It’s been a rough day for Dirty Harry Callahan. He’s taken shit from just about everybody on the police force and on his beat. Finally it’s lunch hour. Harry collapses at an outdoor chili parlor and orders up a hot dog and a Coke. He has just taken a bite and wiped the mustard from his mouth when he hears a commotion across the street. Slowly, like a wounded reptile, he turns. A bank is being robbed Harry watches with supreme disinterest, his eyes and facial muscles registering not a whit of disturbance. Around him, people are screaming as the armed robber makes his way out the door. Harry studies him. What’s ail the commotion, ain’t no real problem here. Slowly, almost like a zombie, Harry finishes his hot dog, carefully wiping his mouth. Then, still chewing, he strolls across the street, knocks the thief’s gun to the street and places his own .44 Magnum at the base of the man’s skull.
‘I’ve had a couple of fights already today, punk.” says
Harry. “I’ve shot most of my bullets… maybe. Maybe I’ve got one left. You want
to try your luck?”
The punk collapses on the ground. He looks longingly at
his own gun, only a foot away. Ail he has to do is reach for it. But there are
these snake’s eyes staring at him, and this huge barrel. Saliva forms on the
edge of his mouth. He starts to reach out, then looks again at that death-mask
face. You can see the life going out of him. Harry finishes chewing his hot dog
and slowly, sadistically, licks his lips.
“I thought it would be interesting to have Harry not
quite able to digest the hot dog, to keep right on eating it. Now, I don’t
believe there’s a law officer in the world who would do that. It’s dumb,
ridiculous. But I liked it, and I knew the audiences would like it. I mean,
it’s funny!”
“It’s hilarious.”
“But it wasn’t in the script at the end, and I thought it
would be great to have it come back in like an epilogue. Only that time there’s
no hot dog. He plays it utterly straight. He’s getting this guy he’s gone out
of his way to find, and he’s broken every rule, political and judicial, and
it’s a sad moment, almost. Pauline Kael calls it a moment of glee when he
shoots the guy, but there is no moment of glee. If she looked at it again I
think she’d realize there’s actually a sadness about it. And when he drills the
guy there’s no happiness, no smile.”
“She obviously wasn’t looking at the movie. She was
looking at the last Robert Altman movie.”
Eastwood laughs and stretches out his frame. “There’s
sadness in all of them,” he continues. “In The Enforcer, the girl is killed and
he goes off alone. There’s a certain loneliness in all of them.”
“In the new one, though, he finds a girlfriend.”
“That’s right,” he says, “and not only a girlfriend, but
one he wouldn’t respect. She’s a hooker and he’s a cop—two different kinds who
would never respect one another but who can learn to. It’s more of an African
Queen situation. It’s more of an old-fashioned movie. Look at It Happened One
Night, how much reality is in that? But you enjoy the people—you enjoy the guy,
you enjoy the gal. It’s entertainment.”
“But your movies are incredibly violent,” I say. “Do you
worry about a carryover from screen violence to crime in the streets?”
“If that were the case,” Eastwood says, “then every guy
on Death Row would have reason to be released because Tom Mix or James Cagney
or Hoot Gibson shot guys on the screen. Or go back before movies to literature-—Shakespeare,
Greek tragedy—everybody can find some fall guy for why they commit some act of
violence. You can say ‘My family insisted I learn about the Crucifixion of
Jesus Christ.’ That’s a violent act where somebody is impaled on a cross.”
“Besides,” I agree, “there is a distinct difference
between the violence in your movies and, say, Taxi Driver or The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, where you literally want to throw up.”
“Well, yeah,” he says, “except I wasn’t appalled by the
violence in Taxi Driver because they went so overboard. Like, the guy holding
his hand out so he could wait for his fingers to get shot off—I found myself
laughing at that.”
Harry Callahan is standing in front of the mayor of San
Francisco, a slick, beaver-faced man with grey ringlets drooping off his head.
