American Rebel (12 page)
Authors: Marc Eliot
The project he had in mind was a script called
Hang ‘Em High
, an Americanized single-feature amalgam of the Leone trilogy. It had been written by Mel Goldberg in 1966, as a pilot for yet another western TV series. Clint thought it might be the right project to launch his Hollywood film career and approached producer Leonard Freeman, who had originally commissioned it as a pilot, about the possibility of turning it into a feature film. Freeman had already produced
Mr. Novak
, and co-created the idea for a new series,
Hawaii Five-O
, after which Freeman and Goldberg shelved
Hang ‘Em High
.
The script had first come to Clint via Irving Leonard, who happened to be friends with Freeman’s agent, George Litto. Over dinner one night Litto had told Leonard about
Hang Em High
. Leonard thought it might be what Clint was looking for and asked if he could send him a copy. Litto sent it over the next day. Clint, rather than going back to the well with Leone, wanted to do it. “When [Leone] talked to me about doing
Once Upon a Time in the West
and what later became
Duck, You Sucker
, they were just repeats of what I’d been doing,” he said.
*
I didn’t want to play that character anymore. So I came back and did a very small-budget picture, called
Hang ‘Em High
, which had a little more character. Maybe it was time, too, to do some American films, because even though these films were very successful, the movie business for
some reason was still thinking of me as an Italian movie actor. I can remember the field guys at Paramount years ago said they’d talk about using me but all they got was, “He’s just a TV actor.” I wasn’t marked to be accepted. There were a lot of other actors who were marked to succeed more than me.
The first thing Clint did was take the script to his more powerful agent at William Morris, Leonard Hirshan, who, like any good WMA rep, did not like projects coming to his clients from outside sources. It was a question less of ego than of packaging. Putting agency writers together with in-house actors gave the agency a voice in virtually every aspect of a production. Hirshan’s first inclination was to pass on
Hang ‘Em High
. He wanted Clint instead for a production called
Mackenna’s Gold
, an ensemble action film whose cast would be headed by Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif. Clint read the script for
Mackenna’s Gold
, and it left him cold. Being part of an ensemble, he felt, would be a step backward for him, a return to the ensemble style of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
or, worse,
Rawhide
.
*
Clint insisted he was going ahead with
Hang ‘Em High
. He believed the back-to-back financial successes of
A Fistful of Dollars
and
For a Few Dollars More—
the latter received even worse reviews than
Fistful
but so far grossed $4.3 million in its initial theatrical run, nearly a million dollars more than
Fistful—
could get the film funded by Krim and Picker at UA. He was right. Once the deal was set, he approached Ted Post, one of his favorite
Rawhide
directors, to make the film.
On December 29, 1967, production began on
Hang ‘Em High
, Picker and Krim released
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly;
all three films in the trilogy had been released in the space of a year. It set off a tsunami of debate among the more esoteric critics, who either loved it or hated it but could not ignore it. Mainstream critics like Charles Champlin complained in the
Los Angeles Times
that “the temptation is hereby proved irresistible to call
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, now
playing citywide,
The Bad, the Dull, and the Interminable
, only because it is.” Pauline Kael, the high priestess of film criticism writing from her perch at
The New Yorker
far above the world of the common man, pronounced the film “stupid” and “gruesome” and wondered why it was called a western at all.
Time
magazine sniffed its nose too, after minimally acknowledging Leone’s stylistics, giving Leone a good spanking for daring to encroach on that most holy of American turf, the movie western.
The
New York Times’s
first-string film critic Renata Adler wrote in the newspaper’s January 25 edition:
“The burn, the gouge, and the mangle” (its screen name is simply inappropriate) must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre. If 42nd Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism, this film, which opened yesterday at the Trans-Lux 85th Street and the DeMille, is an entire supermarket … it lasts two and a half slow hours … there is a completely meaningless sequence with a bridge—as though it might pass for “San Luis Rey” or “Kwai.” Sometimes, it all tries to pass for funny.
The film would fare no better in later years, after Adler’s departure from the
Times
and a string of exceedingly esoteric film critics increasingly turned their noses up at Clint, until the arrival of Manohla Dargis in the first years of the new century, a film reviewer who did not automatically dismiss Clint by definition (of the times, of his genre, of the so-called fashions of the times). The
New York Times
, however, would continue to push its more standard party line. In its television section, whenever
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
showed up, it ran the same one-line blurb year after year that, while acerbic and condescending, was, in truth, not that far from what Clint himself felt about the film: “Snarls, growls, and a smattering of words. Clint treading on water, on land.”
Only Andrew Sarris, in the
Village Voice
, was willing to admit that there was something to Leone and his trilogy. Sarris, a forerunner of the “auteurist” movement in American film criticism, derived from the French Nouvelle Vague critics a highly controversial assessment of American movies; he was then considered a rebel (but ironically is rightly revered today as a reactionary). His auteur theory celebrated
genre films and the directors who made them as more purely cinematic and personal than the corporate, impersonal, and therefore indifferent product of the old industrial studio system. Having seen the trilogy before it opened, he wrote a two-part “think piece” that appeared in the
Voice
on September 19 and 26, 1968, called “The Spaghetti Westerns.” It explained the Leone films’ box-office success in terms of their auteurist appeal—something to which the other critics were completely blind—and he allowed the trilogy, and Leone, to enter the world of the hip (or the hipster), such as it was. If it still wasn’t okay to laud the films at cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue, after Sarris it was the essential stuff of coffee shops and kitchen counters.
