Authors: Richard Schickel
“One. Why?”
“We passed it twice.”
“It’s still $2.95.”
“Well, here’s three dollars—including the tip.”
A little more of that kind of badinage would have been welcome, and would have helped sustain the film’s best tone, which is tough-comic and particularly well put in the relationship that develops between Coogan and Lee J. Cobb’s weary, testy New York detective. The former has the frontiersman’s contempt for bureaucratic ponderousness, the latter is scornful of Coogan’s professional qualifications and increasingly fed up with the outlander’s interference in his routines. (“This isn’t the OK Corral around here. It’s the city of New York. We’ve got a system. It isn’t much, but we like it.”) Their relationship develops more logically than the one between Coogan and Julie does.
The contrast between the sureness of these scenes among men and the crudeness of almost all the scenes that involve Coogan with women is jarring. Coogan’s adventures in the demimonde where Ringerman’s drug dealer allies are to be found and through which Coogan must pass in his search for the escaped criminal are also poorly realized. The hippie characters he encounters there are rather coarsely portrayed in a way that plays into the conservative cliché of the time, which saw long hair and love beads as serious threats to good order. These sequences seem near to silly now, and at the time they had a clueless air about them—Hollywood guys trying to be hip and knowing and not quite making it.
Or was this, as certain gender scholars have recently had it, a truly
reactionary movie, despite Siegel’s liberalism and Clint’s generally amiable tolerance of lifestyles the opposite of his own? It’s obvious the film partook of middle- and lower-class America’s unease—on the brink of becoming outrage—over the counterculture, over the early stirrings of the feminist revival, over the way authority everywhere was being questioned. But one does not think of Clint eagerly advancing these attitudes, for he was not (and is not) the ideologue liberal strangers sometimes imagine him to be. Preoccupied by his suddenly accelerating career, he responded to the Vietnam War, for example, with a sort of dispassionate disapproval. The conservatism attributed to him never embraced the Cold War anticommunism, and he says that he projected his own former attitude about the Korean War onto the new conflict. Having himself not wanted to fight, he could well understand why this generation of young men didn’t want to fight. The idea of anyone’s dying in an inconclusive war, in which neither the nation’s existence nor a high moral principle is at stake, is anathema to him.
This relaxed attitude is a fairly typical Eastwoodian response to public issues. He may vote Republican most of the time, but his political beliefs were then, as they are now, far from the standard right-wing positions: He is mildly in favor of gun control and strongly in favor of abortion rights (and most of the rest of the feminist agenda), he is close to being a First Amendment absolutist, and his hatred of anything that hints at racism is very close to the surface. The best label for him is probably “libertarian,” but of a distinctly live-and-let-live kind.
On none of these matters, obviously, did Walt Coogan express himself. On none of these matters would Clint Eastwood’s screen character ever have much to say. The central issue for that figure would remain the same for decades: how to preserve his outraged individualism in an increasingly bureaucratized world while at the same time permitting his best qualities—good humor, even sweetness, certainly a tolerance for individual eccentricity—to come engagingly to the surface. Or to put it another way: how to keep his righteous anger clearly focused on the appropriate targets, not let it overflow into other realms as it does in this movie, where it too often reads as brutal inconsiderateness.
Some of
Coogan’s Bluff
’s crudeness can be excused; everyone would do better with more practice. But still, it remains what it apparently was from its first-draft script, a muddled and tone-deaf movie, never finding its true pitch, constantly wandering—lurching, actually—from key to key. This is not something Clint, operating under time pressure, not completely certain of exactly what he wanted to project in this role—how tough did he need to be? how soft could he afford to be?—fully addressed.
In purely commercial terms, such niceties were unnecessary. In the mind of someone like Jennings Lang, the picture was always meant to be what Hollywood likes to call “product,” something inexpensively designed to satisfy a certain corner of the market. If it made a pleasant profit (which it did) and cemented his relationship with a new star (which it also did) then, as far as the studio executive was concerned,
Coogan’s Bluff
served its purpose. As for Clint, the picture established
his
relationship with an important studio, enhanced his sense of security at a moment when that was welcome and incrementally expanded his screen character’s range. Its largest benefit to him—the beginning of his collaboration with Siegel—was, of course, an entirely unintended consequence.
