The random encounter led to the offer of a leading role in the network’s upcoming Western series Rawhide, an endless cattle drive suggested by Howard Hawks’s 1948 classic Western, Red River, starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Oddly in view of his subsequent career, but logically in view of his age—still only twenty-seven—Eastwood was not given the John Wayne role but that of Montgomery Clift, the younger man, a part he has described as “sheepish.” Rawhide became one of the most successful series in the history of television, running for a full nine years and syndicated throughout the world.
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Most television stars are born, flourish, and return to dust without ever having made it to the Elysian Fields of “the movies.” This would probably have been the lot of Clint Eastwood if not for one of the more bizarre international cushion shots in the history of the world cinema.
First, it should be known that Akira Kurosawa, almost universally held to be the greatest film director in Japanese history (Rashomon, The Seven Samurai), is a great fan of American Westerns. This is not as eccentric as it sounds. A staple of Japanese movies for decades was the so-called chambara film (the word is an onomatopoeic rendition in Japanese of the clinking-together of swords), action movies set during the endless civil wars of the two-century Tokugawa Shogunate. Although the chambara film is already a close equivalent to the U.S. Western, this was not enough for Kurosawa. He decided to make a chambara movie following the standard story line of the American genre. The result was his masterful Yojimbo.
Next, an obscure but not untalented Italian director named Sergio Leone, seeing Yojimbo, determined to make an “American” adaptation of this Japanese adaptation of an American Western. Leone had also been watching Rawhide on Italian television. He liked Clint Eastwood’s looks, and for $15,000 he had a deal. During the “hiatus” (off-season) from Rawhide, Eastwood turned up in Almeria, Spain, found he was the only man on the set speaking English, somehow or other finished a film he was told was to be named The Magnificent Stranger, and returned to California and Rawhide.
He had kept himself entertained in the acting, however. Tired of the engaging, ingratiating character he played in Rawhide, which had made him the idol of American teenagers, he went all the way in the other direction. In The Magnificent Stranger the Man With No Name, self-possessed, cold-eyed, kills a lot of people and never flinches once. They are all very bad people, of course, so there is no need to feel sorry for them. But the Man With No Name’s hand never trembles. Uncertainty never clouds his brow. Eastwood, who felt the character was far too ruthless for American audiences, returned from Spain certain that the Leone film would never be shown in America. But he had made film history. He had hit the mother lode.
Back in Los Angeles, months after his return, Eastwood was browsing through Variety and noticed that Italy was aboil with plans for more Westerns after the spectacular success of a film called A Fistful of Dollars. The title meant nothing to him. It was only when he saw a second story, that the film sweeping Europe starred Clint Eastwood, that he realized what had happened. The next year he was back making the second of what were to become known as “spaghetti Westerns,” For a Few Dollars More. And the year after that, in 1966, he made the third and last of the Leone-Eastwood collaborations, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Each film was better directed and brought in more money than its predecessor, making Eastwood one of the world’s biggest, most popular, and most highly paid actors. The world, apparently, still loved Westerns, that quintessential piece of U.S. folklore (or mythology, if you will). It loved the action, the blood-and-guts. It loved the directing. And it certainly loved Clint Eastwood. It loved his steely confidence, his self-control, his fearlessness, his assurance that he would win. For if you’re winning people join you. If you lose confidence in yourself, they fall away. It is the way of the world.
In the United States, however, in the mid-60’s, certain highly vocal elements of the population had not only lost confidence in America, they hated it. They accused it of genocide, oppression, official racism, waging unprovoked war against harmless Third World people. They spelled America with a “k” as if it were Nazi Germany reborn. As of the end of 1966, not a single American movie distributor was willing to take a chance on the hottest property in world show business—a native-born American starring in a native American genre. Then in 1967 United Artists took the plunge, and for a modest figure picked up the U.S. distribution rights for the Eastwood-Leone trilogy. It turned out to be one of the best investments the company ever made. Released in chronological order beginning in early 1967, the films received the expected disastrous reviews, but A Fistful of Dollars was one of the company’s biggest moneymakers for years. For a Few Dollars More, released later the same season, made even more money. By the time The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly opened in early 1968—the year, interestingly, of the Tet offensive in Vietnam—crowds for the Eastwood film were vast.
