Clint Eastwood (45 page)

Hardly an optimistic view of human nature, but the writer did not pursue the line of questioning it suggests, except to note that, “Like most western heroes and the men who play them, Eastwood is a political conservative.” The reference here was to John Wayne and Gary Cooper among others, and it represented the other, more halfhearted, but equally unproductive, way the press tried to position him in those days. (
In a matter of months he would begin his decades-long attempt to avoid political labeling, recording his first published denial of activism,
his first insistence that he voted for candidates from both major parties.)

The journalists couldn’t imagine that he just might be an actor acting. This was not, as they all knew, what the movies’ lucky stiffs did to get ahead. That was art, or at least artifice, and thus beyond them. Harmetz, for example, catching Clint at home, nursing a cold, “
encumbered by a wife, a baby and the rules of civilization,” conceded that he was not entirely the character he played, but still insisted he was “not
not
the character either.… Sitting uncommitted, holding himself in reserve, even in what should have been the safety of his own living room Eastwood echoed the caverns of the man he portrays on the screen.” “Caverns” is, of course, a euphemism for “emptiness” (the amorality of the Leone character was still much on this writer’s mind), and it never occurred to her (or to anyone else) to undertake more serious spelunking. You did that with actors out from the East, people who had studied with Lee or Stella, Herbert or Uta. It was not worth the effort in cases like this one.

In fairness, it must be said that Clint in those days did not volunteer information about, say, his training as an actor or his interest in jazz. Presenting himself as a guy who had just “
tripped across the movie business” he gave the reporters what they needed and got them out the door. To only one reporter, who asked him if he might feel uncomfortable playing someone other than a westerner, did he state the obvious, “
I’m an actor, you know, not a
real
cowboy.”

It is, perhaps, a matter of small consequence; a somewhat more resonant portrait of Clint Eastwood would eventually emerge in the media. But it may be a matter of some importance, too; this notion of him as a silent primitive would affect the reception of his work for years to come.

Clint moved almost without a break—he would spend nine months of 1969 on location—from Mexico to Yugoslavia to make
The Warriors
(to be referred to hereafter by its final title,
Kelly’s Heroes
). Financed by MGM, and featuring an all-star cast, it was a self-contradictory enterprise. A military adventure, to be made on something close to an epic scale, it was also supposed to be an antiwar satire, somewhat along the lines of such contemporary films as
Castle Keep, M*A*S*H, Catch-22
and
Too Late the Hero
, all of which, one way or another, spoke to public disgust with the war in Vietnam.

It was this aspect of the project that stirred Clint. Around this time
he confessed that he had voted for Nixon in 1968 because he regarded Johnson’s bombing halt as a cynical electoral ploy on behalf of Hubert Humphrey. But he still had no enthusiasm for the Vietnam adventure or for militarism in general, and Troy Kennedy Martin’s original script expressed these feelings—in Clint’s opinion, movingly and adroitly. This was the story of some military misfits who take some time out of World War II to do a little free-enterprising. It begins with Clint’s character, the Kelly of the title, interrogating a captured German officer—he gets the man drunk—and learning that the enemy has cached $16 million in gold bullion in a bank in the town of Cleremont, some thirty miles behind the front. When their commanding officer goes on leave, he proposes to the topkick left in charge (Telly Savalas) that their unit stage an assault on the bank, strictly for private profit. Their principal coconspirators are a Bilko-like supply sergeant, Crapgame (Don Rickles), and the commander of a tank unit, Oddball (Donald Sutherland, doing a nice turn as a sort of premature hippie). In a subplot, a publicity-crazed general, played by Carroll O’Connor, tries desperately to keep up with their penetration of enemy lines and claim it as a bold tactical stroke of his own.

Running more than two hours,
Kelly’s Heroes
is a messily contradictory and never fully resolved movie. Besides being, occasionally, an antiwar satire, it is also from time to time a caper (or bunch-of-guys-rob-a-vault) comedy, an old-fashioned service (or bunch-of-goldbricks-goof-off) comedy and, yes, a straight bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission piece. To put the point simply, it tried to be all things to all audiences and so, naturally, ended up a muddle—although, right up to the end, Clint thought it could be straightened out.

At Clint’s behest, Don Siegel was offered the picture, but he was tied up on postproduction with
Sister Sara
, and so, with Clint’s approval, the assignment went to the pyrotechnically inclined Brian Hutton. He, not unnaturally, wanted to stress the kind of action that had worked for him in
Where Eagles Dare
, which went into its successful release just before this film went on location. And he had a wondrous range of equipment to play with. Tito’s Yugoslavia had developed a profitable sideline renting units of its army to visiting film companies. Along with the troops came some rather interesting matériel, for when Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union, it acquired from the United States great mounds of surplus military supplies. Clint remembers taking machine guns, still protected by the grease they had been packed in, out of their original World War II crates and driving vintage jeeps with perhaps two hundred miles on them. Ever the auto collector, he tried to buy a couple of them but was defeated by red tape.

Such diversions were, however, rare. The day Clint arrived at Novi
Sad, close to their first location, offered a fair prediction of things to come. The “suite” he had been promised had been turned into two rooms by the simple expedient of hanging a blanket in the center of a single room; it looked, he says, like the motel scene in
It Happened One Night
. Amused, he retreated to the lobby, where he discovered Don Rickles, his wife and an assistant, all encumbered by steamer trunks, checking in. Rickles had insisted, contractually, on accommodations equivalent to Clint’s and eagerly inquired about their quality. Clint was noncommittal, but awaited the comic’s response with considerable interest.

