Authors: Richard Schickel
Ha-ha. Journalism had plenty of experience processing dopey—or, at best, innocent—young movie discoveries, having its fun with them, especially when, awkwardly, they expressed their ambitions, something
Clint had no experience doing. But at least the newsmagazine acknowledged what the industry, looking at the success of the first two Leone films in America, and anticipating the returns on
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
, had also at last observed: that a star of some sort was definitely coming to term. Indeed, even before the first two Leone films had gone into release, Picker astonished Clint’s agent, Lenny Hirshan, by predicting that sometime soon people would be offering him the then princely sum of $750,000 for his client’s services.
That earning that money might only come by working within the limits of the action picture was not an entirely pleasing prospect to Hirshan’s client, or to the agent himself. Being an “action star” was not in those days what it has become, and action pictures were not yet the “tentpoles” they now are, with studios risking huge budgets and building their release schedules around an armed and dangerous Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone. In the late sixties, action movies were still largely low-prestige, low-budget enterprises, and one had to avoid permanent entrapment in them. What Hirshan and Clint wanted to do instead was to make enough straight-ahead, reasonably priced action films to satisfy what they judged to be Clint’s core audience, while at the same time making some more expensive, presumably more prestigious, films that would, they hoped, establish him with a larger public and as a major industry player.
Between the successful release of the first
Dollars
movie and the optimistically awaited release of the second, Clint was presented with at least two interesting possibilities. Leone turned up in Los Angeles to pitch
Once upon a Time in the West
to him again, offering him Harmonica, the mysterious gunfighter eventually portrayed by Charles Bronson in the film. It was to be produced by an American company (Paramount), was to be made entirely on location in the United States and was budgeted at a substantial figure. But their meeting did not go well. Leone particularly (correctly) loved the movie’s opening sequence, in which three gunfighters await the arrival of Harmonica at a train station and engage in much memorable and subtly satirical western business. Somewhat to Clint’s impatience he focused on the entrapment of a fly in a pistol barrel by the figure who was played in the film by the iconic Jack Elam. “It took him fifteen minutes to get past that part,” he says, and he remembers asking, “Wait a second, where are we headed with this?” But Leone was not to be hurried, and continued his synopsis at his own overly detailed pace.
At its end Clint still felt that however artfully the film was accomplished, it would inevitably be perceived as just another pasta dish. He could also see that though technically he would be the star, the best parts
once again would go to others, in this case to Henry Fonda and Jason Robards Jr. So he passed, telling Leone that he would love to work with him sometime on something that was not a western. In a sense he was wrong.
Once upon a Time in the West
turned out brilliantly, the dark full-scale epic of western settlement that Leone had always wanted to make, rich in brutal irony and wondrous imagery. Though a commercial disaster when it was released (the studio cut more than twenty minutes out of it a couple of weeks into its run), it has since been widely acknowledged as one of the great westerns of its time.
Large but empty commercial vistas had no appeal, either, for around the same time, writer-producer Carl Foreman approached Clint with
Mackenna’s Gold
. It was, on its face, just the sort of upscale enterprise everyone agreed Clint ought to be doing—a western to be sure, but one intended for an all-star cast and being advanced under the toniest auspices. For Foreman was then a prestigious figure in the industry; he had written and produced a number of small, serious, critically appreciated films in the late forties and early fifties
(Champion, Home of the Brave, High Noon)
, had endured blacklisting and had come back to make the hugely successful adventure film
The Guns of Navarone
, the director of which, J. Lee Thompson, was attached to this new project.
Clint remembers that Hirshan was enthusiastic about the film, though he was not. “I don’t get the script,” he recalls saying—something about a treasure map, buried gold and the usual mixed, contentious crowd gathering to pursue it. Nor was there anything very interesting about his character, who was a standard hero. Hirshan remembers Clint leaving a meeting with Foreman, saying, “It’s just an extension of
Rawhide,”
and telling him that he was going to pass. It was a wise decision, for despite an all-star cast headed by Gregory Peck in the role that Clint turned down,
Mackenna’s Gold
flopped miserably.
