Authors: Richard Schickel
Their performances do not so much reflect their affection for one another as their remoteness from the production process. Sometimes it almost seems as if they’re working in a different picture. He is more a juvenile than a potent romantic lead; she’s more an ingenue than a mature sexual being. But, in a curious way, this worked for them; their romantic passages are little islands of calm and sweetness in a sea of desperation and discontent. And by and large they would escape responsibility for
the picture’s failure. Critics mostly dismissed their work with a bland sentence or two, while Hollywood blamed Logan, who would never direct another picture.
But in another way,
Paint Your Wagon
did have a major, and continuing, effect on Clint’s career. As the muddle persisted right up to the very last days on location, he firmly resolved never again to place himself in such circumstances. “That’s when I came to the conclusion, after the fifth month, that I was going to be really active with Malpaso. I was going to go back to doing just regular movies.”
That is to say, relatively small-scale films employing good, but not necessarily big-name, actors, and certainly none that carried with them any explosive personal baggage. By this he also meant that he would direct at least some of these films himself. As he put it on one public occasion, “
If I’m going to make mistakes in my career,
I
want to make them, I don’t want somebody else making them for me.” Or, as he put it a little more colorfully later on, “if these guys can blow this kind of dough and nobody cares about it, why not take a shot at it, and at least if I screw up I can say, well, OK, I screwed up, and take the blame on it.” This realization, and this resolution, constituted for Clint “a turning point in my career.”
It was the most important decision, in fact, since accepting
A Fistful of Dollars
. For the moment, however, this was a largely negative turning point; knowing now what he
didn’t
want to do—further pursuing the stardom-by-association strategy—he still didn’t know precisely what he wanted to do, beyond making more manageable films. What their subject matter might be, what developments he might permit his screen character, when, exactly, he would begin to direct, remained unclear to him. And, in fact, he was at the moment committed to two rather routine movies, neither of which would advance him along the path he was beginning to imagine for himself.
But at least he was done with
Paint Your Wagon
, except for recording his songs, attending to the usual looping chores and showing up for the premieres in New York and London. “Gulp,” he said when confronted by Nelson Riddle and a full orchestra on the recording stage, but he persevered. When he finally saw the film in completed form he thought it was “cut defensively,” meaning that wherever there was a choice the more conventional material was used to make a film that was without energy or sense of movement. It contained very little dancing, and what there was of it was not integrated into the plot. The songs (some of which, like “Wanderin’ Star” and “They Call the Wind Maria,” were agreeably melodic) were clumsily staged and sometimes simply played over other action, almost as if they were a kind of narration.
Its attempts at spectacle were glum and distant, and the big finish, the town collapsing, was unpersuasive. “Fiascoesque” was Clint’s neologistic final judgment.
Some reviewers, like Vincent Canby, were surprisingly tolerant of it; “amiable” was his word for it. Here and there Clint got a good notice. The Los Angeles
Times
’s Charles Champlin wrote favorably of him (his “stoic and handsome dignity stands out and he sings in an unscholarly baritone which is fine”). The reviewers who liked his work were responding to Clint’s strategy of polite reserve—the old Rowdy Yates manner, come to think of it. “People were so favorable to me,” Clint now observes, “because they didn’t like anything else about it.”
This was essentially true. “Coarse and unattractive” was Champlin’s summarizing phrase. “Rarely has a film wasted so much time so wantonly,” said
Newsweek
. In this chorus of disapproval Pauline Kael’s voice was the most devastating, and her savage, career-long dislike of Clint—not just his work, but, it often seemed, his very being—was enunciated here. She discerned his strategy—“
he hardly seems to be in the movie”—but unlike some of her colleagues, viciously chastised him for his withdrawal: “He’s controlled in such an uninteresting way; it’s not an actor’s control, which enables one to release something—it’s the kind of control that keeps one from releasing anything. We could stand the deadpan reserve of Nelson Eddy’s non-acting because he gave of himself when he sang, but Eastwood doesn’t give of himself ever, and a musical with a withdrawn hero is almost a contradiction in terms.…”
If her case against Clint’s work in this instance is perhaps justifiable, her larger generalizations about him as an actor are wrong, and her endless animus against him remains, like so many of her curious passions, inexplicable. Perhaps no more so, however, than her notion that films like
Paint Your Wagon
evidenced the terminal decadence of the whole Hollywood system.
