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A forum for smart, idiosyncratic writing about movies, Film Comment, published bimonthly by the Film Society, has earned and sustained a reputation as the finest film magazine in the English language. Every issue is notable for the unusually literate, often elegant, style of
its authors. handsomely designed, Film Comment brims with provocative,
cutting-edge articles about all aspects of the art, entertainment and industry
of filmmaking. In the May-June Film Comment:
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The May-June issue, available at newsstands, by subscription, or by Film Society membership. |
the good, the bad and the ugly: clint eastwood as romantic hero By Kathleen Murphy ©1996 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center TOPPED BY AN ASSERTIVE CREST of tawny hair, a lanky cowboy edges his way to the head of the chow-line for the lion's share of grub. It's 1959, the first episode of "Rawhide," a TV series debuting in a season that favors Westerns, and the hungry young man is, of course, Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates, trail boss Gil Favor's sidekick. "Rawhide" would run for seven seasons, but before its demise the brash, fresh-faced Rowdy had already metamorphosed into a Man with No Name, the burnt-out hardcase who shot a trilogy of Sergio Leone's famously bloody Westerns into the money. And by 1968, little more than a decade into his accidental acting career, Clint Eastwood had formed Malpaso, his own production company, cannily taking early control of his filmmaking destiny. From the first, Eastwood demonstrated a remarkable shrewdness, a talent for the kind of focused observation that has translated into a consistently enlarging vision of a potent off- and on-screen persona. At 13, he taught himself to write music and play the piano; Eastwood the man clearly kept an eye out for anything -- narrative motif, directorial style, genre convention, character components -- that might be taken in and reconceived to expedite his ambitious ascent up the Hollywood foodchain. He saw the vein that worked for him as a performer, and mined it, sculpting variations for the better part of four decades. He's aimed that same control and cinematic intelligence at the business of directing. Eastwood's craft and art have always derived from informed, instinctive taste, most notably in the fabrication of an idiosyncratic, strangely durable romantic hero -- a lover whose masks have been that of artist, angel, demon, death, holy fool, and even, on occasion, endearing dolt. That first "Rawhide" episode, "Incident of the Tumbleweed Wagon," featured a paradigmatic Fifties sexpot, pouting, curvaceous Terry Moore, wearing heels, low-cut blouse, and manacles for her transport by prison wagon through the wilderness. Dallas has exacted revenge -- "an eye for an eye" -- on a townful of people who hanged her innocent, half-blind father: "There were a lot of empty chairs at the dinnertable before I was through...." At first glimpse of this cactus Antigone, Rowdy Yates whistles wholehearted appreciation, prompting a caveat from Favor: "You haven't seen a woman in trouble yet that you haven't fallen for." Redemption for past-haunted Dallas is death, taking a bullet meant for the good guys. One wonders if somewhere in the baby-doll vulgarity of Moore's expressions of vengeance lies recombinant DNA for Eastwood's innocent man hanged for rustling, resurrected for revenge, and mirrored by Inger Stevens's raped and widowed huntress in Hang 'Em High (Ted Post, '68). Or for Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), Clint's murderously outraged castoff in Play Misty for Me (Eastwood, '71). Or for the coven of betrayed bacchantes in The Beguiled (Don Siegel, '71). Or even for the actor's first full-fledged revenant, carrier of hellish retribution to a whole guilty town in High Plains Drifter (CE, '73). Or Sondra Locke's violated Fury, Harry's Dirty Harriet, in Sudden Impact (CE, '83). In seminal collaboration with Leone, Eastwood forged a masculine presence predicated on the strictest conservation of energy and emotion, a contraction of character so severe that its primum mobile must remain mystery. As with Robert Mitchum, that deep reserve is a come-on, provoking the desire -- in men and women -- to agitate, to assault the still, unmoved flesh. Disengaged and deracinated, he is given to intense watchfulness from some inner coign of vantage -- hell, grave, or madness. Confronted, his head turns slowly, eyes narrowing into scorched-earth fury, as steady and deadly as a swiveling gun turret. The thin lower lip curls upward to sign dismay or disgust, like a cat grimacing at a bad smell.