Rickles was still talking about it more than two decades later. Remembering Clint for an interviewer, he said, “
I didn’t realize how easily pleased Eastwood was—living in a kind of motel.” He added: “A very down-to-earth guy—give him a bottle of beer, and he’s happy … A pick-up truck and a dog.”

As the months wore on, Rickles provided most of the entertainment for what proved to be yet another endless shoot. He told a reporter the most interesting activity available was his changing clothes. Clint spent considerable time tooling around the countryside on a new motorcycle he had acquired in London on the
Eagles Dare
shoot—a powerful (and classic) Norton 750, which he still owns. Essentially the straight man to the assembled pranksters, and their leader in the action sequences, his was an ungratifying role, and his work is, at best, stern, even grim, and perhaps the least interesting he had done as a star. Off camera he remained a tough interview, if anything less forthcoming than usual. “
I can never think of anything clever or witty to say,” he informed one visiting writer. “In fact, half the time I can’t think of anything to say.” “
I’m always a little closed in,” he said to another, “and I don’t go around telling people what I think of this or that.”

Hutton offered a more interesting perspective. “
We went twenty years … from 1947 when Brando hit until 1967 when Clint hit, with actors who, for the most part, played characters who were confused, not sure of themselves, unable to cope, befuddled. Now Clint is a throwback to the strong, silent men of the thirties. Clint’s character has always been a guy who knows who he is, knows what he wants and goes out and does it. Regardless if he’s good or bad, at least he’s certain.”

In life, as on-screen, as the director was soon to discover. There came a moment, late in the fall, when everyone had simply had it with this picture. When the director asked some of the players and technicians to stay on a few more days to perfect some sequence or other, Clint (among others) simply deserted him. The shot footage was scheduled for shipment to Paris, and Clint declared that he was going to be
on the same train with it; he had given all that he could to this endless enterprise, had a date to celebrate Thanksgiving there with some friends, and that was that.

If, on the whole,
Kelly’s Heroes
had been relatively untroubled in production, it was severely troubled in postproduction, much to Clint’s disgust. The film was victimized largely by the troubles then afflicting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was financing and distributing it, and whose history is an object lesson in how modern financial shell games can reduce a great institution to a shell itself. The picture had been green-lighted by a management team headed by Robert O’Brien. But then control of the studio’s parent company, Loewe’s Inc., was acquired by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Seagrams, whose new managers tried to turn this into a back-lot picture. They were fought off by its producers, Gabriel Katzka and Sidney Beckerman. By the time they were in active production, controlling interest in the studio had been acquired by Kirk Kirkorian, the corporate raider, who installed James Aubrey as head of production. As Kirkorian prepared to strip MGM of most of its assets (the famous auction of its props, the sale of its back lot and ultimately the sale of its invaluable film library took place during his regime), Aubrey, who had been known as “the Smiling Cobra” in his network days, announced that the studio would cease to take the large gambles
(Mutiny on the Bounty, Doctor Zhivago, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
that had made its corporate life so harum-scarum over the last decade. Impressed by the huge return
Easy Rider
in 1969 had made on a minuscule investment by a rival studio, he said that from now on MGM would concentrate on similarly modest productions in hopes of making a similar killing.

Given this philosophy he was bound to look askance at
Kelly’s Heroes
. It was not only not his kind of picture, it was not his picture in any way. It was left over from two previous regimes, and like most executives in this situation, he saw no reason to make his predecessors look good. So he picked at it unenthusiastically. After seeing Hutton’s cut he ordered the title changed from
The Warriors
, first to
Kelly’s Warriors
, then to
Kelly’s Heroes
. He also ordered substantive revisions, possibly because the film’s several, contradictory themes discomfited him, perhaps because they did not offer him a clear marketing strategy, perhaps because he felt this must be a “Clint Eastwood” picture as he defined the term, that is to say, a straight-ahead action-adventure movie. Hutton, who did not have final cut, had no choice but to oblige Aubrey, and when Clint saw what had been done to the film, he told the director, “Brian, you can’t release this.” To which the director, who had been fighting the good fight, replied wearily, “Well, that’s the way they want to do it,”
adding that the studio had a release date “creeping up on them.” The implication was that even if the studio liked Clint’s ideas there wouldn’t be time to execute them.

In general Clint felt that the film’s comedy now played too broadly, and specifically he was dismayed at the excision of a transition scene between the picture’s second and third acts in which, as he recalls, he and the character played by Telly Savalas “just sort of summed up the philosophy of these loose ends, and what the war had done to them.” He goes so far as to say that “its soul was taken out, a little bit of its soul was robbed.” Surely it sounds as if his best scene, one in which he got to do something more than bark commands and look determined, was missing.

He had, as well, a purely practical complaint—that “creeping” release date. If it was held to,
Kelly’s Heroes
would open in many major markets virtually day and date with
Two Mules for Sister Sara
. “Why should I open across the street from myself?” Clint asked Aubrey. “How much can they tolerate of one actor?” Besides, he said, if they could spend a little more time in the editing room he was certain they could deliver a cut that satisfied everyone’s needs. “Let me just come in and show you what I’d do. In one day, I guarantee you—one day—I’ll have something to show you.”

In retrospect Clint makes this discussion sound more reasonable than it actually was. By the time it took place he was on location with Don Siegel in Louisiana, shooting
The Beguiled
, and Siegel recalls him spending the better part of a day in his trailer on the phone yelling at Aubrey “
in a fury.” Knowing the force of Clint’s anger when one is faced with it in person, he suggests that Clint might have been more successful had he been able to confront Aubrey directly.