It, along with the other expensive musicals of the moment had “finally broken the back of the American movie industry,” she gleefully crowed. The major studios, part of “a rotting system” she insisted, “are collapsing, but they’re not being toppled over by competitors; they’re so enervated that they’re sinking under their own weight”—rather like No-Name City itself, one might say. This ludicrously overdramatized the situation. All that was coming to an end was a mode of exhibition, road showing, in which overlong, overstuffed movies like
Paint Your Wagon
were made to be shown on a reserved-seat, two-shows-per-day basis at advanced prices—mostly because the public felt it had too often overpaid for too many big, bad movies.
That did not mean, however, that the whole Hollywood system was
tottering, only that it was once again in transition. Indeed,
Paint Your Wagon
did not turn out to be the insupportable disaster Kael imagined it would. It was certainly not worth the trouble and anxiety it caused, but eventually it returned $15 million of its $20 million cost in domestic rentals and probably made back much of the rest overseas and in television licensing. Nor did it bring down Paramount’s management, which skipped blithely on to the profitable likes of
Love Story
and
The Godfather
. Like all radical critics of capitalistic enterprises, Kael underestimated their adaptability and their capacity for survival.
Her opinions about his work aside, Clint agreed with many of Kael’s judgments on
Paint Your Wagon
. In a general way, indeed, he agreed with her view of the Hollywood system; it was slow, cumbersome, often stupid in its decisions. He did not, however, think it was ripe for revolution. What he guessed was that a cooler, more amiable and self-interested kind of subversion might be practiced on it by a man increasingly confident of his own skills, power and judgment, and increasingly wary of other people’s opinions about what he should and should not be doing.
A
utonomy was a dream easier to define than to realize. It would take Clint a half decade to attain the kind of control over his professional destiny that he wanted, mostly because of his long-term commitment to Universal. The projects this hierarchical and routinizing studio urged on him were generally unimaginative and often vexed—sometimes by scripts in need of major revision, sometimes by inept producers, most often by indifferent handling when they went to market. On the other hand, when Clint developed projects he thought were more interesting, they were treated as indulgences more to be patronized than enthusiastically supported. It could be argued that all the films he made at Universal were useful to him in that they firmed and settled his relationship with his audience, but the history of this period is, from his point of view, one of increasing fractiousness and restlessness.
The first of the two films Clint made in 1969,
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, would prove to be a case in point. In some measure the movie owed its existence to him. While
Where Eagles Dare
was in production, Elizabeth Taylor showed him an early version of the script, which producer Martin Rackin was set to do at Universal, and they made a handshake agreement to costar in it. When Don Siegel arrived in London to do some looping for
Coogan’s Bluff
, Clint gave him the screenplay, and he said he’d like to direct it. Unfortunately, there were already complexities about this project of which they were unaware.
There is certain irony in this, for the story they all liked is very basic and straightforward. It recounts the adventures of a seemingly mismatched man and woman who meet under desperate circumstances—he rescues her from an attempted rape—in the Mexican desert, circa 1865. Hogan, as Clint’s character was eventually called—curious how many figures with Irish names this Wasp has played—is an American mercenary who has sold his services to the Juaristas rebelling against the dictatorship of the French puppet government of Emperor Maximilian.
He is supposed to dynamite a fort, abscond with its treasure of gold and receive half of it for his troubles. Sara is, supposedly, a nun (she turns out to be a whore in disguise), idealistically committed to the Juaristas’ cause and seeking funds for them, while the French try to apprehend her. Along the trail, this odd couple shares many adventures, some comical, some suspenseful; in the end, of course, the fortress is very satisfactorily blown up, she reveals her true occupation, he turns out to be not quite so hard a case as he had seemed and they ride off into the sunset together.