* Fine lines already ray out from the corners of the early Eastwood's fierce eyes, his forehead is vertically furrowed and veined, and the very shock of his hair seems to spring thickly up along those same rising vectors. It's as though whatever imploded the soul of the Man with No Name scarred permanent blastlines into the desiccated landscape of his face. His gait is that of a ghost or a predator, his poncho'd torso remaining strangely still, propelled ahead by the long legs, as though swimming upright in slowmotion. Paradoxically, the hands of the remorseless gunfighter are those of a musician or a painter: elegant, long-fingered, with graceful wrists. In these formative stages of the Eastwood persona, his often nearly whispered vocal tones seem too pressured for ordinary speech. The silky, then increasingly abrasive sibilance of his drawl, like sand or gravel shifting in water, works best for epigrams, cryptic ripostes, up-close seduction. In Leone's A Fistful of Dollars ('64), Eastwood is enigma but not yet a dead man walking: he concentrates and reflects the town's amorality, as well as incarnating the unspoken prayer of Marisol (Marianne Koch), the faithful wife and mother held prisoner by the worst of a wolfish lot (Gian Maria Volont). Riding down Fistful's main drag on his mule, this cold Christ come to harrow hell pauses to pass a dim smile on to the woman jailed for her desirability. A past crucifixion is hinted: when he takes the time to rescue Marisol, he recalls that "I knew someone like you once...there was no one to help her." Similarly, there is no one to help the young sheriff (Eastwood) whipped to death in High Plains Drifter, a Grand Guignol Golgotha witnessed by two very different "Marys." When the lawman's unquiet shade returns to paint the town red, he uses his allure as demon lover to strip each woman down to her true soul, damning the pretty, young creature of vicious appetite (Marianna Hill) and saving the earthy, older Verna Bloom. Before disappearing into a horizon of shimmering heat waves, he stops to share that complicit smile -- born of more than carnal knowledge -- with Bloom, the only distaff survivor of his retribution. Later, in Pale Rider (CE, '85), Eastwood's supernatural Shane materializes in his funereal Drifter frock coat to protect both virgin and a last Western paradise from rape, to renew and confirm Carrie Snodgress's abandoned womanhood as well as miner Michael Moriarty's uncertain masculinity. In Coogan's Bluff ('68) and The Beguiled, Eastwood took tutelage under director Don Siegel, his American film-father. Interestingly, in both films, The Man with No Name's existential arrogance shades into specific sexual insolence, erotic allure used as lethally as a gun. Arizona stud Coogan, abroad in the Big Apple, seduces with too-practiced ease a social worker committed to a program of "self-regeneration" for bad girls (Susan Clark). Gentling her body as he might a skittish horse, whispering her into sensual trance, Coogan doesn't miss a beat when, having rifled her files of the information he's after, he walks out -- without a word -- on his unsuspecting prey. Scarcely hours later, he deliberately beds down a sociopathic hippie to con her into giving up a killer's whereabouts. It's probable that Siegel and Eastwood aren't consciously exposing manipulative machismo as a species of whoring. Still, when a slutty hotel-tart, way past her prime, tries to run an obvious scam on Coogan, his response is excessively ugly; there's a cruel, cracked mirror here, but the rest of Coogan's Bluff doesn't really support such reflections. NO QUESTION, THOUGH, that The Beguiled, the third film by Siegel and Eastwood, does -- with a vengeance. In this Grimm fairy tale, Corporal John McBurney is a wounded Yankee deserter who stumbles on to a Southern seminary housing a tribe of girls and women as perversely neurasthenic as any out of Tennessee Williams's imagining. McBurney's first act is to passionately soul-kiss 12-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), diverting her attention from an approaching Confederate column. An adept sexual performer, he plays to each seminarian's script: Geraldine Page's bisexual headmistress, seething with hot memories of incestuous lovemaking with her brother; Elizabeth Hartman's repressed virgin, man-shy courtesy of a promiscuous father; Jo Ann Harris's self-serving Lolita; and little Amy's budding bad seed. "I wonder," he purrs into spinster Hartman's ear, "if you don't think of yourself as a Sleeping Beauty in a castle waiting for a handsome prince to free you with a kiss." Could be a 19th century Coogan, working his main chance, but Beguiled has more in common with Boxing Helena, genders reversed. The dominant POV keeps shifting between McBurney and his avid auditors. When the young soldier is first brought in, unconscious, Page gazes hungrily down at the handsome head at her breast, savoring eyelashes on cheek, fine mouth relaxed in almost feminine curves, unruly blonde mane. It's the kind of titillating shot that in most movies (especially soft-porn and splatter flicks) would frame the face of a beautiful sleeping woman, helpless and vulnerable to rape. Later, much recovered, McBurney leans back smiling, smug in his sexual power, to indulge in a fantasy that stars him as each woman's lover. This rather conventional casting segues into Page's more outr dream: she, McBurney, and Hartman in a sexual romp, climaxing with his naked body sprawled across her lap in perfect reflection of the painting