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It has often been said that the recent spectacular upsurge of the so-called women’s “gothic” novel is a reaction against the new feminism, and I think the point could easily be made that the meteoric rise of Clint Eastwood was a reaction against the radicalism of the 60’s. Not that there weren’t heavy thinkers around who did their best to get things upside-down. Two film historians, writing from the perspective of the “unalleviated pessimism” of the 70’s, explained the Eastwood phenomenon as an expression of “revolutionary violence,” going so far as to say that the Eastwood character was “Guevara without the encumbrances.” This is on a level of silliness with claiming that the Lone Ranger was “Lenin without the encumbrances.” Whatever the explanation, before long Life magazine, in its earlier, grander incarnation, ran a cover story with the astonished headline: “the world’s favorite movie star is—no kidding—clint eastwood!”
In the four years after his return to Hollywood as an international star, Eastwood made a mixed bag of eight movies with no clear-cut polemical bent but conventional enough in their morality and patriotism: three Westerns, two World War II films, and a “cop” movie. The one for which he got greater critical praise than he had ever received before in his life was the “Hitchcockian” Play Misty for Me, which he directed himself. In a plot whose initial stages seem to have been suggested by Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Eastwood plays the most popular disc jockey in the Carmel-Monterey area in California. He attracts the passionate attentions of a very forward woman who gradually reveals herself to be hysterically jealous, psychotic, and, ultimately, murderous. In the film’s final scene, with her trying to kill him, he lands a bone-crushing punch to her face, knocking her through the windows, over the balcony, and down into the ocean below. It is all in justifiable self-defense, but one doubts that Play Misty for Me is Gloria Steinem’s favorite movie.
In film after film, with occasional dips and then “corrections,” as with stock-market charts, Clint Eastwood kept moving steadily higher and higher. Several changes also occurred during this period in the way Eastwood worked and led his life. First of all, he left Hollywood and built himself a home on the outskirts of Carmel, some 90 miles from where he was born in San Francisco. He is not a Hollywood-type person and is never, or almost never, seen at gatherings of Hollywood’s gilded set. He does not go with the herd. Second, he organized his own production company which he called Malpaso Productions (after a creek crossing his property in Carmel). “My theory was that I could foul up my career just as well as anyone could foul it up for me, so why not try it?” he said. And also, “I’ve got a six-pack under my arm, and a few pieces of paper and a couple of pencils, and I’m in business. What the hell, I can work in a closet.” Eastwood seems to have no love of show and not a speck of Hollywood megalomania. He knows the movie business well, however, and all his productions come in under schedule and under budget.
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In 1973, for reasons of his own, Eastwood decided to make High Plains Drifter, such an obvious reprise of the themes of his collaborations with Sergio Leone that one is almost tempted to think he wanted to give the “official” Eastwood version of the trilogy. This time, Eastwood directed the picture himself, and his screenwriter was the celebrated Ernest Tidy-man, who had recently won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the hugely successful The French Connection. But High Plains Drifter also has similarities of structure with High Noon, one of the greatest of the classic Westerns, directed by Fred Zinnemann and acted by Gary Cooper almost exactly twenty years before.
In High Noon, frightened townspeople approach their sheriff (Cooper) with the alarming news that a gang of outlaws is heading for the town with the intention of taking it over. The sheriff prepares a defense, but at the last minute finds that not a single other man has the courage to stand with him against the bandits. All alone he guns them down, one by one, but then, out of contempt for the cowardly townspeople, unpins his sheriff’s badge and throws it in the dust.
In High Plains Drifter, the beginning is Leone-esque. The Stranger (Eastwood), as the Man With No Name is known in some of the Leone films, rides into an isolated town in the Southwest some time in the 1870’s. The only clue we have to the Stranger’s identity is nightmares he has as he sleeps in the town hotel. In the nightmares we see a helpless man being whipped to death by shrouded hoodlums as a terrified citizenry stands by, too cowardly to help. By day, the general plot of High Plains Drifter proceeds for a time almost identically with High Noon.
A gang of outlaws is on its way to take over the town. Since there is no sheriff the terrified citizens plead with the Stranger to save them. They are a gang of sniveling cowards, however, and not a man jack among them can be induced to help. Here slight surrealistic and sometimes supernatural notes begin to appear. The Stranger (Eastwood) agrees to save the town, but makes the residents repaint it bright red and rename it “Hell,” after which he disappears. The outlaws arrive and start to kill and loot and burn, but where is the Stranger? It is only when they begin to put the town to the torch that he reappears and wipes out the marauding outlaws to the last man. Now suddenly the townspeople have a mysterious vision of the scene that has haunted the Stranger’s nights: it is of their former sheriff, being whipped to death by these same outlaws while they stood by, afraid to save him. “But who are you?” one of the citizens timidly asks the Stranger who has saved their town, perhaps, but not before allowing a very considerable amount of mayhem and destruction. “You know who I am,” answers the Stranger calmly, and rides out of town as mysteriously as he came.