The Mayor Looks faintly like Nero. Harry looks like a slob. His herringbone
tweed jacket is too small for him, his shirt is unbuttoned at the top, he has a
big mouse under his eye where a psychopathic killer clipped him. Now, after
almost being killed five times, Harry is being rewarded for his dedication by
being taken off the case.
“I’m sorry, Callahan,” the Mayor says, “but you’ve broken
the law. That’s what keeps the fabric of society together, you understand? No,
you wouldn’t understand. Not your kind.”
“Somebody has to get him,” Harry spits.
“Not you, Callahan. You’re through. Now, get out.”
Harry looks around for support. From his chief, from the
Mayor’s flunkies. Forget it. Slowly, with a profound torpor, he turns and moves
toward the door.
“Asshole,” he mutters under his breath. “Assssshole.”
“Asshole” is to a Clint Eastwood film as “Rosebud” is to
Citizen Kane. A signature, a recurrent coda. He always mutters it with a
distinct nasal vehemence. I mention it and Eastwood roars.
“That’s my South Oakland background. I have college kids
come up to me on the street and say, ‘Hey, man, say asshole the way you say it
in the movies.’”
“Kind of a working-class talisman….”
Clint is really laughing and nodding now. “Oh, yeah. No
matter how high you go, it’s something you never lose. I use it, because it was
from my background, a certain way I got pissed. If Lawrence Olivier tried that,
it wouldn’t work at all.”
“No,” I laugh. “Perhaps ‘ass-hole: High Tea version.’”
Clint smiles again. “You don’t leave your background
behind,” he says. “I’m the first in my family to ever make it. That’s one more
reason I don’t play down to them; I came from that place. People know when
you’re talking down to them. They instinctively know what’s going on…. All the
good actors know this. Cagney, John Wayne, Gary Cooper…”
“Were they your influences?”
“Cagney, especially. I loved that stuff.”
“Yet he was outgoing. With you there’s a kind of silence
at the core of your characters. They’re slightly removed.”
“Well,” says Eastwood, “I think if you analyze all the
great actors of the past, it’s not what they did so much as what they might do,
what they were about to do. It wasn’t what they said—a lot of guys can do
dialogue better than those guys. Charles Laughton was a great character actor
and he had all sorts of tricks, but if he was on the screen with Gable, your
attention was on Gable, even if Laughton was doing the talking.
“There’s a famous story. I can’t remember the character
actor’s name, but he was talking about being onstage with Gary Cooper where he
had this tremendous big monologue and Cooper didn’t say a word. And the
character actor said he went to see the thing and he thought he had really
wrapped the scene up, and he said when he got into theater he noticed that
during his big monologue, everyone in the theater was staring at Cooper. And
then he realized the worst part of all: he was staring at Cooper. That’s what
real acting is all about.”
We both laugh and it’s time to go. Eastwood sees me to
the door.
“Where will you go from here?” he says.
“Baltimore,” I say, grimacing a little.
“Yeah?” he says. “Do you get back to your old hometown
often?”
“Not that often. And every time I do, my love-hate affair
with the place surfaces and I end up kind of upset.”
Eastwood smiles and pats me on the back. “I know what you
mean,” he says. “I feel that too. But you never want to lose contact with it
altogether.”
“I guess not,” I say, not quite sure.
“Nah,” says Eastwood. “You got to go back every now and
then so you don’t forget how to say it.”
“Say what?” I ask.
With his best Dirty Harry smirk, Eastwood sneers:
“Asshole.”
Postscript
Clint Eastwood is now such an icon, and so beloved, that
hardly anyone remembers the days when he was considered a handsome stud-muffin
with no brains. But as late as 1978 that’s exactly how most of the public and
all the movie critics viewed him. Pauline Kael was the main culprit. She
considered Dirty Harry a Fascist picture. She thought Eastwood was nothing more
than a John Wayne without talent.