of a Piet that hangs beside her bed. Though he's the source of reawakened fertility (in women and chickens), the ravaged McBurney ends up a symbolically castrated gigolo, "planted" -- in parts -- by The Beguiled's convent of twisted sisters. Not until The Rookie (CE, '90) will such physical violation by a woman be visited on an Eastwood hero. Amazonian Sonia Braga, bad guy Raul Julia's second in command, cuts and caresses the handcuffed Eastwood's bared flesh with a razor blade, moving down toward his groin: "I hate anything useless," she growls. "Something is no good to me, I cut it off and throw it away." In this truly disturbing sequence, echoed many times over in a bank of video monitors, the sadistic Braga mounts and rides the unblinking Eastwood to climax. It's as though he's trying the experience on for size -- playing the role from which he's rescued so many virgins and hookers in his films (Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Tightrope, Pale Rider, Bronco Billy). Braga is unfettered succubus, and her genealogy leads straight back to nightmare Evelyn Draper in Play Misty for Me, the film that followed hard upon The Beguiled, and Eastwood's directorial debut. As The Man with No Name seemed a fatal projection of his enemies' own amorality, so too is Evelyn Draper a Dantean retribution for the casual promiscuity practiced by Eastwood's Carmel disc jockey. She comes out of nowhere, her only I.D. "Annabel Lee," a Poe poem about two lovers so attached not even death can separate them. Like Eastwood's gunfighter revenant in High Plains Drifter, filmed just two years after Misty, this unforgiving one-night stand lives to send those who sinned against her to hell. Despite Eastwood's soft-focus vision of Carmel's paradisiacal landscape through which he and the blonde artist who settles him down (Donna Mills) walk, swim, and make love, it's Walter's dark, unrelenting Lilith who steals the show until her directorial doppelgnger rubs her out. There's something of unregenerate Evelyn abroad in Tightrope (Richard Tuggle, '84), a film in which Eastwood's bitterly divorced cop, father of two little girls (the older played by his own daughter Alison), takes a dangerous dive into the belly of the sexual beast. Eastwood acts out his authentic, ambiguous rage at the woman who abandoned him, handcuffing hookers in kinky sado-masochistic psychodramas. Shadowed, even directed by a clown-masked serial killer--rapist, the cop's dangerous play brings his darkside home, into his girls' lives -- despite the framed unicorn that guards their chaste beds. (In Sudden Impact, shot just the year before Tightrope, the trauma caused by brutal sexual assault in her youth brings a woman round to an antique carousel, on which she is stalked by her old tormentors. The most psychotic of the rapists is ultimately impaled on the horn of a maddened unicorn.) Tightrope is punctuated by genuinely disquieting moments, suggestive of deeper sexual waters than are usually plumbed in the traditional cop story. Eastwood lounges in a doorway, eyeing Genevive Bujold -- a woman who sees through his conflicted psyche -- as she demonstrates to a class how to disable a rapist. When she kicks the dummy in the crotch, its eyes light up, its tongue pops out, and tennis balls shoot across the gym straight at her male audience of one. It's grotesque slapstick, and draws real blood from wounded manhood. Later, Eastwood's daughter finds her dead-drunk dad sprawled face-down on the livingroom couch, a wedding photograph clutched in his hand. Her delicate features very grave, the prepubescent child climbs aboard her father, warming with her tomgirl body the man her mother has rejected. Not much later, the cop's crazed-clown alter ego deposits this same child, bound and gagged, in her father's bed, and her violation there is barely thwarted. In the aftermath of her rescue, Eastwood explodes in purgative rage, tearing up the offending bed and bellowing "You motherfucker!" at his own -- possessed -- reflection. By film's end, the sexually shattered cop's reformation is signaled when he flings away a severed arm, all that remains of the creature that acted out what Eastwood only dreamed of. Sudden Impact (CE, '83) introduced Dirty Harry Callahan to his vigilante counterpart (Sondra Locke), a woman taking revenge on the thugs who raped her and her younger sister years ago. As director and star, Eastwood can be remarkably generous with actresses in his films, and here he mostly steps back to give the steely Locke, her hairstyle verging on Veronica Lake, room to play out her version of The Bride Wore Black. What's of particular interest in Sudden Impact is its mating of illness and creativity -- the obsessed Locke paints anguished self-portraits when she's not aiming crotch-shots at the men who fractured her own innocence and her fragile sister's sanity. During the Eighties, in Bronco Billy ('80), Honky Tonk Man ('82), Sudden Impact, TV's "Vanessa in the Garden" ('85), and Bird ('88), director Eastwood signposted intriguing intersections between assault on the mind or body and the generation of some form of