American Rebel (20 page)

Movie poster for
High Plains Drifter,
1973

O
n the heels of his fabulous success with
Dirty Harry—
without the sure hand of Leonard to guide him, and on the advice of the less visionary, more bottom-line-oriented Bob Daley—Clint signed on once more at Universal, via Malpaso, to star in a John Sturges film,
Joe Kidd
, a pale-faced imitation of the Leone westerns, with a script by Elmore Leonard. Sturges was a journeyman director who had had a string of early successes:
Bad Day at Black Rock
(1955),
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
(1957), and most notably
The Great Escape
(1963).
Joe Kidd
was made amid the groundswell of controversy created by
Dirty Harry
and slipped in and out of theaters early in 1972 without stirring much interest in either audiences or critics. It was perhaps just as well; the film didn’t work on any level and remains one of Clint’s least-remembered movies, but the money was good, and it did give him a chance to work with one of his old army buddies, John Saxon, whose screen career had never blossomed into anything memorable or lasting.

High Plains Drifter
was something else again. It too came via Universal, in the form of a nine-page treatment written by Ernest Tidyman. Tidyman, a pro, had written both the original novel and the screen adaptation for Gordon Parks’s 1971 seminal
Shaft
, and the Academy Award–winning adapted screenplay of
The French Connection
, for which the previous year he had won an Oscar, the Writers’ Guild Award, and the Mystery Writers Edgar. He wrote
High Plains Drifter
specifically with Clint Eastwood in mind, certain he would not be able to resist the temptation to both star in and direct the script.

At least part of what made Tidyman so sure was his familiarity with the so-called Gold Rush Syndrome that sooner or later afflicts every star in Hollywood—the desire for official anointment by the faceless little statue called Oscar. Clint had every reason to believe his performance as Harry Callahan had a shot at the big trophy in 1971;
it was, after all, one of the biggest box-office movies of the year and had screwed Clint into the consciousness of its viewers. It was therefore something of a letdown, if not a total surprise—so-called pure action films are rarely considered “important” enough by the elitist Academy—that he wasn’t even nominated.
^*

After his disappointing stint with Sturges, Clint believed more than ever that no one could direct him like Don Siegel, and should never even try. But it seemed too soon to work with Siegel again—some of the critical fallout from
Dirty Harry
had to fade—so he decided once more to try to direct himself.

For budgetary reasons, Universal wanted
High Plains Drifter
to be shot on their expansive western backlot, but Clint preferred something more original and, for him, director-friendly. He managed to convince Lang (credited as the executive producer on the film) to green-light the building of an entire western-town set, in the desert near Lake Mono in the California Sierras. It took eighteen days to build. (Film critics and historians Richard Thompson and Tim Hunter would later describe its main street as “looking more like a new condominium in Northern California than a Western town of the past.”) Clint shot the entire film in sequence, which was unusual and usually more costly due to the extra setups, but the film came in early and under budget.
^†

Clint played his familiar role of a Man with No Name—called the Stranger this time. His costars were featured players (but not stars) Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, and Mitch Ryan, and the film held unmistakable echoes of the Leone trilogy. (Typical of its reviews,
Box Office Magazine
described it as having a “dog-eared plot-line of a mysterious stranger who shoots up a town.”) What is notable about this film is the introduction of an “otherworldliness” (already seen in
The Beguiled)
that would reappear in several of Clint’s later films.

High Plains Drifter’s
script strongly suggests that the Stranger is
actually the ghost of the heriff killed by the gang that controls the town; now the Stranger kills them off, one by one, before disappearing into the sunset.
^*
With touches
of High Noon, Shane
, and Leone’s trilogy, the film contained a menu of surefire story ingredients; Bruce Surtees’s unusually wide lenses intensified the brightness of the landscape and added a hellish look to the film.

This was a Clint Eastwood cowboy audiences wanted to see, the cold-blooded, infallible, noble killer—not the imperfect ex-con
Joe Kidd. High Plains Drifter
was a huge hit at the box office, grossing nearly $16 million in its initial domestic release. It appeared to have everything the early Eastwood westerns had had, but its success was uneasy: the film was derivative and less than authentic, and its faux mysticism was a facile substitute for the real mystery of the Man with No Name. Clint felt to some a little like post-army Elvis—he still looked and sounded like the performer who had so recently exploded onto the cultural scene, but was instantly and obviously not the same thing. There was something too safe, too slick, and too comfortable about
High Plains Drifter
.

While the film proved to be a cash cow, audiences were not really interested in it. This time there was no talk of awards for either the film or Clint Eastwood’s performance. It was, however, for Clint the director, a start.

    
O
n May 22, 1972, Maggie Eastwood gave birth to her second child, Alison, who weighed in at a manageable seven pounds, four ounces. In fact, she arrived fifteen days premature, just after Maggie had flown down to Los Angeles to see Clint. Barely a month later Maggie was with Clint at the opening ceremonies of the three-day Pebble Beach Celebrity Tennis Tournament, hosting such legendary participants as the John Waynes and the Charlton Hestons.

By now virtually anybody who spent time with Clint on a set or at Malpaso knew that the Eastwood marriage was, at the very least, a bit unorthodox. But no one in his circle, or hers, seemed particularly
bothered by it, least of all the Eastwoods themselves. And while he was still involved with Roxanne Tunis, contributing money to help to raise their child, he and Tunis had cooled off when she turned to Eastern spiritual practices and took their daughter to Denver so she could devote herself to full-time study. Roxanne and Clint still saw each other, but not as often nor as intensely as before, and almost never anymore when he was making a movie.

