Authors: Richard Schickel
Soon enough they engage in a sharply testing exchange on a river steamer where one sunny, windy day they are sharing clams, beer and the beginnings of intimacy. He begins by wondering if she is unattached, which she says she is.
“What else were you wondering?” she asks.
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“What it would be like to lick the sweat off your body.”
Confused laughter. “Do you … do you always say exactly what’s on your mind?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Could be a little more subtle.”
“What I said?”
“No, the way you said it.”
“How would you like me to say it.”
“As if you’re not saying it to somebody every night.”
“What else would you like?”
“I’d like to know what’s underneath the front you put on.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t like what’s there.”
“Maybe you’re afraid I would.”
The scene is solidly on pitch—romantic comedy as it might be played by people who are neither as romantic nor as comedic as they might like to be.
In time they will talk about what his work has done to him. The first inspiration for Tuggle’s screenplay was a manhunt for a serial rapist in the Bay Area who was never caught. In the course of his research he asked a vice cop how dealing constantly with the seamiest side of sex affected his private life. The man thought for a moment and replied, “It makes me treat my wife more tenderly in bed.” He gave a variant on that line to Wes, and has Beryl ask, “How did she respond?” “She said she wasn’t interested in tenderness,” he replies.
Slowly his wariness dissipates. He introduces her to his daughters. They take a liking to her. He and Beryl begin to edge toward the bedroom. Once there, she picks up his handcuffs and asks him why the killer always uses them on his victims.
“Control,” he says.
“Do you use them often?”
“Well, that depends.”
“On what?”
“The situation.”
“When you feel threatened?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“With these, no one could get to you.”
“They’ll stop just about anyone.”
At this point she snaps the cuffs on herself, and reaches out to touch his face. He flinches. But she is signaling trust; even though she knows the worst about him she is saying she does not fear submission to him. When he unlocks her handcuffs he also unlocks his emotions.
The film is in itself a kind of tightrope, dangerous if too slack, dangerous if too tightly strung, and the understated tension with which this scene is played is emblematic of the smart, believable middle way that it finds. As it happens, that was more difficult to achieve than anyone not present at its creation can possibly know.
Tuggle had sold his script on condition that he be allowed to direct. Clint, harking back to the passion with which Michael Cimino had animated his writerly vision, thought that was a good idea. But the two
men are very different personalities. Cimino is a willful and decisive character. Tuggle, on the other hand, is a man who tends to see a dozen equally interesting alternatives in any situation and is not averse to exploring them all. Moreover, he did not have the experience that Cimino had gained making commercials, did not, therefore, know how to command a set. This last, perhaps, was his largest failing, for this was an Eastwood crew, used to moving quickly and ready to glance in his direction when a director faltered.
It seems Tuggle lasted no more than a day in full control of the location. One witness remembers him hesitating overlong on the placement of a picture in the background of a shot. Another recalls him choosing a camera placement that ensured a door that had to be opened in the scene would block the actors from view. And these were comparatively simple shots, “He didn’t know how to function in a decision-making deal” is the way Clint puts it. He also suggests, and it is the only criticism of Tuggle that he offers, that the would-be director should have spent some time on other sets, observing how the job was done. It was too late now. There was much complicated work still to be done involving crowds, high-voltage action and sophisticated coverage, and Clint simply did not feel Tuggle would be able to handle it.
Here it was again, the near-endemic problem of trying to direct a star who was not only the film’s de facto producer, but also his own best director (at least until someone proves otherwise to him)—vastly complicated in this case by the fact that Tuggle was manifestly “such a good guy,” as Clint describes him. Even if the Directors Gudd’s Eastwood rule had not prevented Clint from taking over, he really didn’t want to.
So a compromise was worked out. The writer would stay on, contribute what he could in a collaborative way and receive directorial credit, while Clint, literally, called most of the shots. Tuggle insists he made substantial contributions to his script’s realization in this role, and Clint does not deny them. But our eyes tell us this is very much an Eastwood movie—his stylistic tracks are all over it—and the anecdotal evidence supports this reading.