art, between muses and mirrored selves, between mostly male artists or performers and their enabling lovers. Eastwood directed "Vanessa in the Garden" for Steven Spielberg's short-lived TV series Amazing Stories. Written by Spielberg and featuring Harvey Keitel as a 19th century impressionist, Sondra Locke as his wife, and Beau Bridges as agent and family friend, this half-hour effort suffers from woeful miscasting and awkward performances by the two male leads. But at the heart of its oddly hallucinatory narrative lies a striking evocation of the power of the imagination and the nature of the creative process. Wife, subject, and muse, Vanessa is truly the artist's "godsend," an Eve who composes his real and painted gardens and makes them fruitful. After her accidental death, Keitel burns every canvas that bears her likeness -- with the inadvertent exception of the garden portrait -- and sinks into drunken despair. One morning he wakes to a painting emptied of its central figure, and Vanessa's sweet humming outside his window. In a stunning elision, the camera moves rightward from the abandoned canvas to catch Keitel's reflection in a mirror; then tracks into the mirror to frame -- through window panes -- the white-clad woman posed among her flowers; then, using the edge of the actual painting as a wipe, drives leftward to confirm the scene in reality; returns to the artist's reflection, followed by a reprise of the ghost in the garden. When Keitel plunges outdoors, the vision dissolves away. (In Sudden Impact, made just two years before, Locke played the despairing artist -- as well as murderess, firing her gun into a glass that mirrors her own face and one of the grotesque self-portraits she has painted.) It's irrelevant whether Keitel has gone mad, conjured his very own "pale rider," or somehow found a way back to the spiritual source of his creativity: that audacious camera sequence precisely diagrams a syntax of the imagination at work. "It cannot be unless you create it," Vanessa whispers, and through the art of making pictures, Keitel resurrects his wife and all their past and future times. That phrase -- "making pictures" -- is Robert Kincaid's from The Bridges of Madison County ('95), Eastwood's celebration of love as an expression of passionate creativity. Kincaid explicitly identifies the aesthetic impulse to make pictures with "making his way" to Francesca (Meryl Streep), and takes into exile the faith that they "are hardly two separate people now." Through the looking-glass of "Vanessa in the Garden," Francesca and her godsend can be seen creating a durable dream to sustain them for the rest of their separated lives. AT THE BEGINNING OF Bronco Billy, Eastwood's camera locates a circus bigtop in the middle of heartland fields, and time-dissolving ever deeper into evening, closes slowly in on the set where a New Jersey shoe salesman directs a sweetly communal fantasy of an heroic Wild West. The brightly lighted island inside the tent where Billy and his crew present their tableaux vivants often seems to float in an ocean of darkness -- indeed, at film's end, Billy and his "family" of costumed misfits disappear into that darkness. As long as "orphaned" heiress-on-the-run Antoinette Lilly (Sondra Locke) insists on poking holes in Billy's creation, she's the author of "bad luck" that literally brings down the show. This gentle screwball comedy is a remarkably self-aware take on Eastwood's career, and the art of the Western; even the director's reputed need and ability to control every aspect of a shoot may be referenced in Billy's hot-tempered insistence on being "head ramrod." Eastwood's contemporary "Western" shapes up as a much lighter, self-reflexive version of The Outlaw Josey Wales (CE, '76): both Billy and Josey lose their wives under traumatic conditions, turning outlaw as a result; collect a ragtag family of mixed race, gender, and age; save from rape a girl (Sondra Locke, in both cases) who redeems the outsider -- or is herself redeemed -- through love and enlistment in the hero's cause; and find a home in unexpected "paradise," Billy's American Flag circus tent and Josey's democratic ranch. In the richly imagined Bird, a well-meaning psychiatrist recommends shock therapy for lifetime drug-addict Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), who, recently confronted by his sorry soul in a bathroom mirror, has downed a bottle of iodine. When Chan (Diane Venora), the jazzman's wife and best audience, expresses concern about the effect of ECT on Bird's creativity, the doctor suggests that she may have to choose either husband or musician. Venora's red-hot Chan lays it on the line: "Husband and musician -- they do not separate!" As though her words called up a home-movie memory, the space behind camera-facing Chan slowly blacks out. In that darkness materializes a "street of dreams," a neon-lit big-city strip of pulsing jazz joints down which a young, vibrant woman strides on her way to fall for Bird and his music. Chan's remembrance of a (flawed) paradise lost is as potent and seductive as Bronco Billy's Wild West bigtop, as Red Stovall's Grand