PERSONAL FAVES: Dirty Harry

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Clint Eastwood / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 34 of 100

It’s fair to say that Clint Eastwood has pretty much one style of acting: minimal. According to an Eastwood biography I read earlier this year – ‘Clint: The Life and Legend’ by Patrick McGilligan (actually it’s more a 600-page character assassination than a biography, which is why I haven’t bothered reviewing it for this month’s Eastwood-fest) – he’s that rarest of actors: a man who scours screenplays demanding his characters be given less dialogue, not more.

Fortunately Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner’s script escaped with its big speech intact, allowing rogue cop Harry Callaghan (Eastwood) to draw down on his nemesis whilst delivering the following immortal lines: “I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking: did he fire six shots or only five? Now to tell you the truth, I kind of forgot myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow you head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

Am I pushing it by claiming this little monologue as the “to be or not to be” of action movies? Debate that one in the comments section; all I know is that it’s the first movie speech I ever knew off by heart. And Andrew Robinson’s Scorpio killer was one of the first movie villains who ever truly scared the crap out of me.

For all that Eastwood’s onscreen minimalism underpins his iconic coolness, credit must be given to those co-stars whose more effusive turns have provided the contrast against which said iconic coolness is emphasised. Perhaps the best example is Eli Wallach in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, all jittery unpredictability, chewing his way through all the best lines in the script. Then there’s George Kennedy’s motor-mouth supporting role in ‘The Eiger Sanction’, Jaimz Woolvett’s piss-and-vinegar personifaction of the Schofield Kid in ‘Unforgiven’, Donald Sutherland’s prototype hippie in ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, Richard Burton’s magnificently sozzled man of action in ‘Where in Eagles Dare’ … hell, even the orang-utan in ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ and ‘Any Which Way You Can’ fits the bill.

Andrew Robinson in ‘Dirty Harry’ fulfils the same role as these others. He also emerges as one of the few antagonists in the Eastwood canon who provides a palpable threat; in fact, it wasn’t until the one-two of John Malkovich’s political assassin in ‘In the Line of Fire’ and Gene Hackman’s stone-cold portrayal of “Little” Bill Daggett in ‘Unforgiven’ that his protagonists were faced with such a challenge again.

Based on the Zodiac killer (David Fincher’s eponymous film includes a suitably satirical reference to ‘Dirty Harry’), Robinson’s Scorpio is the sociopath writ large: unhinged, obsessive and determined to drag Callaghan down to his level in a battle of wits that’s as psychopathic as it is psychological. His most grimly embittered scene – worse, in some ways, than the climactic sequence where he commandeers a school bus, pitilessly terrorising his tearful hostages – comes after Callaghan effects his arrest by flaunting due process. The legal system declares that Scorpio’s rights have been violated and he is released. He immediately hires a muscular gentleman of African American heritage to beat him to a pulp; as he’s wheeled into hospital on a gurney, reporters flapping around him, he weakly asserts that it was Callaghan who beat him up. It’s chilling enough that Scorpio goes to such lengths to score points against Callaghan, but what makes the scene gut-twistingly sickening is the way he racially goads his pugilist into really doing a job on him.

It would have been easy for Robinson to have walked off with the film, leaving only the title as a reminder of Eastwood’s part. Yet ‘Dirty Harry’ is one of the quintessential Clint titles. The aforementioned speech helps, but there are simply a plethora of iconic and cynically entertaining moments: Callaghan’s blunt verbal exchanges with both his long suffering boss Lt. Bressler (Harry Guardino) and the less-suffering but politically motivated Mayor (John Vernon); Callaghan persuading a potentially suicidal citizen down from the ledge by the unpretentious expedient of punching him unconcious and slinging him over his shoulder; Callaghan breaking off from his lunch to intercede in a bank robbery, turning an urban street into a war zone then wandering back into the deli to finish his sandwich.

‘Dirty Harry’ is easy to criticise nearly forty years after its original release: in its ethnic characters, its casual incorrectness and its throwaway violence, it’s very much a product of its times. It also feeds ammunition to a small but vocal encampment of critics who persistently and tiresomely dismiss Eastwood’s cinema as right-wing. Me, I don’t get involved in politics. I just dig movies. And ‘Dirty Harry’ – boasting gritty direction by Don Siegel and defined by Eastwood’s most in-yer-face and unapologetic anti-hero – is powerhouse movie.

Escape from Alcatraz

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Clint Eastwood / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 32 of 100

The fifth collaboration between Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood, ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ is a steadily-paced, slow-burn drama adapted from J.Campbell Bruce’s non-fiction book about the most famous (and possibly only successful) escape attempt from the notorious prison island. I use the word “possibly” advisedly. Although the official investigation concluded that the escapees – Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin – were drowned, their bodies were never found. The film adds a fictitious but nicely understated coda which both implies the success of the escape attempt and serves as a “fuck you” to the Warden.

