Clint Eastwood (66 page)

The first film in which the change was apparent was
The Enforcer
, the second sequel to
Dirty Harry
. Jim Fargo was once again serving as associate producer, and beginning to worry because a director had not yet been named. Finally, one spring day, in the midst of an office party, Clint and Bob Daley called him into the latter’s office, to press him on what seemed to Fargo an annoyingly minor point. “Who are you going to get for your assistant?” Clint inquired.

The question rendered Fargo, who was planning to double as the production’s first assistant director, somewhat snappish. “Clint, I can’t be
thinking about getting a second at this stage. We gotta get a director in here.”

“Look,” came the grinning reply, “if you’re gonna be the director of this thing, you gotta have a good first.”

Thus, slyly, did Fargo learn that a long-standing ambition was about to be satisfied. It was his sangfroid, tested in the contrasting fires of
The Eiger Sanction
and
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, that won him the promotion, as well as his ability to stand up to the star when he had to. On the former picture he had set up the camera and called “Action” and “Cut” for a little talk scene and had been bold enough to propose a second take. Why? “Because it was terrible.”

“What do you mean, it was terrible?”

“Listen to it,” said Fargo. So they played it back, and heard three flubbed lines, as Clint hurried through some dull exposition.

“All right,” he grumbled, and repeated the scene. All right, he probably thought, this guy can withstand pressure.

Not that Fargo, or anyone else directing Clint, or any other actor working in a Malpaso production, is permitted to assert a large authoritarian ego. “Basically, you work with Clint like he works with actors,” says Fargo. “And that is give them the chance to do what they can do. Make your suggestions, and make them as suggestions, not as demands.… Let’s face it, you’re not going to be able to tell Clint how to play Harry Callahan.”

This script had come to Clint in a way almost as curious as
Josey Wales
had. Its first draft, entitled
Moving Target
, was the work of two young San Francisco film students, Gail Hickman and Scott Shroers, who had handed it to the maître d’ at the Hog’s Breath, the restaurant Clint and some partners had opened in Carmel, hoping it would be passed on to the proprietor. Somehow it was, and Clint liked it: “
Their effort was better than the ideas of several professionals I’d read.” Malpaso bought it, turning it over to the veteran Stirling Silliphant and—who else?—Dean Riesner. They received screenplay credit on the film, with the youngsters reduced to a story credit, though they insisted that many of their scenes remained in the finished film.

Once again, San Francisco is being terrorized by a crime wave, perpetrated this time by a self-styled revolutionary cadre, similar to the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974. These fictional revolutionaries are not moved by principle; they’re into crime for the money. But like their real-life models they do kidnap a prominent citizen—the mayor no less—and hold him hostage on Alcatraz.

But story is not this movie’s main line of business. Humorous self-awareness is. Everyone involved in
The Enforcer
obviously knew what
Harry had come to represent to the audience, and they play to those expectations, entering into a kind of us-against-them conspiracy directed at the middle-class, middlebrow right-mindedness that was bound to greet these films. The filmmakers encourage the audience to revel with them in wretched excess—low humor, outrageous behavior, action heightened well beyond realistic bounds. In effect, they treat their critics exactly as Harry Callahan treats his superiors, cheekily challenging them to make prissy fools of themselves, then going on to show how dumb they are by getting results—in the case of the movies, smashing box-office results.

Take, for example, a sequence many reviewers would single out as particularly lacking in both realism and social responsibility but which is, in fact, one of its best set pieces. Some bandits, foiled in a liquor-store robbery, are holding clerks and customers hostage while the police, who have them surrounded, impotently try to negotiate an end to the stalemate. Arriving on the scene, Harry engages in the following dialogue with the cops’ commander, thin-lipped, captious Captain McKay (Bradford Dillman).

“What do they want?”

“They want a car.” Pause, as Harry begins edging away. “What are you gonna do?” “Give ’em one.”

Since we are entirely aware of his impatient nature, we start smiling to ourselves the minute Harry speaks, our pleasure growing as he settles himself behind the wheel of a vehicle and revs the motor. He wouldn’t, would he?

Of course he would. He rams the car full tilt through the store’s plate-glass window, its glass and that of the store’s stock shattering spectacularly. Naturally, the bad guys’ strutting arrogance quickly turns into sniveling surrender.

Is this improbable, as many reviewers held? Naturally. Is it dubious police procedure, imperiling the innocent as it does? Doubtless. Is it funny to see the world’s most famous knothead delivering his predictable goods? You bet it is.

Needless to say, Harry’s attitude toward authority has not improved, and we eagerly—and not for long—await his exchanges with it. Hauled before a board of inquiry, headed by a lady of the perpetually appalled liberal persuasion, he is informed that “the minority community’s just about had it with this kind of police work.”

“By minority community I suppose you mean the hoods.”

“They’re American citizens, too.”

McKay is naturally obliged to second the board’s opinion—and,
equally naturally, to cover his ass. “I never said to use excessive violence,” the captain primly informs him. “What’d you want me to do, yell trick or treat at ’em?” comes the reply. McKay responds by taking Harry off active duty, assigning him to a desk job in personnel. “Personnel? That’s for assholes.”

“I was in personnel for ten years” comes the completely self-satisfied reply.

And so it goes. Clint’s performance is often very funny because like all splendidly splenetic movie figures—from W. C. Fields to Daffy Duck—there is a kind of aplomb in his outrage that derives from an unapologetic sense of his own nature. Harry’s enemies do parody liberal piety—an Episcopalian minister who has been taken in by the self-styled revolutionaries gets particularly rough treatment—and the detective’s sallies against them do constitute a harsh, premature critique of what we have since learned to call political correctness.

