American Rebel (29 page)

Sent off to a small town to serve out his suspension, Callahan is a warrior without a war, unappreciated and tossed aside. But he investigates a homicide there and discovers that a serial killer is at work. As usual, detecting the presence of evil provides him with energy and heroism: it turns out that the local police chief, Jannings (played by the always-effective Pat Hingle, who played a similar type in
The Gauntlet)
, is aware of the killer’s presence. And Jannings suspects the pretty young artist Jennifer Spencer (Locke) is committing the murders as an act of vengeance—she was gang-raped by a group of young toughs led by Jannings’s own son, Mick (Paul Drake). Harry becomes romantically involved with Spencer and eventually rescues her from one final kidnapping by Mick, who also manages to kill his own father. Then Callahan spectacularly disposes of him and the rest of his gang. He not only rescues Spencer but redeems her by shifting the blame for all her serial murders onto Mick.

The tailoring of the story once again mirrors Clint and Callahan (whose very name is a partial anagram—both share the letters C, L, and N). In the film, Callahan lets Spencer go free—a technicality in his world, justified by his larger (rougher, and to audiences more satisfying) sense of law and order.

Sudden Impact
opened in December 1983 and proved to be the colossal comeback hit that Clint had been searching for, grossing a whopping $70 million in its initial domestic release. It also earned him great reviews, including another nod of approval from Sarris: “The staging of the violent set pieces is stylized, kinetic and visually inventive,” he wrote in the
Village Voice
. “Eastwood, occasional
langueurs
and all, has less to worry about in this respect than other filmmakers. When he stands poised for his civically cleansing shootouts, no one in the theater is likely to be dozing. I like Eastwood, always have. But then I even have a soft spot in my heart for law and order.”

David Denby wrote in
New York
magazine:

Locke’s reviews too were excellent, and her on-screen pairing with Clint was nothing less than electrifying. As a doppelgänger for him, she shared his murderous dark(er) side, this time cut with a feminine edge; more than one critic referred to her in this film as “Dirty Harriet.”

Warner quickly offered them fortunes to do yet another Dirty Harry film. But as winning as they were on-screen Locke knew it was never going to happen. Clint’s heated passion for her was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it except stand and watch it—and him—fade away.
^*

Fired on the same day in 1955 by Universal for having no talent, Burt Reynolds and Clint were two of Hollywood’s biggest stars thirty years later and appeared together in
City Heat,
1984
.

S
udden Impact
had been critically lauded and a box-office smash. Having finally climbed back up the commercial mountain, Clint next decided to take a giant leap off it by making a buddy-buddy movie costarring Burt Reynolds, whose career was not what it had once been. Some saw this as charity-casting by Clint.

He also appeared to have permanently warehoused Sondra Locke, as he had already begun an affair with a beautiful young Warner Bros. story editor and analyst by the name of Megan Rose, whom he had met during the making of
Honkytonk Man
. This relationship would last nearly five years, until 1988. During that time, Clint paid regular visits to her nearby Warner Bros. office. According to Rose, they made love in her office at lunchtime, in the bedroom he kept behind his office, at her apartment.

Due to scheduling complications having to do with everyone being available at the same time, the Burt Reynolds project was delayed. Instead Clint rushed into production a new film,
Tightrope
, shot on location in New Orleans. Locke was neither in the film nor accompanied him; the part that might once have gone to her went instead to Geneviève Bujold, a forty-something Canadian-born actress who had struck gold in her portrayal of Anne Boleyn opposite Richard Burton in Charles Jarrott’s
Anne of the Thousand Days
(1969). Afterward, her off-center looks, strong accent, and lack of bombshell vavoom kept her career on lateral hold. She was actually recommended for the part by the always-willing-to-help Sondra Locke.

Clint loved the idea of putting Bujold in the film, because to him everything in and about the film was off-kilter, and so should be the woman he cast as his costar. Her character was the head of a women’s rape center who is tough, tender, and decidedly unglamorous, but sexy nonetheless.

Tightrope
was an original Richard Tuggle script that, like his
Escape
from Alcatraz
, was loosely based on a true story—in this case, a series of Bay Area serial sex-and-slash murders that had been covered in a local newspaper. Tuggle had written the film with Don Siegel in mind as the director and Clint as the star, but Siegel begged off, still not willing to work again with Clint. Tuggle then thought about directing it himself. According to sources at Malpaso, that deal was done in a single thirty-second phone conversation to Clint, who had read the script and wanted to be in it. Some believe he was so eager to star in it that it was the real reason he pushed the Reynolds picture back to make room on his schedule.

The story transferred well to New Orleans, whose night-side atmospherics perfectly expressed the noirish mood of the story—darkness and fog everywhere. His character, a law officer, was both attracted to and repelled by not just the victims (mostly New Orleans-style prostitutes and hookers, echoing the notorious Jack the Ripper) but also the murderer—perhaps the embodiment of his own darker side. This time the struggle would be between a law officer and his inner self, between desire and fear of giving in to the darker, rougher, sexual side that lurked within (a sense of self utterly missing from the character of Harry Callahan).