In the film, Morris is played by Eastwood and John and Clarence Anglin by Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau respectively. The Warden at the time of the real-life escape was Olin Blackwell; he was the last Warden of Alcatraz and the facility closed a year after the Morris/Anglin escape. The Warden, played by Patrick McGoohan, is unnamed and at one point refers to Blackwell as his predecessor (presumably to avoid litigation since Richard Tuggle’s screenplay paints the Warden as a sadistic bastard). ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ marks Tuggle’s debut (he went on to write and direct the dark and ambiguous ‘Tightrope’ for Eastwood) as well as Fred Ward’s and that of Danny Glover, who appears in a small role as one of the inmates.

It’s the casting of McGoohan, however, that’s most interesting. A decade after his career-defining turn as Number Six in ‘The Prisoner’ – and following some run-of-the-mill parts in ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’, ‘Silver Streak’ and TV series ‘Rafferty’ – ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ gave McGoohan the first part he seemed to fully engage with since he escaped The Village. As Alex Cox remarked in an introduction to the film as part of the “Moviedrome” series, “Number Six has become Number Two.” It strikes me that in ‘Escape from Alcatraz’, Number Six becomes a specific Number Two.

For anyone whose only exposure to ‘The Prisoner’ is the misconceived remake with Jim Cavaziel in the McGoohan role (a so-called “re-imagining” that tried too hard both to incorporate tropes from the original and do its own thing, and ultimately got lost somewhere inbetween), Number Two was played by a different actor in virtually every episode (although Colin Gordon appeared in two episodes and Leo McKern in three). It’s Patrick Cargill’s prissy, twitchy, malicious characterization of Number Two in the episode “Hammer Into Anvil” that McGoohan seems to be channelling in his portrayal of the Warden; and the final scene of ‘Escape from Alcatraz’, where the Warden is summoned back to the mainland to answer to his superiors, is reminiscent of Number Two’s defeat by Number Six in that episode.

Fortunately, though, there is no attempt to synthesize Number Six into Frank Morris, otherwise the ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ could have been as overloaded with ‘Prisoner’ subtext as this article! Eastwood’s minimalistic style of acting is entirely suited to Morris, and Siegel’s direction – unintrusive and attentive to detail – is just as appropriate. The first half of the film captures the routines, cadences and repetitions of prison life, the slow passing of hard time occasionally interrupted by the threat of violence, here personified by Wolf (Bruce M Fischer): a big bastard hellbent on making Morris his bitch. When Wolf puts the moves on Morris in the shower block, Morris the only cock he gets is cold-cocked (sorry, couldn’t resist!). Later, Wolf tries to shank Morris in the yard; the fight is broken up by the guards and both Wolf and Morris are put into solitary confinement, despite Morris’s justified protestation that “he came at me”.

Solitary, with its attendant humiliation of being hosed down, piques Morris’s hatred of the Warden. When privileges are pettily revoked from two older timers Morris has befriended – Doc (Roberts Blossom) and Litmus (Frank Ronzio) – resulting in one of them immolating himself and the other suffering a heart attack, after which the Warden threateningly informs Morris that “some men are destined never to leave Alcatraz … alive”, Morris decides that escape is the best form of revenge.

Slow-burn gradually flares into legitimate tension as the escape attempt gets under way, with shakedowns, the reappearance of a vengeful Wolf and the possibility of Morris’s transfer to another cell block forcing the conspirators to make their bid for freedom earlier than originally planned. The escape itself is a mostly wordless sequence that Siegel films with taut realism. Indeed, realism was Siegel’s watchword: the film was shot on Alcatraz itself, the prison buildings restored to their 1962 condition, and despite a few anachronisms a powerful sense of confinement and claustrophobia is achieved.

‘Escape from Alcatraz’ is a reined-in, low-key piece of film-making, one that probably bemused audiences anticipating the Eastwood/Siegel dynamic of ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ or ‘Dirty Harry’ but would have come as no surprise to aficionados of ‘The Beguiled’. With Eastwood taking increasing control of his own projects – more and more frequently fulfilling the triumvirate of actor, director, producer – this was the last film Eastwood made with Siegel; it was a sobering and atmospheric swansong.

