Clint Eastwood (57 page)

Except, possibly, the nihilism that dares not speak its name. Clint, like many of us, sometimes does things just to do them, or to have done them. And isn’t that, finally, the most interesting of the unspoken connections he makes with his audience? Seen in this light the rape scene looks less like a clumsy narrative diversion, more like the crux of the
matter. Taken together with the sudden heedless coupling of the stranger and Verna Bloom’s character, the mad insistence on painting the town red before the final confrontation, it imparts to the unnervingly silent stranger an anarchic unpredictability unique in this genre.

It says much about Clint Eastwood that at the moment when he felt he was finally fully in control of his destiny, he risked this tightly wound and single-minded film, so harsh in its light and its angles, so mannered in its style, so black in its humor, so unforgiving in its view of human nature. Far more than
Dirty Harry
, it tests, redefines, the nature of screen heroism, asking the audience if it can come to terms with the darkest (or anyway the most enigmatic) side of Clint’s screen character.

When the film was released in April 1973, the reviewers had no such perspective on it. Their response was perhaps more varied than any that had greeted a previous Eastwood movie. Vincent Canby thought it might be a parody of some sort, characterizing it as “
part ghost story, part revenge western, more than a little silly, and often quite entertaining in a way that makes you wonder if you’ve lost your good sense.” Judith Crist, predictably, thought it a “Middle-American, R-rated substitute for
Deep Throat,”
a “
male sexual fantasy restricted, in our grand Puritan tradition, to the rape of a whore and the instant seduction of a ‘good’ woman and then sublimated in all sorts of virility rites.” In the
Saturday Review
, Arthur Knight did better than most with it, if only because he stressed the strength of its direction. He praised its “compulsive and surrealistic” imagery and hailed Clint as “a formidable new talent” among directors.

By this time Clint had been named the nation’s number one box-office star in the annual exhibitors’ poll, with Universal using that news, released in January, to herald its spring release of
High Plains Drifter
in full-page trade-paper ads. It was the fifth in Clint’s record string of consecutive appearances in the top ten, but the first of four times he headed the list. (He is second to John Wayne in total number of appearances—twenty-five to twenty-one—but Wayne’s streak was interrupted in 1958, with no one else approaching these numbers; it is the main thing they have in common.) Clint would lead the list again the following year, 1974, thanks mainly to the success of
High Plains Drifter
, which would open strongly and in its first year return more than $7 million in domestic rentals to Universal.

Before that picture was released, Clint had completed principal photography and most of postproduction on what has turned out to be
one of his most obscure films.
Breezy
is the story of a May-December—perhaps one should say a March—December—romance between a divorced, fiftyish real estate salesman, played by William Holden, and a teenage hippie waif played by Kay Lenz in her first substantial movie appearance. Written by Jo Heims, it is itself rather waiflike, thin, somewhat undernourished, occasionally tough-talking, but eager to find a home in someone’s heart.

“I think I said to Clint, or maybe he said to me,” Bob Daley recalls, “‘It won’t make a dime and I don’t care; let’s do it.’ ” Partly they were operating out of affection for Heims. (Daley remembers that around this time the Writers Guild was on one of its semiannual strikes, that Heims was scheduled to be picketing the main gate at Warner Bros. at noon and that he and Clint bought her a fancy lunch, complete with silver, crystal and fine napery, set up a table and served her as her fellow scriveners milled past them.) Partly they were operating out of Clint’s desire to test himself as a director with unlikely material and partly out of knowledge that the film could be done quickly and frugally at virtually no risk to Universal. Clint remembers presenting it to the studio along with the commercially surefire
High Plains Drifter
.

What drew him to
Breezy
was its theme: “the rejuvenation of this cynic through this naive creature.” One suspects, as well, that he thought it was time to demonstrate his softer side, though Clint rejected Heims’s suggestion that he play the leading role, that of the divorced, somewhat-depressed real estate agent, Frank Harmon. He didn’t think he was right for the part—not in comparison to William Holden, who appears to have been his first and only choice for it.

Holden had been something of a Wasp
beau idéal
in the fifties, an actor capable of both cynicism and idealism and, in his best performances, of mixing the two qualities in a way that suggested a certain darkness beneath the veneer of American good nature. This reflected something of his own ambivalent character, for he was one of those stars haunted by the suspicion that acting was not a fit occupation for a grown-up. Pleasant and tractable on the set, Holden was given to making dismissive comments about his own talent and the motion picture business in general, from which he absented himself as frequently as possible. His largest passion was for a game preserve he had established in Kenya, where he spent a great deal of time. He was also an alcoholic, alternating periods of sobriety with days of binge drinking. He was fifty-five at this time, and partly because of his own indifference, partly because of changing times, partly because his hard living was now etched on his face, his career had dimmed.

Breezy
, however, seemed to stir something more than dutiful professionalism
in the actor. Clint remembers a preproduction meeting at the end of which Holden, having risen to leave, stood in the doorway and said, “You know something? I’ve been this guy.” Clint replied, “I thought so.”

Casting the title role was a much trickier proposition. The actress had to be young—
Breezy
was seventeen according to the script—capable of playing hippie waywardness while at the same time suggesting qualities that would make mutual, albeit hesitant, attraction between her and a man more than twice her age plausible. She also had to manage seminude love scenes with aplomb. Clint and Bob Daley interviewed dozens of candidates for the role, among whom was Sondra Locke—the first time she and Clint met. “She sat there in Clint’s office on the couch,” Daley remembers, “with her legs folded up underneath her, and she was just like a little waif—very strange little girl.” Clint knew her work from her debut film,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
—“I thought she was a good actress”—but felt she was too old for this role (Locke was twenty-six at the time) and decided not to test her.

