Clint Eastwood (59 page)

Clint expresses puzzlement over Post’s unhappiness. He continues to regard him affectionately and respectfully, and looks back on
Magnum Force
as a congenial collaboration. It is difficult to reconcile this disparity, but one suspects that it began with a failure on both sides to address forthrightly the change in their relative status since they had last worked together.

In that interim, Clint’s career had clearly flourished while Post’s had not. Clint was now an experienced director in his own right. He was also, in a much fuller sense than he had been on
Hang ’em High
, the film’s producer, therefore its ultimate source of authority. Most important of all, he was now in full possession of a highly defined screen character, the presentation of which he knew more about than anyone. None of this, it appears, did the headstrong Post take into account.

Thus Clint’s “helpfulness” in taking over some scenes—it is always his tendency simply to do what needs doing, rather than discuss it—seemed to Post a challenge to his authority. So did the fact that he ignored Post’s proposals that he impart more animation to a performance the director judged “draggy.” Having known him best at a very different
stage of Clint’s career, Post just could not see what Clint’s costar, Hal Holbrook, easily perceived, namely that “
that silent containment of his is his most powerful instrument.”

Holbrook says that he sensed no overt tension between director and star on the set. “They consulted on everything,” he says, though he also remembers being “surprised that Clint directed as much as he did.” This included his major scene with Clint, the confrontation in the car. There were cameras mounted on both front fenders, and a soundman crouched in the backseat with his equipment, leaving no room for the director. It turned out to be, for Holbrook, a memorable experience, because besides directing and acting, Clint was driving, navigating the vehicle through freeway traffic, rendering him more unfocused on his role than usual. “He’d stop in the middle of a speech, not liking the way he was saying it,” Holbrook recalls. Naturally, Clint would apologize for breaking his partner’s rhythm, but still it was, Holbrook says, “like getting ready to jump over a gap between cliffs and somebody grabbing you just as you were ready to go.” Yet it all worked out in the end. It is by far the best scene in the movie.

If Post’s grievances were confined to the not-unusual push-and-shove of star and director on a set, he would probably not be quite so bitter as he is today. But he is convinced that
Magnum Force
harmed his reputation: “Because this kind of phony rumor got around, saying, ‘Oh, Clint directed the whole thing.’ And that’s what hurt my career. I was soaring, ready to bounce into the big time.” Then, suddenly, as he tells it, he couldn’t get a job in features.

Post somehow blames Clint, though he admits that no one who repeated these bad reports ever attributed them to him. But this is highly unlikely; it is not the way Clint does business. Even in instances where problems on the set were more serious than they were here, Clint has always remained silent—or protectively evasive—about their causes. What seems more likely is that others working on
Magnum Force
exaggerated their differences. It happens; people working within the small, closed world of a movie location tend to improve their stories in retelling them to outsiders; it makes them appear more knowing and important.

The tensions between Post and Clint probably did not diminish the quality of
Magnum Force
. It is what it is—a reasonably efficient, reasonably entertaining, not very ambitious, movie. Its limits are self-evident, and not to be attributed to Ted Post, though adding insults to injured feelings many critics did. They did not recognize the advantage of surprise that Don Siegel had enjoyed on the original
Dirty Harry
. Nor did they see that its script was in almost every way intrinsically superior to that of
Magnum Force
. The sequel’s villains, for example, are more chilly
than chilling, it fails to provide Harry Callahan with the kind of funny and quirky moments that humanized him in the earlier film and it doesn’t put anyone into the kind of suspenseful jeopardy that its predecessor did. To put it ludicrously: The script is too … well … intellectual, too much in love with the idea it is exploring, insufficiently concerned with developing character and circumstances in which to catch the audience up.

Not that the reviewers cared very deeply about any of that. Most of them wanted simply to prove their superiority to the film. A few wanted to worry anew about the question of Harry Callahan’s fascism, though Pauline Kael had moved on from it. She used the movie to repeat her previous animadversions on affectless violence and Clint’s supposed failures as an actor. That “containment” which Hal Holbrook had so admired was to her “
wooden impassivity,” something that “removes the last pretensions to human feelings from the action melodrama.”

Nothing new here. Yet Kael did reveal an elitist bias she did not usually admit in her generally populist musings: “While actors who are expressive may have far more appeal to
educated people
[emphasis added], Eastwood’s inexpressiveness travels preposterously well.… He’s utterly unbelievable in his movies—inhumanly tranquil, controlled and assured—and yet he seems to represent something that isn’t so unbelievable.” Or, perhaps, so unenviable.

It’s a scary thought—the notion that it is only in the guise of cool amorality that one can successfully oppose the cool immorality of modern life. It implies that decency’s last refuge is to be found in superior style, not superior ethical insight. It is also an acute thought. For despite her contempt for Clint, Kael was picking up on the source of his power as no other critic was. She saw that he was operating in a radically revised movie context: “This is no longer the romantic world in which the hero is, fortunately, the best shot; instead, the best shot is the hero.” She also saw that he answered a need felt in an audience “grown derisive about the triumph of good,” saw that he was “the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world.” Her mistake was her belief that this was a totally cynical construct. She, like most commentators on violence in film (then and now), refused to countenance the possibility that this fantasy had its roots in a revised, if generally inchoate, sense—held, however reluctantly, by many among us—that contemporary reality is … yes … largely nihilistic. From this there arose, in her case, a failure to understand that the disturbing effect Clint created in her was far more than accidental, that it was … yes again … a well-calculated one.