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Now I, personally, have no idea who Clint Eastwood’s mysterious Stranger is, whether he is the dead sheriff’s brother, or his ghost, or perhaps an avenging angel. But I have no difficulty whatever in reading the morality of the tale, or understanding why the Stranger has the town painted red and renamed “Hell.” What some of Eastwood’s elite critics have difficulty grasping is that in his canon, cowardice is a punishable offense. The idea has become so pervasive among our educated classes that the proper stance for facing the world should be one of accommodating sensitivity that Eastwood’s contrary view—that the proper stance should be one of bravery—marks him as some kind of barbarian. I suspect this is one of the reasons many people cannot bear him—although his attitudes were almost certainly shared by Gary Cooper and most of the team that made High Noon.
But the difference between the elite reactions to High Noon and High Plains Drifter is a lugubrious comment on some of the changes that came over America from 1952 to 1973. From many points of view, the stories are identical. Both the Gary Cooper character and the Clint Eastwood character look with bitter contempt on townspeople not brave enough to fight in their own defense. The Gary Cooper character throws his sheriff’s star in the dust, leaves town in utter disdain—and admittedly lets it go at that. But his story, after all, has started from scratch. In the Eastwood story, there is a score to settle. A man has been beaten to death while cowards stood by, afraid to help him. The Lord is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
Careful readers of Norman Mailer—and who do not expect his instincts to accord with his professed politics—will not be entirely surprised to learn that he is an ardent fan of Clint Eastwood. Mailer’s favorite films seem to be the Westerns that Eastwood made in the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s, and the movie with which he leads his list is High Plains Drifter. These films, says Mailer, “come out of the old, wild, hard, dry, sad, sour redneck wisdom of small-town life in the Southwest. All of Eastwood’s knowledge is in them, a sardonic, unsentimental set of values that is equal to art for it would grapple with the roots of life itself.” Mailer goes even farther, quoting a speech of the Eastwood character in a later Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales. “When things get bad,” says the character played by Eastwood, “and it looks like you’re not going to make it, then you got to get mean. I mean plain plumb-dog mean, because if you lose your head then, you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” This carries the moral to an even grimmer point than in High Plains Drifter. We are no longer concerned here with bravery, or the punishment of cowardice, but simple, back-to-the-wall survival. It is them or you. Live or die.
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Eastwood was making these later Westerns alternately with his Dirty Harry series, police stories set in present-day San Francisco. And with each film, whether detective or Western, the Eastwood audience—irresistibly, it would seem—continued to grow and grow. The detective series and the Westerns were strongly linked morally, but it is perhaps no puzzle that the “unsentimental sense of values” Norman Mailer so admired in the mythic and even present-day small-town West he found totally inapplicable in modern San Francisco. The Dirty Harry series, Mailer decided, was made to “satisfy producers.” (What producers? The late Louis B. Mayer? The late Darryl Zanuck? Hollywood doesn’t work that way anymore. Clint Eastwood is his own producer.) For when you try to do justice and pursue criminals in a great, modern U.S. city you come up against the American Civil Liberties Union and other such groups.
It seems as if any American with even the mildest interest in public affairs must be able to recite the Miranda warning in his sleep by now (and the young probably think it was written in the Bill of Rights), but it dates from only 1966 and the famous Miranda decision of the Warren Court—historically a mere blink of the eye. What is not often recalled is that, even in the ultra-liberal Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the decision on Miranda was only five to four. Still, over a mere five years, from Mapp in 1961 through Miranda in 1966, the Warren Court radically altered the relationship of the police and prosecutor to the criminal suspect, and entirely to the advantage of the latter. This, at a time when the authority of family, church, and school were all declining drastically, narcotics were introducing into our society disruptions of which we are not yet able to take the full measure, and crime rates were rising alarmingly.
The Miranda warning, recited by the approaching officer at the time of arrest, assures the suspect that he has “the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions,” and “the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during any questioning now or in the future. . . .” Then there is the “exclusionary rule,” according to which any evidence—corpses, murder weapons, whatever—gathered at variance with the strictest constitutional proprieties is “tainted” and inadmissible in court even when the police have acted in perfectly good faith, sometimes even under instructions from a judge. So people who have committed revolting crimes—which no one questions for a moment—are now walking the streets, or have been clogging the judicial system with appeals for as much as fifteen years.