In the end he had something like fifteen candidates he did want to see on film, and Holden spent three days on a stage playing a sample scene with each of them—work above and beyond the call of duty for a star of his rank. Lenz, whose father, Ted, was a well-known West Coast radio broadcaster, was included among them because Joe McKinney, the makeup artist on
High Plains Drifter
, had just done a television program with her and recommended her. Once Clint saw her work with Holden—“There was such chemistry between them,” as Daley puts it—he quickly decided she was right for the part.

Clint treasures his memories of Holden. There was, he says, a particular thrill in directing an actor whose work he had enjoyed long before he had himself become an actor. More than that, “He was just a prince to work with; he was always the first guy there, ready to work.” At the time, he said, they had agreed “not to intellectualize an unintellectual art,” and Holden praised his director on every possible occasion: “I’d forgotten what it is like to make pictures this agreeably. I’ll work with Clint any time he asks.”

Lenz, rather like the character she was playing, was full of innocent enthusiasm. “
I called him Bill,” Lenz would recall many years later. “My God. And I was yelling, ‘Hey, Clint.’ I had so very little experience, I couldn’t even hit the marks, but what a kind guy William Holden was, and what a very nice man Clint was.” He granted her veto power over her nude scenes; unless she approved a shot, he would not include it in the final print. She also appreciated Holden’s gentlemanliness in their love scenes. When she was obliged to disrobe he kept his eyes riveted on
hers. “
I could have been wearing tinfoil and he wouldn’t have known it. I couldn’t have done it without him.” Holden, who only had to take his shirt off in the scene, quickly draped it around her when the most revealing take was completed.

The film, though, seems willfully deaf to its most discomfiting resonances. For a work exploring a potentially explosive—and, to many minds, scandalous—sexual encounter, it is not a very sexy movie. It has its comic and melodramatic passages, but overall its tone is bemusedly realistic, as if it is just relating a curious, mildly interesting story—not much more than an anecdote, really—in an unforced, even artless, way. “Remember Frank Harmon? Ran into him the other day. Damnedest thing. He was with this kid.…”

Frank and Breezy meet when a stray dog is hit by a car. She is beside herself. He takes it to a vet and eventually adopts it. Eventually he adopts Breezy, too, and permits her to charm him out of his shell (“Do you mind very much if I love you?”). Difficulties, of course, ensue. When they run into his ex-wife and friends from his former life, he finds himself embarrassed. They split up, but then Frank’s former lover, a woman of his own age, is involved in an accident in which her husband, to whom she has been married only a week, is killed. Visiting her in the hospital, Frank is forcefully reminded of life’s brevity, and of the need to grasp what happiness one can, however fleeting it may be. Reunited with Breezy he says, “I don’t know, if we’re lucky we might have a year,” to which she replies, “Just think of it, Frank, a whole year.”

Her infallible optimism—“I never wake up in the morning with someone who made me sorry I was there, but I’ll bet you have”—reads perhaps more fatuously than it plays in understated context, which is no more than mildly critical of the hippie lifestyle (in its view, that’s just another kind of conformity) and portrays its heroine more as a loner than a communard, almost a young female version of the character Clint typically plays, appearing out of nowhere to unsettle the comfortably settled.

Similarly, it is no more than mildly sympathetic with Frank’s emotional immobility. It observes his self-pity without particularly indulging it. At one point Breezy tells him that if he were an Indian his name would undoubtedly be Black Cloud. When his former lady friend tells him that she is going to get married, he apologizes: “I feel a terrible sense of loss. I just wish it could have been more.” To which she replies: “It was—I just wish you could have been there.” Been there emotionally, she means. As for his friends, tsk-tsking over his affair with this child, the film’s dismissiveness stops short of satire. It simply argues that age, social status and long-term calculation are not—or should not be—of
much moment in comparison to grasping those few moments of intense happiness life occasionally offers us. It says, gently, that some lovers do flout convention and that our responses to them perhaps ought to be more generous than they usually are.

One may like the film for its refusal to age its hero down or its heroine up, for pushing the movie convention of the much older leading man involved with the much younger leading woman about as far as it can be pushed and doing so less nervously than, say,
Love in the Afternoon
did, for setting its story in quotidian Encino instead of a romantic capital like Paris, where popular fiction has conditioned us to expect and accept all sorts of curious romantic happenings. But finally the film is less challenging than it might be. Aware that it is flirting with absurdity (or, at the least, laughter in the wrong places) on the one hand, erotic danger on the other, it settles for good nature, good taste and a light slathering of sentiment, supplied mainly by a title song that does not represent Michel Legrand and Marilyn and Alan Bergman at their best. Once again, Clint was too polite in his eroticism.

The film, which did no more than recoup its very low cost, was virtually thrown away by the studio—another slight silently stored by its restive director—and treated casually, more often than not jokingly, by the reviewers. Most of them praised Holden’s work and welcomed Lenz’s freshness, and a minority thought well of the film, but few of them observed its largest significance: that it completed a very enterprising trio of movies by a new director who was signaling a desire to explore an unusually large range of material.