At this time Clint had another close adviser, his longtime business manager Irving Leonard, and he, too, was playing an active role in developing his career. A small, fastidious man, Leonard acted, as Clint puts it, “like a second father to me.” He had taken Clint on as a client when he was freelancing, managing his modest financial affairs for contingency fees. Clint admired Leonard’s skills as a lightning calculator—one time at a play an actor did some complicated mental arithmetic on stage and gave the wrong answer, only to hear Leonard cry out the right one from the audience. More important, he gratefully admired his loyalty and general shrewdness; Leonard’s firm continues to be Clint’s business managers to this day.
Around this time the accountant passed on to Clint a script entitled
Hang ’em High
. A western on a fairly modest scale, it was the work of
Leonard Freeman (a producer-writer working mainly in television, for which he would eventually create
Hawaii Five-O
) and another TV writer, Mel Goldberg. When he read it Clint found in it a “certain feeling about injustice and capital punishment” that he responded to. He also thought the leading role, that of Jed Cooper, a lawman seeking private vengeance while serving a hanging judge who takes a peculiar pleasure in his work, offered him opportunities as an actor that he had not had in the Leone films. Here he would not be, as he puts it, “a symbol,” but rather a troubled figure, questioning both his own motives and those of the system he served. “I felt it was time,” he says, “even though it was a smaller film, to go ahead and challenge myself in that way.”
Clint’s feelings for the film perhaps ran a little more deeply than that. For it took up and extended the main theme of a favorite picture of his,
The Ox-Bow Incident
, which through its story of men wrongly accused of, and hung for, cattle rustling expresses, in its way, one of the main themes of his inner life, his abhorrence of false witness, false accusation (it is why erroneous tabloid reports of his doings constantly evoke his outraged litigiousness). The film would also permit him to explore again the resurrection theme adumbrated in
A Fistful of Dollars
, and returned to in so many later films.
This project he and Leonard took to United Artists. At the same time, Clint, acting on Leonard’s advice, established his own company, Malpaso, which means “bad step” in Spanish and is also the name of a creek that ran through the property he owned in Carmel at the time. Clint liked the irony implicit in the phrase, but says that he did not then foresee the company becoming the full-scale production entity that it soon turned into. Rather he and Leonard saw it as a typical loan-out company of the kind the movies’ above-the-line talent had begun establishing in the 1950s, partly for their tax advantages, partly because they put their owners in at least nominal charge of their own destinies.
The latter promise was particularly appealing to Clint. As an actor for hire there was little he could do to reshape something like
Mackenna’s Gold
. But if his company was supplying his services and coproducing a project, he would have much to say about its outcome. Indeed, as he thought about
Hang ’em High
, he found himself thinking about Ted Post to direct it. And he also thought that Post would be a good person on whom to test his opinion of the script. The director had come out of the New York theater and live television and aside from his twenty-eight
Rawhide
episodes he had by this time directed hundreds of other TV hours. He also taught in some of the same acting schools that had shaped Clint’s own ideas about performance.
So Clint made an appointment with him, arriving at Post’s Beverly
Hills home carrying with him, besides the
Hang ’em High
script, a novel and a brief treatment for another original film—projects that UA had proposed to him. The fact that Post was a voluble, volatile man from Brooklyn increased his value to Clint. If so different a sensibility responded as he had to
Hang ’em High
it would seem more likely that the film could find a broad audience. Clint briefly described the material he had brought with him, asked Post to study it and then get back to him. He did not offer his own evaluations of the properties.
When they next talked, Post told Clint that he thought
Hang ’em High
was the best of the lot, and it was only then that Clint said he agreed. His judgment confirmed, he and Leonard told UA that Clint would commit to this project if UA would sign Post to direct it. This created an immediate dispute. Post recalls Arnold Picker, David’s father, who was operating head of the company at the time, calling from New York to argue against him. He and Clint and Leonard were all in the latter’s office, listening as the elder Picker raised his objections: “We have a list of directors we gave you. They’re all very experienced and talented people who have tremendous track records.… I mean, we know Teddy is very good at what he’s doing, but that’s television, not features,” he said, ignoring the fact that Post actually had two theatrical films to his credit at this point.