The country is at this point in a ferment over the “exclusionary rule.” The U.S. Congress has before it a raft of bills, including one backed by the Reagan administration, that would suspend the rule when the police have acted in “good faith.” Already three states have voted good-faith bills into law and others are considering another remedy: doing away with the exclusionary rule entirely while legislating a right to sue the police for violations of the Constitution. Perhaps most important of all, public disgust with crime has reached a high level. My own feeling is that the American people, in a popular vote, with that “unsentimental sense of values” we have heard so praised, would have expunged or radically modified the exclusionary rule long ago—at least as long ago as 1971, when Clint Eastwood made the first Dirty Harry movie, which came close to tripling the success of any Eastwood vehicle to date. Clearly, he hit a nerve.
Kent State had been in 1970. The campuses were alive with “peace” demonstrations. Students carried the Vietcong flag, called their own country “fascist.” Policemen were known as “pigs.” But Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel thought that there was another America out there. Warner Brothers, which put up the money, agreed with them. And, judging by the forty-nine states that went for Nixon in 1972 and the success of their film, they were right.
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The scene is San Francisco. “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Eastwood) is a police inspector known, in these immediate post-Miranda years, as a little hard to keep leashed. A psychopath announces that he has buried a fourteen-year-old girl alive and will let her suffocate to death unless he is paid $200,000 within hours. In a first encounter both Callahan and the psychopath, who calls himself Scorpio, are wounded, but Callahan continues in hot pursuit. Discovering that Scorpio is the groundskeeper at a football stadium, and thinking the buried girl has only minutes to live, Callahan (with no warrant) blasts through the groundskeeper’s quarters and finally runs him to earth in the middle of the football field. Still thinking the girl’s life is at stake and that every minute counts, he brutalizes the extortionist until Scorpio reveals where he has buried the girl. Police rush to the spot and lift her up out of the ground. She is dead. But is Scorpio charged with murder? Kidnapping? Extortion? Or any of a dozen other felonies? No, because every single piece of evidence against him is tainted. Callahan has entered his quarters without a warrant, failed to read him the Miranda warning, violated his rights under at least the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Scorpio “walks.”
Callahan predicts that Scorpio will strike again, and he does. This time he hijacks a school bus filled with terrified children and demands both ransom money and an escape plane. Against orders, Callahan goes after Scorpio on his own, leaps onto the roof of the bus from a bridge (Eastwood does his own stunts), and, finally, it is the two of them by the waters of the bay. There has been gunplay, Scorpio has attempted to hold a young boy as hostage, gun to his head, but Callahan has freed the boy, wounding Scorpio. At last, there is one of those trademark Dirty Harry moments of truth. Scorpio is about to reach for his pistol from where he lies sprawled on the dock. Callahan seems to have fired all the bullets in his .44 Magnum. “Been counting the rounds, punk?” asks Callahan icily. “Maybe I’m empty. The question is: do you feel lucky?” After an agonizing moment of hesitation, Scorpio reaches for his weapon, and Callahan blows him to kingdom come. As a last touch (another note from High Noon), Callahan slides his police inspector’s badge out of his wallet in disgust and scales it out over the bay.
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The film caused an uproar. It is unquestionably contrived. It is juvenile. It is popular entertainment. But if the plot of the film were to be reproduced in real life, it is hard to imagine that more than 1 percent of the American population would consider Harry Callahan, fighting desperately to save a girl’s life, a contemptible person, or would consider the freeing of Scorpio, whose civil rights have been violated, a triumph of justice. True, this 1 percent was well represented among those who wrote about Dirty Harry. Eastwood was called a brute, a fascist, and worse. But he had his defenders, too, and it was curious how those sympathetic with the film in general tended to like Eastwood’s acting, while those who hated the film thought he was the worst performer who had ever stepped in front of a movie camera.
I, personally, think Eastwood is considerably underrated as an actor. He is not Robert Duvall, or Robert de Niro, or Dustin Hoffman. He operates within a narrow range. But it is no narrower than the ranges of Gary Cooper or John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart—to cite another demigod from the past—worked within an extremely narrow range. Eastwood is 6-feet-4, all bone and muscle, and it is admittedly not every man who has the looks of a Clint Eastwood. But even with these physical qualifications, it is insufficiently appreciated how difficult it is to be a convincing Dirty Harry. Precious few of Hollywood’s leading men could do it. Eastwood looks right, walks right. He is never self-conscious. He uses no profuse display of mannerisms, but this makes the part harder, not easier. It seems he belongs there and that if you violated his sense of the ethical order of society, with no hysteria or loss of contact with his moral center he could calmly kill you. The ultimate test, you might say.