When it was released a year later, audiences and, for the most part, reviewers accepted
Coogan’s Bluff in
the spirit with which it was offered, as minor entertainment. To be sure, the increasingly impotent National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (successor to the Legion of Decency) roused itself to offer a “condemned” rating, calling Coogan “a cynical and sadistic police officer” and the picture “socially irresponsible and exploitative.” Some reviewers followed on that tack.
But Vincent Canby in
The New York Times
called it “
a joke told by someone with no sense of humor” and compared Clint to actors like Alan Ladd: “He doesn’t act in motion pictures; he’s framed in them.” His predecessors greeted Clint with outrage; Canby offered a cooler form of contempt: “Tranquilized beyond all emotion,” Clint was, he said, “an unconscious parody of himself and, for that matter, of all movie super-heroes.”
Time
magazine’s review was heavily colored by the writer’s enthusiasm for Don Siegel’s set-piece action sequences, notably a terrifically energetic fight sequence in a pool hall, where the close confines of the setting greatly intensified the action, and the concluding chase, in Fort Tryon Park, which is also well done. This setting is appropriate for Coogan—outdoor turf where he feels comfortable, as opposed to mean city streets—and he gets to impress the lumbering New York cops with his nervy agility. “
Fast, tough and so well made that it seems to have evolved naturally, almost without benefit of cast, crew or rehearsal,” Time’s critic wrote (somewhat incomprehensibly). “Those who are willing to look beyond this carefully nurtured air of artlessness, however, will see some of the best American moviemaking of the year.” The reviewer even had a few kind words for Clint, who, he wrote, “performs with a measure of real feeling in the first role that fits him as comfortably as his tooled boots.”
This was catch-up reviewing, a long-delayed tribute to a filmmaker
the magazine’s previous reviewers had either ignored or patronized. It was also an acknowledgment, like others occurring around this time, that in the matter of Clint Eastwood, the people had spoken; they had found in him something they liked, or feared, or anyway were fascinated by. It was time, at last, for reviewers to begin following the crowd.
This was a well-established pattern. Clint was not the first star (and not the last) to have been at first dismissed by the critics for his lack of obvious theatrical training and credentials, put down as a lunky, hunky Hollywood phenomenon, then reconsidered as his popularity with the people proved irresistible. As such performers refine as well as broaden their screen personae—or in some cases merely persist as audience favorites—their “development” gives aid and comfort (and Sunday pieces) to reviewers as they reevaluate. This would be increasingly true of Clint, though it must be said that it took him longer to win the kind of critical endorsement he now enjoys than it did some other actors, in part because he added variations to his screen character rather patiently, in part because of the controversy that surrounded his Dirty Harry characterization and his persistence in so often returning to it.
Clint was certainly aware of what was being said critically about the Leone films as they came out and was aware of the reviews of his first American productions when they appeared. He has an acute sense of who his critical friends and enemies are. One suspects, indeed, that he is more hurt by bad notices than he lets on. But he has also always been a man with his own agenda, and at this moment it did not revolve around reviews. Nor was the question of establishing the full dimensions of his screen personality uppermost in his mind or in the minds of his advisers. They were all more intent on reinforcing the foundations of a career the full scope and solidity of which was not yet clear.
This means, frankly, that they were, for the moment, more interested in money—which is how Hollywood determines status—than they were in critical prestige. A little more than a month after finishing
Coogan’s Bluff
(and months before either it or
Hang ’em High
was released) he was off to Europe to make
Where Eagles Dare
(reported salary, $500,000), after which he was scheduled to start
Paint Your Wagon
(reported salary, $600,000). Sooner than expected he was approaching the $750,000 fee David Picker had predicted for him. More important, these big, mainstream pictures would, whatever their modest intrinsic merits, force people to stop seeing him as a curiosity, begin to see him for what he wanted and needed to be, a major industry player.