But his true cause is, as ever, common sense and common decency, a point he makes, with typical obliqueness, in an exchange with a black revivalist preacher who is also a police informer and is played, interestingly enough, by Albert Popwell, the “do you feel lucky” bank robber in
Dirty Harry
. The minister tells Harry he’s working for the wrong side. “You go out there and put your ass on the line for a bunch of dudes who wouldn’t let you in the front door any more than they would me.”

“I don’t do it for them,” Harry responds.

“Who then?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Meaning, of course, that he does it for all the powerless people who, regardless of race, creed and color, are trying to lead secure and honest lives.

But we know all that;
The Enforcer
’s largest interest lies in its variation on another convention of the series—Harry’s relationship with a new partner. As always, it begins in suspicion and ends in affection and respect. But there’s more to it this time because the tyro is a woman, Kate Moore, appealingly played by Tyne Daly, in a kind of rehearsal for her role on
Cagney and Lacy
. The love that develops between them is only chastely suggested, but it is the more affecting for that quality, and the source of the movie’s distinction.

Chunky, square faced, capable of a rather mannish manner, but with a certain vulnerability about her, Daly was Clint’s choice for the role—“the kind of girl who might get into this kind of thing.” Others were urging a dishier actress on him, but he screened one of Daly’s previous, rather small movie roles and said to Fargo, “I don’t see how you cannot consider her.”

Daly told reporter Todd Coleman she turned the role down three times: “
I thought the woman was just there to be made fun of, to be the butt of all the jokes.” But she went through her scenes line by line with Clint, humanizing and strengthening her character. “If she’s going to be as heroic as she possibly can be,” she argued, “then let me kill a bad guy.” This she was permitted to do in the film’s climactic confrontation. “A lesser or more greedy star” would not have allowed this kind of creative participation in his project, she reflected. Clint, of course, welcomed the improved realism. He told a reporter at the time, “
When my lawyer saw her on the set he thought she was the technical advisor.”

Their working relationship now happily established, they attempted something unique in an Eastwood movie, a full-scale improvisation of a long and complicated sequence called, with conscious irony, the “romantic” scene, by the filmmakers. By this point in the picture, Kate has proved herself a game girl—she even dares to kid Harry about the size of his .44 Magnum and its obvious sexual overtones—and they settle down for a companionable drink in a bar. Both actors thought they could wing something better than whatever had been written. Fargo decided on a two-camera setup, one close-up on Daly, the other on Clint, which shot for shot looked fine. But over the course of the work—which at one point Daly interrupted in order to make a trip to the ladies’ room (it stayed in the release print)—they never repeated their lines in exactly the same way. That meant their singles could not be cut together coherently. And that called for another Malpaso rarity—retakes. This time Fargo backed off and used a dolly to get some wide shots and some over-the-shoulders that provided the editor, Ferris Webster, with the material he needed to make a smooth sequence. The result is one of the best scenes in the film—two loners trying to establish a connection.

The movie was greeted by the usual critical disdain, with Richard Eder reaching new heights of cluelessness with his complaint that the film “lacked ideas.” These are never, of course, prerequisites for action films, but what’s extraordinary about him and almost all the rest of the critics is their failure to acknowledge the originality of the relationship between Harry and Kate, the quality of Daly’s work or the extraordinary conclusion to which that relationship comes. For, of all things, the movie ends in tragedy. In the attempt to rescue the kidnapped mayor Kate is killed. She dies cradled in Harry’s arms, wrapped in his anguished love.

It is an entirely unexpected, completely affecting and, one would have thought, totally obvious ending: This moment completes the arc of
a plotline that had never been tried on the screen before, a female police officer overcoming gender prejudice and achieving full equality with a male partner.

It was a feminist critic, Marjorie Rosen, writing in
Ms.
, who alone caught the significance of Daly’s character and her treatment in the film. “
Harry has found … an equal, a partner of similar mettle and courage,” she said. “The strength of the film is his process of discovery as he turns from belligerent to respectful.” This she called “exhilarating,” since his “unabashed apprehension … parallels that of most men more than most of us would like to believe. Therefore, the film nourishes our hope that contact has—or can be—made.” She particularly praised the film’s climax, in which, as she approvingly put it, Kate “dies like a man.”

That said, one also has to say that there is something rattletrap about the way
The Enforcer
veers from action to comedy to fighting romance. Certainly today, attitudes having radically changed, Clint would retract its casual contempt for homosexuals, admittedly a feature of several of his early action films. It is also possible he might have encouraged its writers and director to a greater consistency of tone. Or perhaps not. He seems to have liked brusque switches of mood—particularly in contemporary urban action pieces—perhaps because they struck him as truer to the city’s rhythms. Be that as it may, the film seemed to be taking it too easy on itself, and that encouraged reviewers to be, perhaps, too hard on it. Neatness always counts with them.

The motives of his next movie,
The Gauntlet
, are, if anything, more deliriously mixed than those of
The Enforcer
. At a cost of $5 million, the most expensive Eastwood movie up to that point, it, too, offers a leading female character who is something more than the male lead’s passive companion. In this case she is, in fact, smarter than he is and in a position to affect the narrative’s development more significantly. Moreover, this movie wants to parody, by pushing them to excess, the wild-ride conventions of the action film, to offer a critique of authority different from, but as blunt as, that of the
Dirty Harry
films and, improbably enough, to establish a link between itself and yet another genre, that of romantic comedy. It has a lot on its plate.