Authors: Richard Schickel
By this time his credentials should have brought him to bigger budgets, more prestigious projects. But, as Clint would later say, “
you get into a rut in this town,” and the director was now carrying himself with what Andrew Sarris called a certain “
jocular fatalism,” which sometimes lost its jocularity. Siegel once told an interviewer about his frustration after the success of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers:
“
I didn’t get a job offer from anybody, nor did I hear anybody in the industry say, ‘My God! This kid’s really got it.’ ” Even after he directed Elvis Presley in what was surely his best movie, a tense little western called
Flaming Star
, Hollywood kept him in his unexalted place, though he was beginning to attract some critical attention abroad and in the small American film journals.
What he needed was a rising star to pull him out of his “rut.” What the rising star Clint Eastwood needed was a first-rate action director who could also help him find some charm in a screen character who had up to now been an essentially antisocial figure. Before meeting, Siegel and Clint were dubious about one another, mostly because each was unfamiliar with the other’s work, and so when someone proposed Mark Rydell, a sometime actor and a prolific television director, to Clint, he sent him
Coogan’s Bluff
. The director, who had just finished his first feature,
The Fox
, gave him a mixed response: He liked the script well enough, but felt he needed more than a few weeks to prepare it. Clint then asked him, “What about Don Siegel? The studio keeps talking about Don Siegel.”
Somewhat to his surprise, Rydell responded enthusiastically. “He’s great. I worked with him as an actor [in
Crime in the Streets
in 1956], and he’s the only director I know who’d be ready to go in a month.”
Impressed by Rydell’s recommendation and appreciative of his generosity, Clint decided to run three of Siegel’s pictures, liked what he saw and agreed to meet with him. The director, hearing that Clint had studied some of his work, reciprocated by running Clint’s Leone films, which, in turn, impressed him. Clint remembers their first encounter taking
place in Siegel’s Universal office. Siegel recalls that he flew to Carmel in a private plane piloted by Universal’s casting director, had a couple of drinks with Clint in his “
surprisingly modest” cabin, “discussed dames, golf, dames, the glorious weather, etc.” and was about to repair to a golf course with him, and perhaps stay overnight so they could have a more extensive conversation, when Lang phoned to summon Siegel back to the studio. The director and the actor had not yet exchanged more than a few substantive words about
Coogan’s Bluff
, but that was not really the point of the meeting. They had sized each other up, liked what they saw and silently decided that they could probably work together.
At which point, still unhappy with the script, Siegel went to Lang and proposed that a writer named Howard Rodman, who was working with him on another project, be engaged to write an entirely fresh variation on the film’s basic theme. Rodman, in his turn, proposed that he and Siegel work on it in New York, where they could scout locations in the process.
It sounded like a boondoggle to Clint—“You don’t have to be on location to write a good story”—and it was in part. Cameras, a gold-painted typewriter, a swell suite, were charged to the production. But less than a month after he had begun, Rodman turned in a finished product that both Siegel and Lang liked. Off it went to Clint. And back he came to the studio, requesting a meeting, to which, he said, his agent, his lawyer and his business manager would accompany him. “
Sounds ominous,” Siegel said to Lang. “Entourages are born to dislike everything,” said Lang.
As it happened, Clint’s people didn’t have to say much. He did most of the talking, and what he said was “
I hate the script.” He felt that Rodman and Siegel had vitiated the strengths of the draft he had committed to without bringing any new values to it. “I figured you didn’t like it, so I steered Rodman in a different direction,” said Siegel, “thinking you wanted a change.”
According to both men, their argument grew more intense as the meeting wore on, and it began to look as if the project was going to disintegrate then and there. At which point, Lang intervened: “Look, you guys both behave. Why don’t you just sit down and talk about it, just the two of you. Get rid of all these other people, myself included.…”
This they agreed to do, with Siegel insisting that before they start Clint read all the previous versions of the screenplay. When he had done so, they repaired to his office, unbound all the scripts and spread their pages around on the floor, where for a couple of days they crawled about, scissors in hand, choosing a scene here, a bit of dialogue there, occasionally scribbling bridging material of their own devising. All of this
they pasted down on clean sheets of paper. When they left after the first day Siegel lettered a large “Don’t Touch” sign and put it on display in the center of the mess so the cleaning lady wouldn’t throw anything out.