The most unmistakable example of his imprimatur is the sequences involving the children. This was not troubling to Tuggle. He could see that Alison and Clint would be more comfortable working without third-party interference. Though they were playing roles close to real life—a father and daughter negotiating the shoals of divorce—Clint thought that was to their advantage. That “little parallel,” he says, “made it easier for a ten-year-old to understand.” Besides, when she had visited his sets she had always loved “being in front of the camera and hamming
it up,” and I said, ‘You know, I should just get her in the right part and it will be all right.’ ”
So it was. She is excellent in a scene in which she is supposed to gently comfort her father when he comes home from work distraught and tipsy and falls woozily onto the living room couch. There his daughter finds him and wants to offer him some comfort. Clint had noticed Alison’s fondness for the cat who lived in the house they had rented for use as the Block family home, quiedy stroking and cuddling it between takes. When it came time to do this scene his instruction was simple: “Just think of your dad as this lost, stray cat. Just kind of relate to your dad like that.”
What she did was remove his wedding picture from his hand, try to pat a comforter around him and then snuggle down on top of him, “
warming with her tomgirl body the man her mother has rejected,” as Kathleen Murphy nicely describes it. This proved to be a discomfiting moment to some reviewers, but it is also, in its straightforward behavioral honesty, a breathtaking one, not unlike the opening kiss in
The Beguiled
, one of those rare moments that breaks through the movieness of movies, transcending the conventions by which reality is generally represented in them, referring us to something less mediated, less calculated.
This movie is throughout touched with something of that spirit. For the “little parallel” Clint proposes is part of a larger parallel between his life and the life of the man he plays. As we have observed, Wes Block is a man trying to keep the compartments of his life sealed, desperately attempting to prevent the lives each contains to flow out into the others. Clint, obviously in less melodramatic circumstances, obviously with greater success, has always tried to do the same thing. Private man and public man, Carmel man and movie man, man’s man, lady’s man and family man—he keeps the overlap between them to a minimum. It has been his way of asserting control over a complicated life.
There is, of course, a significant difference between Wes Block and Clint Eastwood: There is an authentic monster invading Wes’s professional life. And this monster will invade Wes’s home, murder a babysitter and deposit his daughter, bound and gagged, in her father’s bed, with the threat of further violation avoided by a hair’s breadth. (“You motherfucker,” the raging Wes cries; he is looking at his own image in a mirror when he does so.) Later, the killer invades Beryl’s home—another, if newer, sacred place for Wes—and again catastrophe is narrowly avoided.
One does not want to make too much of these parallels between fiction and fact. But one does not want to make too little of them, either. For it is obvious that Clint’s eagerness to involve his children in his
work betokened self-awareness, his sense that compartmentalization cannot be carried to rigid extremes. It is equally clear that, in the age of the free-floating psychopath, public figures are subject to terrors of precisely the kind Wes Block confronts. Clint has been stalked (and for a time carried a licensed weapon for protection). His daughter would later be threatened in the same way. And that says nothing about the rapacious invasions of the gossip press on public lives (to which Clint’s response has been a string of successful lawsuits). Simply put,
Tightrope
is, among other things, a dramatic projection of feelings (and situations) its star and unacknowledged director had known and imagined in reality.
It derives some of its power from that simple, unspoken fact. Unfortunately, Tuggle suffered for that. This was a project that engaged Clint passionately, one he could not surrender to someone whose lack of professional experience seemed certain to undermine its force. What Clint did, in effect, was make Tuggle the film’s dramaturge, a role he handled gracefully and effectively. “We really did see eye to eye on the script,” Tuggle says. “It was shot word for word almost. I think we both wanted to make the same movie, and I was real happy with the movie.” Tuggle, though, cannot completely bury all of his resentments at being pushed aside. Assured that Clint still makes no large claims to the film’s authorship, and that he speaks with great warmth about him, Tuggle replies, with quiet bitterness: “No, there’s no reason to criticize me. You only criticize someone if you’ve lost a war or an argument. If you have won, you have no criticism.”