In October 1972, two years after Clint’s father’s death, his mother, Ruth, quietly remarried. The Hawaii-themed ceremony was held in Pebble Beach, and the groom was John Belden Wood, a wealthy widower who had made a fortune from his Piedmont-based lumber business. Clint happily escorted his mother down the aisle, relieved that she would no longer have to be alone.

Clint then turned his attention back to directing, but this time he wanted to see if he could sell a film, both to the studio and to audiences, in which he wasn’t also acting. The project he chose must have resonated quite loudly with him: it was the Lolita-like story of a middle-aged salesman, Frank Harmon (William Holden), and his relationship with a teenage hippie type, Breezy (Kay Lenz).

In some ways
Breezy
signaled a shift in Clint’s focus, away from the violent and (so-called) socially relevant action picture to a small-scale love story. Romance had been missing in previous Eastwood films; even
Play Misty for Me
belongs solidly in the horror category. The shift was a retreat from the social clamor that had surrounded
Dirty Harry
, although the story of a middle-aged man in a sexual relationship with a teenager also was potentially controversial.

Partly because he wasn’t in it and partly because the subject veered too close to breaking a taboo, Universal was inclined to turn it down, despite Clint the actor’s current number one standing at the box office. They finally green-lighted it on condition Clint brought it in for under $1 million (meaning they would put up the million, and the revenues from ticket sales would reimburse the studio until breakeven, after which Malpaso would take a healthy cut of the gross).

To play the part of the older man, Clint chose William Holden, a handsome, soft-spoken actor who was equally at home in westerns, love stories, and war pictures. Always manly, he was in many ways a 1950s version of Clint Eastwood. But he also represented the repressed American male lover, constricted by social mores from getting
down and dirty with costars such as straitlaced and demure Grace Kelly in Mark Robson’s
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(1954), in George Seaton’s
The Country Girl
(1954), and with Jennifer Jones in Henry King’s
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
(1955). With all three films a kiss is the only physical contact (we see) between proper lovers. Such repression, in a way, helps explain Holden’s misplaced passions in such rage-fests as Billy Wilder’s
Stalag 17
(1953), with its prisoner-of-war setting, and David Lean’s
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957), in which noble sacrifice redeems Holden’s unbridled passions.

Clint did not have to operate under Holden’s characters’ social and sexual restrictions, but he nonetheless shared a manly resistance to portraying lust in his own movies. And he had yet to show a simple, open, happy, loving side to any of his male characters, without the woman being a murderer, witch, prostitute, deceiver, or helpless victim.

The part of the young girl Breezy was much harder to cast. Among the many hopefuls he saw was a cute, southern born and bred, twenty-five-year-old blond actress by the name of Sondra Locke. Locke had gained some notice in Hollywood for her Oscar-nominated performance in Robert Ellis Miller’s 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
, but afterward her career had experienced a slight stall. Jo Heims, the screenwriter for
Breezy
, suggested her to Clint, saying she thought Locke was exactly right for the role. Locke never made it to a screen test, however, because after looking at some eight-by-tens and a few minutes of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
, Clint felt she was too old for the role. In his film he wanted to emphasize the age difference between the two lead characters. He eventually chose the very young and coquettish Kay Lenz, who looked exactly right to him but had almost no film experience.

Production began in November 1972, and almost immediately it was apparent to everyone on set that Clint had a very special attraction to her. Clint, interestingly, was pulling back from his screen image as a law-and-order warrior while drawing closer to his real-life character as an aging Lothario. This was heady stuff, doubling the intensity of Clint’s relationship to Breezy as a director and as an authority figure to a younger woman.

But whatever electricity flowed between Lenz and Clint off-screen, it failed to ignite between her and Holden on-screen. Audiences
turned away from this May-December romance. Holden just looked too tired and too old for audiences to believe he could be attractive to Breezy. The movie had no romantic chemistry. It was an out-and-out failure at the box office, not just for its unbelievability but because, simply put, no one was particularly interested in seeing a so-called Clint Eastwood film that did not star Clint Eastwood. Several reviewers sharpened their pencils and had a critical field day. Judith Crist’s reaction was typical: writing in
New York
magazine, she chuckled condescendingly that
Breezy
was “so perfectly awful that it’s almost good enough for laughs.” Only auteurist critics like Molly Haskell, writing in the
Village Voice
, took the film seriously: “Clint Eastwood’s most accomplished directorial job so far … a love story in which almost everything works.” A then-fringe auteurist critic like Haskell, however, had neither the readership nor the clout to make a commercial difference, while Crist had a huge following, especially in box-office-rich New York City.

By and large, critics like Crist got it right, but an oversensitive Clint was quick to blame Universal’s promotion, rather than his own direction, for
Breezy’s
failure to float: “This was a small film—it was just the story of the rejuvenation of a cynic. I thought that was an interesting subject, especially nowadays in the era of cynicism … it was a disaster at the box office, very poorly distributed and very poorly advertised … that’s Universal. They have a terrible advertising department, they’re not smart. I tried to keep an eye on it but [at Universal] it was a harder thing to do.”