This story, at least in its broad strokes, was the work of Budd Boetticher, director of those admirably austere Randolph Scott westerns of the fifties, and one imagines from his dismayed comments about the final version of
Sister Sara
that he had something like their tone in mind for this film. Certainly he had it in mind to direct it. Unfortunately—and here is where some of the film’s troubles began—he sold his material to Rackin, a sometime screenwriter and studio production chief who had recently had the effrontery to remake
Stagecoach
and the chutzpah to announce that this time they were going to do it right. An almost parodistic version of a Hollywood operator—all gold chains, sunlamp tan and tough talk—he quickly fired Boetticher and turned to Albert Maltz for a rewrite.
Maltz, an occasional playwright and novelist, is best known today as one of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned and then blacklisted for their refusal to testify to their Communist political convictions before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, and this would be his first credited screenwriting in more than two decades. His draft suited Rackin well enough, but Siegel and Clint thought it still needed work. More than they initially imagined, for Elizabeth Taylor now rather mysteriously disappeared from the project. Siegel believed she might have quit when the studio refused to shoot the picture in Spain when Richard Burton was also scheduled to be working there. Clint thinks the disastrous reception of
Boom!
may have affected her standing at the studio, especially given the scarcely less dismaying prospects Universal must have seen in
Secret Ceremony
, which it was soon to release. Her movie career was spiraling downward as quickly as her husband’s.
Besides, Shirley MacLaine was available, and she seemed to be hot. She had just finished
Sweet Charity
, which, for reasons known only to motion-picture executives, they were certain was going to be a huge hit, and they wanted a quick follow-up for her. Or maybe they were just typecasting; the Bob Fosse film was the third in which she had played an adorably indomitable hooker.
The part as originally written had called for a Hispanic woman, and
it had been thought that Taylor might just get away with such an impersonation. The red-haired, fair-skinned MacLaine obviously could not, and anyway, there was something about her spirit and manner—so feisty and forthright, so essentially comic—that made her nun’s masquerade implausible at first glance. So in the next rewrite, Sara became an American expatriate, and instead of holding back her true identity until the end of the picture, as Boetticher had intended, broad hints that she was not what she seemed to be were almost immediately dropped—Sara puffing on a cigar or swigging liquor when Hogan’s back was turned or using bad language to his face. Also lost was a mutual-redemption theme dear to Boetticher, in which “
one who you believe is a nun becomes a beautiful person because she falls in love with a bum, who becomes a beautiful person because he is in love with an unobtainable person.” From his point of view there was worse to come.
Of this Boetticher was at the time unaware; though he had a story credit on the film, he was not consulted at any stage of the production and did not see it in finished form until its Los Angeles premiere, where he sat fuming directly behind Clint and Siegel, incensed at what he saw as the spaghetti-like direction in which his material had been taken. Boetticher, who had a particular and often-expressed loathing for Leone, had “motivated” his protagonist in a way that he no longer was. “
My men have become tough for a
reason,”
he would say, and though Hogan is presented as a former idealist soured by the slaughter he had witnessed in the Civil War, very little is made of the point. When Sara asks him, “If money’s all you care about, why did you fight in that war?” he replies, “Everyone has the right to be a sucker once.” The casual cynicism and brevity of the speech was entirely too Leonesque (perhaps by now we should say Eastwoodian) for Boetticher.
In his study of Clint’s films, Christopher Frayling, relying heavily on an interview with Boetticher, adds that Hogan “
seemed to be much more concerned about personal style—about cultivating his ironic, detached stance in order to enhance his status as a walking piece of mythology—than about behaving in a remotely credible way.” This, too, was Leonesque. Clint’s work for him always suggested that when there are no reliable values to resort to, heroes must fall back on personal style; it is what they have instead of personal honor in the modern world.