It was that internal moral tug-of-war (the “tightrope” of the title) that Clint’s character, Wes Block, had to deal with, minus the Callahan .44 Magnum, plus two motherless girls who themselves become potential victims of the killer. In the midst of it all, Block is attracted to his fellow social servant Beryl Thibodeaux (Bujold), the head of a rape crisis center who neatly embodies the liberation of Block’s more disturbed desires and is a stabilizing force as well. She represents the social ties that bind, a restriction Block both envies and fears.

Block fears he will not be able to keep his secrets buried for long, especially from Thibodeaux; he is attracted to submissive women who give in to his kinky desires and weaknesses. He likes oral sex using handcuffs, the tools of his professional trade—then makes love to them. And a scene that takes place inside an especially seedy gay bar suggests that the aptly named Block might have some not-so-latent homosexual tendencies. The gruesome sex-and-slash murders that escalate throughout the film become a vicarious thrill machine for him, even as they set off an increasingly wild pursuit that becomes, literally, one dark soul chasing an even darker soul. The movie also
marked the screen debut of Clint’s second child by Maggie. Twelve-year-old Alison Eastwood played the role of one of his two small daughters in the film.

This time even the harshest critics of the Eastwood oeuvre, except Kael, went out of their way to recognize the quality of the film and of Clint’s acting. Even if they didn’t particularly like its content, they had to admire the masterful stylistics of its contextual unspooling and the increasingly desperate yet tightly controlled unraveling of Clint’s Block. Kathleen Cornell wrote in the
New York Daily News
, “Eastwood is simply terrific, his lean and hungry face revealing all the right emotions … thanks to the efforts of writer-director Richard Tuggle, it’s a raunchy but surprisingly intelligent movie, which at times scares the viewer as much as one of Hitchcock’s tension-filled thrillers.” J. Hoberman of the
Village Voice
called it “one of Eastwood’s finest, most reflexive and reflective films since
Bronco Billy—
and for my money the best Hollywood movie so far this year.” But Kael remained unrepentant:
“Tightrope
is the opposite of sophisticated moviemaking … Clint seems to be trying to blast through his own lack of courage as an actor.” In a rare display of public emotion, in the May 1985 issue of
Video
magazine, Clint finally responded by dismissing Kael as a mere parasite, clinging to his career in order to make herself more important: “[Kael] found an avenue that was going to make her a star. I was just one of the subjects, among many, that helped her along the way.” In truth, there was no shortage of actors, actresses, and directors who felt the same way.

Tightrope
opened the 1984 Montreal Film Festival and grossed an impressive $60 million in its initial domestic release, a number that ballooned to over $100 million after its first foreign release and before TV and eventual video rights. That year, due mainly to the success of
Tightrope
, Clint was named the world’s top box-office star by Quigley (for the second year in a row). It was his sixteenth appearance on the top-ten list, more times than any other living star.

On August 22, 1984, Clint was invited to place his hands and feet into cement at the fabled Grauman’s (Mann’s) Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, alongside the greatest film legends of all time. After casually conversing with the relatively small daytime crowd that had gathered—these events were never well publicized, to keep the crowds intentionally small and manageable—and with Kyle and Alison
proudly looking on, Clint scrawled alongside his handprints,
“You’ve made my day.”

    
W
hile
Tightrope
was still in theaters, Clint finally went into production on
City Heat
with Burt Reynolds. The difference in the two stars’ individual salaries reflected the level of their current popularity: Clint was paid $5 million, while Burt received $4 million. Both stars appeared happy to be working together, even if their much-publicized redneck and roadster buddy-buddy camaraderie was a product of PR more than reality. In truth, they didn’t hang out all that much together. In Reynolds’s memoir, Clint is little more than a passing acquaintance.

Early on tensions rose between Clint, Reynolds, and the director, Blake Edwards, who had also written the script. The central issue was on casting, but the real problems ran much deeper. To begin with, Edwards had originally given the script to Locke, rather than Clint, in one of the typical sleights-of-hand that take place in Hollywood every day of the week. Edwards had asked her if she would read his script, suggesting that she would be perfect in the role of Caroline, Murphy’s (Reynolds’s) girlfriend. He said he had seen her performance in
Bronco Billy
, loved it, and wanted her to costar in his new film. To seal the deal, he suggested that her appearance would once and for all take her out of the giant shadow cast over her career by Clint’s.

Not surprisingly, Locke jumped at the chance. That was when Edwards pulled the switch and asked Locke if she would mind passing the script along to Clint. “Before I knew it,” Locke said later, “Blake and his wife, Julie Andrews, were having dinner with Clint and me. Then Burt Reynolds was suddenly brought in, and within a few weeks I was simply out of the mix and forgotten.”