It is too bad he can’t content himself with an incontestable credit, that of writing one of the most interesting films to which Clint Eastwood ever applied his talents. Of his many explorations of maleness and its meanings, none came closer to the heart of the matter—what we might call “control anxiety” (especially as it is expressed in love relationships)—and none, excepting
Unforgiven
, more effectively used simple and powerful melodramatic devices to create ambiguous social and psychological resonances.
When it arrived in the theaters in the summer of 1984, Kael and her coterie—the “Paulettes” as they were coming to be known—deplored it. Most of the other notices were mixed. Some found it a true inheritor of the film noir manner, especially in that subgenre’s insistence on the close psychological relationship between cop and criminal mentalities. Others felt this parallel not persuasively worked out. But whatever their judgment of the film, their approval of Clint’s performance was nearly unanimous. J. Hoberman in the
Village Voice
called Clint “one of the most masterful under-actors in American movies,” and Jack Kroll in
Newsweek
acutely noted the “forlorn lust” that Clint communicated in
his pursuit of prostitutes and his “vulnerability” in his scenes with his children. “He gets better as he gets older; he seems to be creating new nuances beneath his stony exterior.” David Denby agreed: “
He’s become a very troubled movie icon: That forehead, where all the energy appears pent up in the bulging veins, looks ready to explode. He gives a genuinely spooked performance.”
Precisely because his characterization was located within a genre film of the kind with which he had been most closely (and most controversially) associated, he provided the reviewers a convenient basis for comparison. They could look upon it, consult their memories of
Dirty Harry
and see “growth” of a kind that had been harder to perceive in eccentricities like
Bronco Billy
or
Honkytonk Man
. To put it another way, the critics on the whole undervalued the film, but finally evaluated Clint’s strengths as an actor correctly. As a result, Joe Hyams says, his job became easier than ever. He would not in the future have nearly as much trouble getting reviewers to at least approach an Eastwood movie seriously. He was so excited that he took out an ad for
Tightrope
in
The New York Review of Books
. The studio, gratefully counting excellent grosses, would mount its first “For Your Consideration” campaign for Clint during the next winter’s Academy Award season.
S
tardom’s hoariest rite was belatedly accorded Clint when he was promoting
Tightrope;
he was invited to place his hand and footprints in the concrete of Grauman’s Chinese Theater’s famous forecourt in Hollywood. Taking stylus in hand, and bowing to dull expectation, he scratched, “You’ve made my day,” into the cement block. It had scarcely hardened before he had another picture in release.
This was
City Heat
, and before it was finished—before it was started—it became the playground for much trickier Hollywood rituals. Indeed, it developed into something like a paradigmatic conflict between someone trying to conduct business as usual, Hollywood style, and someone fully intending to do business as usual, Eastwood style. The script, under another title, had been submitted to Warners by its writer, Blake Edwards, who intended to direct it as well. It was a period piece, set in Kansas City in 1933, during the waning days of Prohibition, and it featured a bantering relationship between private eye Mike Murphy and police detective Lieutenant Speer, who had once been partners on the force but were now on the outs. The freelance investigator is a raffish sort, the cop more dour and often obliged to rescue his pal from the potentially deadly consequences of his insouciance. It had something of the air of those quick, tough little movies Warner Bros. used to make about once a month in the thirties, which Clint had always enjoyed.
When the studio passed it on to him, however, he passed on it—too talky. There the matter might have rested, except that “Blake was kind of a bad boy,” says Clint. He sent the script to Sondra Locke, proposing that she again play the part of an heiress in difficulty. She—as Edwards surely expected she would—mentioned the offer to Clint and asked him why he hadn’t liked the script. He replied that he hadn’t entirely hated it and, rereading it, began to see self-satirizing possibilities in what he calls “the Pat O’Brien part,” a sort of superego in a snap brim, imagining Burt Reynolds—then doing rather disheveled sequels to his
Smokey
and the Bandit
and
Cannonball Run
successes—as the piece’s Cagneyish id, the high-stepping Murphy, and giving Sondra a chance at a colorfully comedic part.