Play Misty for Me

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Clint Eastwood / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 29 of 100

Made the same year, ‘Play Misty for Me’ is something of a companion piece to ‘The Beguiled’ inasmuch as both films feature a protagonist of irresolute sexual commitment getting his just desserts at the hands of disturbed and vengeful women. Like ‘The Beguiled’, ‘Play Misty for Me’ would have the tang of blatant misogyny about it but for (a) the male protagonist (albeit to a lesser degree in ‘Play Misty’) deserving it; and (b) a powerhouse performance from the actress playing his antagonist.

While DJ David Garver (Eastwood) isn’t the liar, manipulator and borderline paedophile that McBurney is, he’s nonetheless a narcissist and, by dint of spending most of the movie thinking through his pecker, something of a fool. Garver is another of Eastwood’s anti-heroes. It’s fascinating that an actor who has maintained, over half a century of screen appearances, the reputation of the quintessential macho icon so frequently plays flawed characters. It’s also fascinating that in his directorial debut he plays not a cowboy or a cop or a rough ‘n’ ready action hero, but a laconic DJ who doesn’t use violence until he absolutely has no choice during the Hitchcockian finale. For much of the film, and despite his easy charm, Garver is something of a non-character, breezing through life with (at first) genial indifference, and later bland confusion as the implications of one bad decision snowball into psycho-sexual power games, stalking and finally violence.

And who is it who visits said anti-social behaviour upon him? Well, that brings us to point (b) and let’s have a great big hand, please, ladies and gentlemen, for Jessica Walter. Her turn as Evelyn Draper, the obsessed fan who repeatedly calls Garver’s show to request the sultry Errol Garner standard ‘Misty’, is the ace up the film’s sleeve. Without her, ‘Play Misty for Me’ would be at best a curio, notable for being Eastwood’s first outing behind the camera and for being a thriller that’s chiefly devoid of thrilleramics.

Let’s face it, for all of the clones that came after ‘Play Misty for Me’ (I’m looking at you, ‘Fatal Attraction’), you’d think it was a blueprint for the “woman scorned” thriller. And yet virtually every film that borrows from it, right down to a slew of top-shelf erotic thrillers, is tighter in its pacing and more urgent in its narrative arc. ‘Play Misty for Me’ downright meanders. It’s almost as if Eastwood can’t be bothered with the thriller elements. Late in the game, when everything should be revving up to high gear for the nail-biting denouement, Eastwood decelerates for an extended trip to the Monterey jazz festival, then puts the brake on altogether for a bit of how’s-your-father in the woods a la ‘Madame Bovary’ as Garver blithely decides to get back together with old flame Tobie (a bland Donna Mills).

Jessica Walter, however, lights the blue touch paper and burns up the screen every scene she’s in. From her sultry, underplayed pick-up of Garver in a bar tended by his friend Murphy (Don Siegel, mentoring his protégé) to her bouts of jealous rage by way of some moments that vacillate between sexy and scary so effectively that you’re not sure whether she’s fanciable or frightening, Evelyn Draper is one of American cinema’s great psychos, claiming lineage from the iconic and seductive man-eating femmes fatale of film noir, and more than capable of holding her own against the enduring villains of recent years. Give Hannibal Lecter a sex change, a mini skirt, a tube of lip gloss and a preference for ‘Misty’ over the Goldberg Variations and the result would be Evelyn Draper.

In fact, it’s probably Eastwood’s determination to strip away the thriller elements and let ‘Play Misty for Me’ unfold as an offbeat, free-wheeling character study that most benefits the film. With very few genre conventions and/or plot devices to distract the audience*, Walter’s performance is allowed centre stage, and Eastwood’s effortless cool has never seemed so threatened than by the dervish-like fury of Evelyn’s jealous rage.




*Indeed, the only real plot device that sneaks under the radar – matters pertaining to Tobie’s room mate – doesn’t hold water when you stop to consider the chronology of events.

The Beguiled

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Clint Eastwood / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 28 of 100

‘The Beguiled’ opens with stark titles over a montage of archive photographs from the civil war. At first quietly, but then with increasing urgency and volume, a militaristic drumbeat fills the the soundtrack. A newcomer to ‘The Beguiled’ could be forgiven the false expectation of a dry-run for ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’.

The opening credits sequence is the only thing in ‘The Beguiled’ that conforms to expectations. The remaining 100 minutes play out like a prototype of ‘Misery’ but re-imagined as a western and directed by Roman Polanski. Confined setting, pressure cooker environment, sexual repression and a smattering of controversial moments. Director Don Siegel tosses one of them out pretty much straightaway. Picture the scene:

The montage of archive photographs segue into the first scene proper. The film is sepia for a few seconds, colour eventually bleeding into it, as if the scene were a continuation of the montage (Peckinpah would use a similar technique in ‘Cross of Iron’). A young girl (Pamelyn Ferdin) runs through the woods, gathering mushrooms. She comes across a wounded Union soldier, John McBurney (Clint Eastwood). Overcoming her initial fright, she helps him to his feet with the intention of taking him back to the school she attends. Hearing a patrol approaching, McBurney drags her into the undergrowth. “What’s your name?” he asks her. She tells him: Amy. McBurney asks her age. Twelve. “Old enough for kisses,” McBurney muses and covers her mouth with his as the patrol gallops past.