I do not have quite so high an opinion of Eastwood’s directing. He is a competent director, perfectly adequate professionally, but his most skillfully made films have been directed by other men, such as long-time crony Don Siegel (still perhaps best known for his original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), to whom Eastwood gave his first chance to direct in Thunderbird and Lightfoot. In addition to Cimino and Tidyman (The French Connection), Eastwood has used as screenwriter such a self-declared Hollywood right-winger as the flamboyant John Milius (who went on to direct Conan the Barbarian). Eastwood fired director Philip Kaufman from the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) after one week’s shooting, thereby perhaps saving that highly successful Western from the havoc which I am convinced Kaufman wreaked upon Tom Wolfe’s wonderful The Right Stuff. But Eastwood’s greatest shortcoming as a director is his casting and handling of actors. Locked within the stoic self-possession of his characters, from the Man With No Name to Dirty Harry—a self-possession that absorbs substantial psychic energy—Eastwood seems rather insensitive to other actors’ performances, although he did have the acumen to team up with Robert Duvall in Joe Kidd.
In 1978 Eastwood walked straight into another one of his lucky flukes. Every Which Way But Loose was his first “bare-knuckle subculture” film, but it also had broad comic elements, with an orangutan as co-star, also Ruth Gordon. But the main cause of concern was that Warner Brothers, the distributor, was spending most of its promotion money that season on its $30-million spectacular, Superman, on which the studio’s life depended. Malpaso and Warners devised a strategy, however. That Eastwood was king in the South and West was established. But in the cities of those regions, heavy advertising budgets had already been committed for Superman. The answer was to open the Eastwood film first in small towns in the South and West, sometimes in back-country areas. The result was the most successful Eastwood ever. It finished the year second only to Superman, and ahead of Rocky II (which itself had bettered Rocky I).
Meanwhile, Eastwood has gone on intermittently with his Dirty Harry series, which has now reached its fourth film, Sudden Impact. In Magnum Force (1973), he attempted to disarm his liberal critics: the villains are a band of young policemen who assassinate murderers and criminals escaping punishment through the laxity of the laws. “There are things wrong with the system,” says Callahan angrily, but he stops a long way short of condoning extra-legal groups exercising retribution under no authority but their own. In The Enforcer (1976), he attempted to placate feminist critics by having his police partner a woman (Tyne Daly), assigned to act as his “watchdog.” As it happens, she is the only woman Callahan ever falls deeply in love with. Unfortunately—if conveniently—she dies.
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In the opening episode of Sudden Impact, released in the Christmas season of 1983, Callahan is wrestling again with the exclusionary rule. He has arrested a criminal. No one questions either the man’s guilt or Callahan’s good faith in acquiring evidence. But there is a slip somewhere. The evidence is tainted. The judge reprimands Callahan scathingly in court. And the criminal walks. But the main action of Sudden Impact is about a woman who has been the victim of a gang rape, of which the perpetrators have all been found innocent through perjured testimony. The woman (Sondra Locke) sets about taking justice into her own hands, and when finally caught by Callahan, after the usual firefights with thugs and hieratic shots on misty streets, she is pityingly let go.
For the theme that hangs over all the Dirty Harry movies, and perhaps to a lesser extent all of Eastwood’s career, is vigilante justice. It is a theme deep in American culture, literature, films, and popular fiction: a man alone in a corrupt world, the lawless West, or the jungle of cities. The sinister twist in the Dirty Harry series is that what has corrupted justice in our time, and made it so hard to obtain, is a kind of liberalism gone mad. Thus: Dirty Harry.
But last Christmas offered an interesting development. Throughout the nation at large, Sudden Impact had the strongest opening of any Eastwood film ever. In New York City, moreover, which to say the least is not Clint Eastwood country, Sudden Impact went off like dynamite. Eastwood, who almost never grants interviews, denies that his films are the least bit political. On the other hand, what is “political”?
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In his private life, Eastwood financed the mission of Bo Gritz, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, in his recent armed attempt to recover U.S. MIA’s in Laos. Perhaps Eastwood’s patriotism, his belief in the legitimacy of force when necessary, and his determination to see predators punished are so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t even think of them as political. Perhaps he thinks such fundamental assumptions should be beyond the realm of political debate. And the man might have a point.
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