In the course of this process, they began to rekindle their good first impressions of one another, and Siegel suggested bringing in Dean Riesner, a screenwriter he thought was the best on the lot, to help them. After a day’s work all three were getting along famously, and Clint decided he could leave the rest of the work in the writer’s hands. He was told not to do any major rewrites until he had finished pulling together the best material from all the previous drafts so they could all see what they had and what they didn’t have.
Riesner worked quickly, and by October they had a solid shooting script. The picture was cast, and, with Siegel worrying about the vagaries of November weather in New York, they went into production. It was then that bonding between star and director was completed.
In some ways theirs was the attraction of opposites. A compact, sad-eyed, mustachioed man, Siegel often wore a little tweed hat on the set, and always a dapper cravat, which was a sort of lucky charm for him. Though he had strong opinions and a quick, if laconic, tongue, Siegel knew how to guard both. Much has been made of the fact that he was, politically, a liberal, while his star is well known for what are thought to be conservative views. Indeed, when
Dirty Harry
was attacked for its apparently reactionary subtext, Siegel cited his credentials as a liberal in defense of the film. But he and Clint shared a view of the world that transcended left-right political disagreements.
In an acute review of their next collaboration,
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, critic Joel Doerfler wrote that every Siegel film he had seen had been “
centered on the conflict between an old moral universe in which the individual was sovereign, and a new collectivist age in which uniqueness and individual initiative are obliterated by egalitarian and bureaucratic forces.” In that sense, he argued, Siegel was a conservative whose films expressed “an overwhelming dread of modern mass society” through their accounts of protagonists who are outsiders and misfits in that brave new world. To put it simply, he had been making Clint Eastwood films long before he began making Clint Eastwood films.
And he was making them in a way that complemented, in a practical way, the values they expressed on-screen. At work Siegel was like his most typical protagonists in that he did not dwell long on anything—a scene, an idea, a technical problem. He intellectualized nothing and regretted nothing, constantly moving ahead without a lot of protective coverage in the can. This, of course, squared with Clint’s ideas about filmmaking as neatly as Siegel’s inherently individualistic philosophy did
with his. Weighed against these affinities, the differences in their bio-rhythms or their opinions about electoral politics meant little.
For it is, finally, good-humored, unpretentious and efficient professionalism that is Clint’s most important measure of a man, and that Siegel always provided him. “He knew exactly what was going to be shot, and he would do no more,” Clint says. “
Some of these guys,” Clint wrote in an obituary tribute to his mentor, “print ten takes; they don’t know what it looks like, or they’re not quite sure what their next set-up is. Often he’d just print the one.” It was spontaneity he was after and hesitation that he feared. It’s like baseball, as Clint puts it; if you wait for the perfect pitch you often find yourself trudging back to the dugout with your bat on your shoulder. Indeed, Siegel was always “rooting for the shot so badly” that he would automatically cross his fingers the minute he called “Action.” “I’d be doing a scene and I’d look down and I’d see Don’s fingers crossed right under the camera, and I’d start laughing.”
Clint also appreciated the fact that Siegel “
worked well under pressure. If something wasn’t working, or a set collapsed, or if something wasn’t in the same direction he had planned, he could always make adjustments.” And, according to Clint, he was always happy to listen to his actors’ suggestions for bits of business or staging that hadn’t occurred to him. “
He always used to joke: ‘If the idea works I’ll take credit for it; if it doesn’t work, it’s your idea.’ ”
In the shorthand that developed between them, a shot or a newly minted piece of dialogue that the actor wanted became a “Clintus,” something the director was pushing for became a “Siegelini,” and the give-and-take was mostly good-natured and collegial. Siegel believed Clint was “inclined to underestimate himself as an actor,” but felt it prudent to keep silent on that topic much of the time. For he had the Hollywood veteran’s invaluable skill at judging just when (and how insistently) he could ask a star to reach for something difficult, and when it was prudent to back off.