Dodgy enough for you yet? No? Okay, let’s meet the staff and some of Amy’s fellow pupils at the Farnsworth Academy for Young Ladies. There’s the owner and headmistress, Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page). She’s strict, matronly and gives the appearance of being the last word in prim and proper. You’d hardly think she used to have an incestuous relationship with her brother, or that she has a sexual interest in her devoted and virginal assistant Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman).

Edwina’s frigidity is contrasted with the melting pot of hormones constituted by the girls in her class. Castigating one of them for lack of attention during a French class, the girl in question replies, “I can’t concentrate because the war sounds so near … If the Union win, they’ll rape us all.”

Once Amy shows up with the injured McBurney, however, thoughts are less of rape than seduction. Amy’s sold on him already; the next expression of interest is from seductive nymphette Carol (Jo Ann Harris). Forget the Polanski comparisons for the moment; we’re in Nabokov territory here, with Carol as Lolita only a few years older and with more cleavage. McBurney’s not exactly your Humbert Humbert type, though. He’s younger, hunkier and has country boy charm in spades.

Martha orders that McBurney’s wounds be tended and that he is allowed to recover before being handed over to the next Confederate patrol. He is kept in a locked room. Nursing duties fall to black servant Hallie (Mae Mercer) – by Martha’s orders – and Edwina … by her own volition. When Carol intrudes on Edwina bathing the semi-conscious McBurney (the film was made in 1971, with Eastwood at the prime of his macho physicality) and offers to relieve her (and doubtless give McBurney a little relief as well), Edwina slaps her across the face and calls her a hussy.

McBurney first uses his charm on Martha, concerned with preventing his handing over to enemy troops. He smooth-talks Edwina. He appeals to Hallie, seeking to create empathy by suggesting they’re both prisoners. He doesn’t have to expend any effort with Carol, she’s so desperate to jump his bones it might as well be spelled out in neon. In time, even Martha becomes attracted by his sexual charisma, arranging for his room to be left unlocked one night so that he might visit her. He takes advantage of the situation to pay a visit to Carol instead, only for Edwina to catch them in flagrante delecto. What happens next moves ‘The Beguiled’ from western to chamber piece/character study to horror movie.

The genius of ‘The Beguiled’ is it never tips into the misogynistic fantasia many (male) directors would have made of it: an injured man trying to escape the clutches of a group of women who would variously betray, imprison or enslave him. True, he suffers at their hands as the film progresses – the first to turn against him is Carol when she catches him canoodling with Edwina and perpetrates an act that almost gets him arrested by a patrol – but by the time things get really dark and nasty, there’s no doubt that he deserves it.

For all that Siegel and scriptwriters John B. Sherry and Grimes Grice* (working from the novel by Thomas Cullinan) unambiguously establish the psychologically disturbed Martha as the villain of the piece, only the most blinkered Eastwood aficionado could mistake McBurney for the hero. From getting amorous with a twelve year old girl to romanticising his tawdry past (two crucial monologues are counterpointed by flashbacks that reveal McBurney as a blatant liar) to the act of violence that poisons even Amy against him, McBurney is a case study in compromised morality.

His darkest moment comes when, having reasserted his masculinity over his female captors (and, by this point, abusers), he holds Martha and gunpoint and declares that he intends to satisfy himself with whomever “wants the pleasure of my company”. He then turns his attention to Hallie: “You’re a handsome woman. I might start with you.” A flashback has Hallie cornered by Martha’s brother in the barn; he rips her bodice open and advances on her before she fends him off with a pitchfork. The implication is clear: just as Martha and her brother were two halves of an illicit union, McBurney and Martha are two sides of the same coin.

Reputedly Don Siegel’s personal favourite of his films, ‘The Beguiled’ is as potent an example of Southern gothic as has been put on screen. The atmosphere of sexual hysteria is barely contained, but Siegel manages to keep enough of a lid on things that the film never degenerates into histrionics or cheap melodrama. He also summons a wealth of fine performances. Eastwood digs beneath his laconic veneer to present a portrait of reptilian charm and moral corruption. It’s one of the first glimpses in his filmography of a flawed and not necessarily likeable protagonist.