Clint, however, remained steadfast. According to Post, he told Picker, “I know most of these directors you recommended, I’ve worked with most of them. I prefer Ted Post. I did a lot of shows with him. I feel very comfortable with him.” Says Post: “He was very patient, very soft-spoken. He was rare in our profession, somebody who could react with a saneness and soberness that you don’t see around too often.”
So Post was signed. He and Clint then went to work on the script, pointing up the dramatic tension of some scenes, adding bits of dialogue and action that they thought sharpened some of the script’s characterizations. Post says they made no large structural changes, but their work led to the first of what would turn out to be many conflicts with Freeman, who was also to have sole producer’s credit on the film.
In deference to the writer, Post and Clint backed away from many of their revisions, vowing instead to improvise them on the set, where they imagined that Freeman would not always be present, perhaps because he proved largely indifferent to the picture’s casting. According to Post, he had a relatively free hand in this matter, recruiting Pat Hingle, Bruce Dern, Ed Begley Sr., Charles McGraw, all of whom had worked on
Rawhide
, and Inger Stevens, who had not, and who, according to Post, initially resisted working in a western opposite Clint, whose work she did not know.
They all worked together happily enough—Stevens embraced Post on her last day of work, fulsomely thanking him for an altogether excellent experience—but there was further acrimony between Post and Freeman. As Post recalls it, Freeman appeared on the White Sands, New Mexico, set “with the Cecil B. De Mille boots and the riding crop, banging the crop against the leather, going on the set and changing things.” Post and Clint watched this performance with some astonishment, and Post said he would speak to Freeman about usurping the director’s authority. “
No, don’t you do it, Ted,” said Clint, “I’ll do it.” Clint drew Freeman out of everyone’s earshot and talked earnestly to him. Shortly thereafter, the producer withdrew and was subsequently not much seen. What did you say to him? Post asked Clint, who replied, “‘If you come on the set again, there’ll be no set, no crew, no actors, no director. Stay away.’ And he stayed away.” At least until postproduction began.
Eventually Post and company put on film—for a budget Clint says was less than that of his last Leone film—an intelligent western well within genre traditions, but not without some complexities and originality as well. Most of the latter quality was concentrated in the excellent opening sequence, where Jed Cooper, Clint’s character, is discovered driving a small herd of cattle he has recently purchased across a river, in the course of which he has to dismount and rescue a calf from the stream. Cradling it in his arms, and very much resembling Rowdy Yates in costume and innocent attitude, he emerges on the other bank to confront a group of armed riders, who accuse him of rustling the herd and killing the rancher and his wife to whom it belonged. He tells them that he is a former lawman, now trying to start a small ranch of his own, and produces a bill of sale for the cattle.
The riders, all in the employ of a rancher called Captain Wilson (Begley), ignore the document and prepare to string him up. Clint plays his youthful terror very persuasively. Dern’s eager villainy as the most vicious of the riders is also effective. His pleas for patience and further investigation ignored, Jed is left swinging from a rope as the posse rides off. It’s a nice, dislocating moment—you don’t expect the star to be (to all appearances) killed this early in the picture. Indeed, when Clint gave the script to his old pal Bob Donner and told him to choose a small part he thought he could play, Donner read a few pages and called him up excitedly, suggesting he play the guy who gets hung in the first reel. Clint laughed and told him to read on a little further—that character was the hero.
For Jed is saved by the fortuitous appearance of a tumbleweed wagon, under the command of that most authentic of western actors, Ben Johnson. He throws Jed in with the rest of the prisoners he has been collecting
and takes him back to Fort Grant, territorial capital of what will one day be Oklahoma. There Jed’s innocence is proved to the satisfaction of Judge Fenton (Hingle), a curiously ambiguous character, who earnestly (and frequently) states his belief that law is the basis for civilization, but who also likes his work just a little too much.