Ole Opry, the "heart's desire" of a country singer in Honky Tonk Man, and yes, even Vanessa in her quiet garden. That garden has turned nearly Fordian grave in Unforgiven, Eastwood's masterpiece. William Munny's lost wife, marrying beneath her, reformed a devil of a man. In turn, after Claudia Feathers dies of smallpox, Munny makes her his guardian angel, an internalized ethic. Her chaste and aging knight -- "I don't miss it much" -- is drawn into a rather lowdown quest, inspired more by money than a lady's honor. But William Munny rises from pigshit to apotheosis when he lays his ghostly superego long enough to exact terrible revenge on men for whom slashing a woman's face or whipping a good man to death count less than civic peace and prosperity. (Shades of guilty Lago in High Plains Drifter.) Wracked by fever-chills and a brutal beating by Sheriff Daggett (Gene Hackman), Munny passes through the little death that often precedes the transformation of an Eastwood hero into a killing-machine. That transformation is triggered by a spiritual dissolve of three visages into one: his hallucinated vision of Claudia, her face eaten by worms; the white-blonde whore (Anna Thomson), her face crisscrossed by scars; and his own, its marred flesh skinned back to show a true death's head. "I thought you was an angel," says Munny to the woman who set this story in motion. Then: "I must look kinda like you." It's not that William Munny reverts to his former drunken, demonic state, during which he annihilated "everything that walked or crawled." Wearing the "colors" of both Claudia Feathers, "a comely young woman...not without prospects," and Delilah Fitzgerald, "damaged property," he becomes a force for something like divine retribution. Drifter, pale rider, barest bones of Bronco Billy's fairy tale, William Munny reshapes the ignominious stuff of actuality (Little Bill's eyewitness account of how English Bob came to kill Two-Gun Corky Corcoran) and cheap fiction (dime-novelist Beauchamp's Duke of Death, avenger of a woman's slighting) into purely clarifying myth. Afterwards, Claudia Feathers's faithful husband disappears into vague, mundane history: "There was nothing on [her grave] marker to explain why [she] had married William Munny...." Reportedly, Eastwood planned early on to make a "romance" for his fiftieth film. The Bridges of Madison County stands as a love story for adults, unreeling in brave slowness (given contemporary popcult pulse rates). As in Bird, his lovers talk their way toward touching, exploring each other -- mostly during and after meals at a kitchen table -- through easy, sometimes heated conversational rhythms. A convention of many previous Eastwood films is the hero's uncanny ability to establish immediate, wordless rapport with women of all ages; here and in 1993's In the Line of Fire, he reveals a truly irresistible gift for gab and self-revelation. The intensely focused, yet mercilessly impersonal, attention with which he has always seared his enemies becomes, in Bridges, generous, erotic apprehension of Otherness. Always unusually partial to less-than-conventional beauty, more idiosyncratic, authentically lived-in faces -- Jessica Walter, Breezy's Kay Lenz, Verna Bloom, Sondra Locke, Alexa Kenin (Honky Tonk Man), Carrie Snodgress, Diane Venora, Rene Russo -- Bridges' director virtually celebrates the seasoned character and flesh of Meryl Streep's earthy Francesca. In The Bridges of Madison County, Eastwood once more plays a sexual savior of sorts, but through some alchemy of imagination and style, transubstantiates a four-day love affair between an Iowa farmwife and a footloose photographer, played by two stars beyond their physical prime, into the kind of newness we yearn to confer on sexual -- and emotional -- experience, if only for the space of a movie. As director and actor, Eastwood has rarely rested on his laurels, has always pushed toward new ground: when he turns his haggard visage to the camera in his last scene in Bridges, his hair lankly plastered down by pouring rain, his face is as open in its naked age and pain as any seen in the cinema. It's a courageous exposure, an opening of the soul, something few could have visualized when he was The Man With No Name. But this late divestiture of the mystery he took to the bank for so long, of any mask and armor, has been earned by four decades of accumulating assurance and self-knowledge as director, star, and man. They do not separate in this shootist for all seasons. Kathleen Murphy is writer-in-residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Clint Eastwood will be the recipient of the FSLC's annual gala tribute on May 6, 1996. *Twenty-eight years later, in Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fire, Eastwood plays at being Bogart, whose teeth-baring, berserker rages may have inspired his "spaghetti Western" variation. Sharing his piano bench with Rene Russo, he faces down his soon-to-be-lover by kidding his own style: "Sometimes a glare is as good as a gun." © 1996 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
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