The New York cultural scene, Sarris wrote,
remains basically hostile to westerns even as precincts of camp … The western, like water, gains flavor from its impurities, and westerns since 1945 have multiplied their options, obsessions and neuroses many times over … What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality … Strangely, Leone has moved deeper into American history and politics in his subsequent [films following
Fistful of Dollars]
. I say strangely because an Italian director might be expected to stylize an alien genre with vague space-time coordinates, like the universal Mexico that can be filmed anywhere on the Mediterranean for any century from the sixteenth to the twentieth … The spaghetti western is ultimately a lower-class entertainment and, as such, functions as an epic of violent revenge.
*
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
packed movie houses to the tune of $6.3 million in its initial domestic release. With his star rising like a rocket, Clint was finally able to put together the funding for
Hang ‘Em High
. To ensure that it became the film he envisioned, he formed his own production company, Malpaso (Spanish for “bad pass,” or
“bad step”), named after a creek on his own property in Monterey County, to function as his producing umbrella. “I own some property on a creek in the Big Sur country called Malpaso Creek,” Clint told
Playboy
magazine:
I guess it runs down a bad pass in the mountains … My theory was that I could foul up my career just as well as somebody else could foul it up for me, so why not try it? And I had this great urge to show the industry that it needs to be streamlined so it can make more films with smaller crews … What’s the point of spending so much money producing a movie that you can’t break even on it? So at Malpaso, we [won’t] have a staff of 26 and a fancy office. I’ve got a six-pack of beer under my arm, and a few pieces of paper, and a couple of pencils, and I’m in business.
*
With a staff consisting of himself, Robert Daley as the resident producer, Sonia Chernus as story editor, and one secretary, he felt ready to make the film he wanted, the way he wanted, and maybe even make some real money doing it.
Hang ‘Em High
became Malpaso’s first release.
†
*
The other four segments and their directors were: “The Witch Burned Alive” directed by Luchino Visconti; “Civic Sense” (aka “Community Spirit”), directed by Mauro Bolognini; “The Earth as Seen from the Moon” (aka “Earth Seen from the Moon”), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini; and “The Girl from Sicily” (aka “The Sicilian”), directed by Franco Rossi.
†
UA eventually dropped it into a few test markets in America in March 1969, as a courtesy to De Laurentiis. It managed to snag a couple of rightfully dreadful reviews. UA quickly pulled it, and it has not been seen commercially in the States since, making it one of the few films in the Eastwood canon that has been seen by almost no American audiences. Clint’s segment occasionally shows up in its entirety on YouTube.
*
The first film was made in 1968,
Cera una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West)
, starring Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Claudia Cardinale. Charles Bronson played the role of Harmonica that Leone had originally offered to Clint. Leone often said that he had cast Clint in
A Fistful of Dollars
because he looked like Henry Fonda, then later cast Fonda because he looked like Clint Eastwood.
A Fistful of Dynamite
, starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn, was made in 1971.
Once Upon a Time in America
, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods, was completed in 1984.
*
Or so it was reported. The circumstances of his death and the fate of his remains are cloudy to this day. Unsubstantiated reports persist that he was eaten by a crocodile. He was to have been married two days after his death.
*
Shortly after the box-office success of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, the Production Code was replaced by Jack Valenti’s ratings system. United Artists then agreed to distribute
A Fistful of Dollars
in America. Also, the Kurosawa-rights issue had finally been resolved.
*
Duck, You Sucker
(1971) was also known as
Giù la testa
, and
A Fistful of Dynamite
, and
Once Upon a Time … the Revolution
. James Coburn appeared in the role of John Mallory, originally intended by Leone for Eastwood.
*
The screenplay was by Carl Foreman, based on a novel by Heck Allen. Foreman had been nominated for an Academy Award for his 1952 script for
High Noon
, then was blacklisted in the 1950s. One of Foreman’s comeback films was
The Guns of Navarone
(1961), directed by J. Lee Thompson. So
Mackenna’s Gold
was considered an important film, and Hirshan pressured Clint, unsuccessfully, to accept a role in it. The film was released in 1969, without Clint, directed by J. Lee Thompson.
*
Clint was well aware of the critics and said in his February 1974
Playboy
interview: “I’ve been treated well—flatteringly so—by the better, more experienced reviewers, people like Andrew Sarris, Jay Cocks, Vincent Canby and Bosley Crowther. Judith Crist, for some reason, hasn’t been knocked out over everything I’ve done—or
anything
I’ve done, as a matter of fact. I think she liked [the porn film]
The Devil in Miss Jones
, but she thought
Beguiled
was obscene … everybody’s entitled to his opinion.”
*
According to Arthur Knight, who interviewed Clint for
Playboy
in February 1974, the walls of the Malpaso office were “decorated with posters; looming in one corner is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Eastwood—which, like his best-known screen characterizations, is curiously one-dimensional and strangely ominous. The most bizarre object in his private office, though, is a three-foot-high, balloon-shaped, shocking-pink, papier-mâché rabbit piggy bank.”
†
“The three [Leone] films were successful overseas,” he said in the 1974
Playboy
interview, “but I had a rough time cracking the Hollywood scene. Not only was there a movie prejudice against television actors but there was a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie was sort of taking a step backward. But the film exchanges in France, Italy Germany Spain were asking the Hollywood producers when they were going to make a film starring Clint Eastwood. So finally I was offered a very modest film for United Artists
—Hang ‘Em High …
I formed my own company Malpaso, and we got a piece of it.”