But it’s the women of the cast to whom the film belongs. Page channels the kind of psychological intensity usually reserved for playing Lady Macbeth. Hartman invests Edwina with a heartbreaking fragility. Harris imbues Carol’s scenes with such jailbait sensuality that I was very glad to discover she was 22 at the time of shooting and not her character’s age. Lastly, Ferdin excels as Amy, the immediacy of her performance belying her age. In many respects it’s the understated scene, very late in the film, where Amy is persuaded into a certain course of action, that characterises ‘The Beguiled’. It is a film of bitter ironies and dark motivations, and all of them spring from the fallibility of the human condition.

*Pseudonyms for Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp. Maltz had been blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten”.

Coogan's Bluff

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Clint Eastwood / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 27 of 100

Ask anyone to name Clint Eastwood’s two most iconic roles and I guarantee – guarantee – the answer will be The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. The cowboy and the cop. Although it predates ‘Dirty Harry’, Don Siegel’s culture-clash thriller ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ synthesizes these two aspects of the archetypal Eastwood persona. In fact, ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ is primarily remembered as the transitional film that moved the Eastwood of the westerns into a contemporary urban environment. This reputation seems to have lent the film a cachet that its slow pacing, reliance on stereotypes and moderately effective set-pieces don’t quite live up to.

‘Coogan’s Bluff’ was the first of five collaborations between Siegel and Eastwood over a decade (six if you count Eastwood casting Siegel in a small role in his directorial debut ‘Play Misty for Me’) and ranks with ‘Two Mules for Sister Sara’ as one of the least interesting things they did together. There’s none of the grand guignol perversity of ‘The Beguiled’, little of the iconography of ‘Dirty Harry’ and the pitting of Eastwood’s laconic minimalist acting style against the scenery chewing of Lee J. Cobb isn’t quite as interesting as the Clint Eastwood/Patrick McGoohan contrast in ‘Escape from Alcatraz’.

The slender narrative of ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ is basically this: Arizona deputy sheriff Coogan (Eastwood), at loggerheads with his superiors over his laissez faire attitude to the job and all-round disregard for the rule book, is sent to New York to repatriate cocky young prisoner Ringerman (Don Stroud). When his NYPD contact Lt McElroy (Cobb) reveals that Ringerman is drying out from an LSD trip in the prison medical bay and there’s no telling how long it’ll be until the court releases him into Coogan’s care, Coogan decides to take matters into his own hands – only for Ringerman to promptly escape.

The script – credited to three writers – starts off in high gear with Coogan on home turf, tracking down and arresting a crook who’s headed out into the wilds with a high-powered rifle and the survival skills indigenous to a Native American. Two men, the elements, a desolate landscape. Plenty of western tropes. Clint in a cowboy hat. Five minutes into the movie and things are ticking along nicely. Then the scene shifts to the big city and the narrative meanders for a while until Ringerman escapes and Coogan’s pursuit puts some pace back into things for the last half hour.

A loose sequence of fish-out-of-water vignettes accounts for much of the first hour. Coogan rubs McElroy up the wrong way. Coogan rubs police psychiatrist Julie (Susan Clark) up the wrong way, before the two of them start flitting around each other in a pas de deux of a romantic subplot that goes unresolved. Coogan encounters hookers, hippies, pushers and pimps. A standing joke has everyone in New York mistake him for a Texan. Eastwood’s low-key performance style, where a snarl and a scowl speak a thousand words, could have made for some inspired moments, but the humour never quite gels.

Still, clocking in at just over an hour and a half, ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ remains a worthwhile slice of entertainment that never outstays its welcome. Siegel was too adept a film-maker to turn in anything that was less than watchable (even his lesser work, such as ‘The Black Windmill’ and ‘Telefon’, have a vigorous proficiency about them) and ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ boasts a brilliantly edited pool-hall fight and a climactic motorcycle chase that palpably communicates the speed and desperation of the pursuit. The Eastwood cop persona is effectively established (setting up ‘Dirty Harry’ three years later) and Stroud’s villain is good value.

Ultimately, ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ is fun but forgettable. Its supporting characters are ciphers and the filmmakers’ evocation of the underground scene (a nightclub called the Pigeon Toed Orange Peel!) is laughable. Nonetheless, I picked it as the lead-off for this month’s celebration of all things Clint because I wanted to pay proper tribute to the importance of Don Siegel in Eastwood’s career. Following the safe bet of ‘Two Mules for Sister Sara’ they re-teamed for ‘The Beguiled’, a psycho-sexual drama that is unlike anything else on Eastwood’s CV, and it’s this offbeat, disturbing and atmospheric opus that I’ll be reviewing next.