That this represents something like a worldview he was about to prove with the choice of his next movie—much lighter in tone than any
he had previously attempted, but also much more complex in its probings of our contemporary craziness.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
is full of genre references—among them the plotting and execution of a complex, high-stakes robbery, the unlikely bonding of the title buddies, played respectively by Clint and Jeff Bridges, and the freewheeling encounters with eccentric characters that mark the typical road movie. But Michael Cimino’s work is more a commentary on, rather than a redeployment of, genre conventions. It is also a meditation on American maleness in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, a critique of certain American traditions normally unquestioned in movies of this kind, and at its best, an extended Looney Tunes—loose, shaggy, crammed with whacked-out incidents that arise out of nowhere and send us off on astonishing vectors.

Unexpected and goofy, the script just naturally tickled Clint—the broadness of its characters, the boldness of its incidents. If there is anything Clint loves, it is exaggeration. This is an odd thing to say about an actor famous for his minimalism, but it is demonstrably true. His Leone character exaggerates the deadly silences of the traditional western hero; Harry Callahan’s choice of weaponry satirizes the central, speak-softly-big-stick dualism of American heroism; a little later the
Which Way
pictures and
Bronco Billy
would exaggerate the mulishness of heroic single-mindedness to great comic effect.

The picture opens with the discovery of Clint’s Thunderbolt in the last place you’d expect to find him—wearing a turned-around collar, preaching from a pulpit to the sparse, dour congregation of a country church. His text is about the leopard lying down with the kid. The kid, in this case, will turn out to be Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges), who is seen stealing a spiffy Firebird in a sequence crosscut with Thunderbolt’s sermon. This is soon interrupted by gunfire, and the preacher takes to his heels, cross-country. He is rescued by Lightfoot in his stolen vehicle.

It’s a cute meet, all right, and it sets the tone for what follows. It develops that Thunderbolt’s pursuers, Red Leary and his dim-witted sidekick, Goody (respectively George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis), are former confederates in the successful robbery of a bank depository. They believe he has made off with their share of the loot, when, in fact, Thunderbolt has hidden it behind the blackboard of a one-room school that has now seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Eventually Red and Goody catch up with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a fight
ensues, and it leads to a surly, snarly peace during which Lightfoot proposes a new alliance aimed at precisely duplicating the former crime. His theory is that the authorities will not expect lightning to strike twice in the same place.

The consensus is that the idea may be just lamebrained enough to work. And it does. But the thieves fall out again, Goody is killed, and then Red is done in during a police chase that ends when he crashes his vehicle into a department-store window, where vicious guard dogs tear him to shreds. Before that, however, he has administered a severe beating to Lightfoot. He and Thunderbolt hit the road to nowhere again. Along their way, however, they find the old schoolhouse. It has been moved and set up as a nostalgic roadside attraction. They find the money from the first robbery exactly where it was hidden, whereupon Lightfoot suddenly dies of the injuries Red inflicted on him.

Aside from its tragic denouement, the film sounds like a fairly routine action piece. But the plotline—stretched between the opening sequence in the near-moribund church and the near-closing one in the disused school, both symbolizing the decline of traditional institutions—is not the point. The life of this wayward movie is to be found in its excursions away from its main line, all of which suggest that nothing in America is what it once was, or, perhaps one should say, what we once, in deluded confidence, thought it was.

Example: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot stop to buy gas and engage in conversation with the station owner. “Somewhere in this country there’s a little old lady with seventy-nine dollars and twenty-five cents,” he ruminates. “The five cents is a buffalo nickel. If she cashes in her investment, the whole thing’ll collapse. General Motors, the Pentagon, the two-party system and the whole shebang.” Things, he mutters, are running downhill and if we stop to think about it we’ll all fall down.

Example: Our heroes hitch a ride with an old guy in a beat-up car. The character is played by Bill McKinney in the first of his seven appearances in Malpaso productions, who as an improvisation—encouraged, he said later, by Clint—made the man talk as if he had a cleft palate. This lunatic keeps a caged raccoon in the front seat next to him and has rigged the car’s exhaust so that it empties carbon monoxide into the car. No reason is given for this; apparently it’s just his way of dicing with death. He also has a trunkful of rabbits, which, again for no reason, he starts shooting with a shotgun (most of them blithely hop away as he begins firing). Is this idle, if hilarious, surrealism? Or is this a symbol of the impotent rage of a country that has lost its way?

Example: Preparing for the robbery, the criminals take jobs driving little trucks (complete with loudspeakers that chime a merry tune) from
which they are supposed to sell ice cream door-to-door. The idea is to case their escape route from these ludicrous vehicles. They reckon without their customers, particularly a little boy who persistently asks for a flavor Red doesn’t have in stock. Finally, the exasperated criminal fixes him with his most menacing stare and snarls, “Hey, kid, go fuck a duck.” No sweets for the sweet in this movie. Cimino recalls having to shoot this scene several times; Kennedy and Clint kept breaking up, and the camera crew laughed so hard they shook the boom on which they were riding. Who can blame them? What joy to travesty everyone’s expectations. What joy to travesty American piety in general, to show and keep showing, in the most casual and offhand manner, hypocrisy’s descent into irrelevance.

What the movie says in its quick-step, sidelong sort of way is that the American center, if there ever was one, has not held and, perhaps more important, that ordinary people know it—or, rather, in their inarticulate way sense it. Cast loose from their traditional moorings they drift into misdirected rage and paranoia.

But it is in the relationship between its two title characters, and in their relationship to others, that the movie achieves its most striking effects. In his suggestive and sympathetic reading of the film, Robin Wood observes that
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
owes something to
Bonnie and Clyde
structurally: An outlaw couple meets by chance, makes common, fractious cause with an older couple, constituting themselves as a “gang,” perpetrates crimes (in this case a single crime) that, though initially successful, ultimately bring them to chaos and death. A significant difference between the films is that Thunderbolt is quite clearly a representative of the most tolerant American values, in effect mediating between rigid Red and lightsome Lightfoot, who symbolizes something like countercultural values.