He was tactful even about this tactfulness: “
He doesn’t require, and I don’t give him, too much direction. A good rule with Clint is that when you give him a direction, be sure you’re right about it. If you don’t think you’re right, don’t say it.” But he also acknowledged that with this actor discretion was often the better part of valor. “
You can’t push Clint,” he once said. “It’s very dangerous. For a guy who’s as cool as he is, there are times when he has a very violent temper.”
In their first shoot together, they established the terms of their relationship very successfully. The problems they never entirely solved were the contradictions of Coogan’s character and the narrative in which it
was embedded. A good case in point occurred one day when Susan Clark, the rather cool and reserved actress who played Julie, a social worker and Coogan’s chief love interest, was talked into allowing Clint to suddenly pull her into a hot embrace in a scene where she was supposed to just brush past him. “
It’s too obvious,” Siegel remembers her saying. “It’s obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he remembers Clint saying. “Let’s shoot it, Don.”
Like many of the quotations in
A Siegel Film
, his autobiography, this one does not ring entirely true. Throughout that book he seems to be exercising the director’s prerogative to improve the script as originally written. It seems unlikely that Clint, given his tenderness about actors’ feelings, would have spoken quite so harshly to Clark, especially since he says he enjoyed working with her. But we may also assume that he supported Siegel in some way, because in the finished film the scene is as the director proposed. And it works well; there’s a nice spontaneity about it. But the general thought from which Clark’s specific objection arose, that the script, the director and perhaps even the star were pushing the Coogan character in a direction that was too improbably (and too unpleasantly) macho, is well taken.
This tone is set early in the picture, when Coogan, having captured a runaway miscreant in the desert, pulls his jeep up to a small ranch house, handcuffs his prisoner to the steering wheel and pops inside for a casual toss in the hay with the married woman who lives there. Later, in New York he uses Clark’s character in a similarly offhand way. They meet when a nameless character tries to fondle her breasts, she slugs him, and Coogan admires her spunk. It is not really funny; it is of a piece with the lack of subtlety with which their entire relationship is developed. There follows a mildly patronizing passage when Coogan and Julie go out to dinner and she tries to pick up the tab. “You’re a girl, aren’t you?” Coogan asks. “There are rumors to that effect,” she replies. “Then sit back and act like one.”
There’s worse to come. Coogan beats a woman while trying to get information—and then for good measure savagely rapes her. Later that night—at 4 a.m.—Julie appears at his hotel to chastise him for an earlier rude departure. However angry she is, this off-hours visit implies that she is more in thrall to him than her strong character should be. Indeed, at the end of the picture, when Coogan has completed his mission, we get our last glimpse of Julie literally jumping up and down and waving frantically at him as his helicopter pulls away from the landing pad. There has been no reconciliation scene, nothing to explain this quite out-of-character behavior—except the sheer irresistibility of this stud.
Set aside, for the moment, questions of taste and morals, set aside, as
well, a quarter century of feminist outrage at portrayals of this kind of male-female relationship, set aside, finally, the fact that a still-forming star image was being carelessly handled in these passages, and this fact remains: His sexual behavior was woefully out of character for Walt Coogan, or, at any rate, outside the character the film was elsewhere trying to establish.
This other Walt Coogan was, in fact, a rather engaging figure. When he is not mistreating female characters there is sometimes a sort of shy courtliness about him that puts one a little in mind of Gary Cooper when he played a rube at large in the city. Underneath that manner there is plenty of quiet, comically expressed shrewdness as well, exemplified by a wonderful exchange with the cabdriver (Louis Zorich) who picks him up at the heliport when he first comes to town. Arriving at their destination the cabbie informs him, “That’ll be $2.95, including the luggage.”
“Tell me—how many stores named Bloomingdale’s are there in this town?”