T
he habits of insecurity die hard. “It takes a long time for an actor to get over the thought that whatever he’s doing at the moment may be his last job” is the way Clint Eastwood puts it. For some actors it is never completely put to rest, which is one reason anxiety—not to mention desperation—floats so freely through show business. As he approached thirty-eight, Clint thought he might be old for the game, just beginning to establish a star career at a time in life when the careers of other leading men (and certainly leading women) were starting to decline.
Actually age was part of his good luck. He had been spared the premature accretion of fame, money and cosseting that turns actors who receive these boons when they are too young into spoiled brats. The fact that Clint still felt obliged to spare a prudent thought for the dubious future kept him in touch with two significant realities—that of the business he was in and that of his audience’s lives.
Grasping, at last, the brass ring, he did not at this moment think his ride on the carousel would necessarily be a long one. Indeed, a couple of years later, with several more successful movies behind him, he was still saying to a reporter, “
We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.” His thinking, as of 1968, was that if he was lucky, the merry-go-round would keep spinning for him until he made it through his forties. This is one reason why, as he has often said, he was beginning to think about directing; it was something he might do when the public had grown tired of him on-screen.
So he decided that if he took up all the reasonable offers he could handle, and worked very hard, then when the music stopped he would have enough put by to see his family through in comfort, no matter what. And a family, in the full sense of the word, was what the Eastwoods were about to become, for Maggie was now pregnant. They considered therefore whether or not he should accept the offer to costar in
Where Eagles Dare
, a World War II adventure story, which was to begin shooting in Austria and in London in January 1968. But she was not due to deliver until the spring, and though the picture had a long schedule, they couldn’t see how it could possibly go five months. He should be back in plenty of time for the baby’s birth.
In Salzburg, where the company was headquartering for the first portion of the shoot, he got his first glimpse of grand-scale international celebrity, for his costar was Richard Burton, four years into his first marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, an event that had redefined the relationship of public figures and the media and, it might be said, redefined the nature of starry excess.
“I get off the plane in Salzburg in Levi’s,” Clint recalls, “and I’ve got this old canvas bag with all kinds of holes in it, and Elizabeth and Richard came in on their own private jet and they’ve got entourages—she’s got a couple of secretaries, and he’s got people, and they’ve got clothes” (not to mention jewels and all the other accoutrements of cheerfully flaunted wealth).
It was no less wondrous to Clint than it was to people gawking from a far greater distance. The couple welcomed him warmly; with friends and coworkers they were generous and convivial. No sooner had Clint checked into the hotel where they were all staying than the phone rang, and he was invited to join them in the bar for drinks—many for Burton, a couple of beers for Clint. It was the first of many such sessions for them, and the beginning of what would turn out to be a congenial working relationship, and, for Clint, a lesson in how not to be a star, for he was about to witness, close-up, an actor in the process of sacrificing self-interest to self-indulgence.
Burton was an intelligent and extremely well-read autodidact who was also a great raconteur, with a vast fund of anecdotes at his command. These he had gathered over the course of a restless life that had taken him from a Welsh coal-mining village to the higher realms of the English theater, thence to Hollywood and Broadway, and finally to the infamous production of
Cleopatra
, where he and Taylor met, fell in love and abandoned their spouses to wed.
Burton’s storytelling was like his drinking; there was something grim in its relentlessness. Both were walls he constructed to hide behind—from strangers, of course, but also from friends and, most significantly, himself. It was this veiled quality, the sense he imparted of hiding out behind technique and a glorious voice, that finally precluded greatness on stage and authentic stardom on-screen. Similarly, in private one could spend many an entertaining hour with Burton but never penetrate his essential reserve and what one imagined was some essential
disappointment with himself—possibly for his profession (his loathing for which filled many pages of his diary), possibly for his compromised conduct within it, for the poor lad from the large family had an inordinate need for wealth, which had led him to many foolish professional decisions.