It was very fashionable in those days to put Clint down,
to laugh at his movies, his squint, and grimace. I laughed at him myself and
made fun of his lack of acting chops with my cool, sophisticated friends.
The only thing wrong with my attitude was, I’d never seen
any of his pictures.
Finally, while visiting home in Baltimore, I went with a
friend, the artist Scott McKenna, to the Towson Theatre to see The Good, The
Bad and The Ugly. I expected nothing more than a campfest. We’d laugh at the
horrible actor, make fun of the rotten Italian western, and go home feeling
smug and superior.
Instead, Scott and I sat in our seats without so much as
going to get popcorn or even take a piss for nearly three hours.
As we walked out in that special daze great movies put
you in, I looked at Scott and said: “I think we’ve just seen one of the best
movies of all time.”
Scott nodded, and we spent the rest of the night in a
Towson lacrosse bar called The Crease going over the many great parts of the
film. What we both agreed on was that: TGTBATU was one of the great movies,
just a little behind The Wild Bunch in both our estimations. And that Clint
Eastwood was a great actor. Pauline Kael didn’t know jackshit about acting or
movies. Because Clint played the piece straight, which made movie work. Any
hint of winking at the audience, or playing it for laughs would have ruined the
whole delicate deal.
The movie was an epic western and an epic comedy, and an
epic drama, and it all worked. Sergio Leone, whoever he was, was a genius. The
guy who did the music—we didn’t know that his name was Ennio Morricone—was also
amazing.
When I told my friends how much I loved Clint they
laughed at me, and shook their heads. But I found, very quickly, that none of
them had seen it.
It was sort of like discussing Moby Dick with writers.
Everyone says it’s a masterpiece, no doubt. But when you try and discuss
individual scenes with them they sort of change the subject. Why? Because no
one ever finished it.
All I knew is that I felt Clint Eastwood was a great
actor, and he deserved a serious interview. One in which he could answer his
critics. So when editors Mitch Glazier and Tim White called me from Crawdaddy,
and asked me to interview Clint I was more than ready.
I flew to Hollywood, and met Eastwood at his bungalow at
Warner Brothers, and he couldn’t have been kinder and more open. I was told he
never liked to talk and would only give people, at most, a half hour.
Instead, he gave me two hours.
I shook hands with him and left. I felt really excited. I
had a great interview with the Man With No Name. I was so happy I decided to
hear a little of it on my way to my rental car.
Then the worst happened, the reporter’s nightmare.
I had always hated tape recorders but more and more
people told me they were invaluable, so I used a mini-tape recorder for the
Eastwood interview.
I hit rewind, then play, and I heard… ZERO.
Nothing, nada, blip…
I felt my blood freeze. The guy who never gave interviews
had liked me and given me two hours. Two hours to Crawdaddy, not exactly the
New York Times or Rolling Stone. And now I was faced with going back to his
bungalow and prostrating myself, begging him to do it all over again!
I tried to figure ways around it, Maybe I could remember
everything he said. But for two hours? No way. I had no choice. I retraced my steps
and went back to his office. I told his assistant what had happened. She looked
at me like “Are you kidding me?” I wanted to crawl under her desk. I waited as
she went into his office and told him.
Two minutes later he came out and looked at me, grimly.
I totally forgot that this was a professional situation
and fully expected him to kill me.
That was fine. I wanted to die anyway. Just shoot me in
the head so it’s quick, okay?
“Heard you had a little problem,” he said. In his low
Dirty Harry voice.
“Uh, ah well you see I uh… hahaha…”
Clint smiled and opened the door into his office, the
same office we’d just sat in for two hours.
“You have a cold,” he said. “You need another cookie and
tea.”
And he did the whole interview, all two hours of it, over
again.
To put it very simply, after that I loved the guy. I
didn’t change one thing in the interview but as far as I’m concerned of all the
giants I’ve met Clint stands out as one of the kindest.
I think too, that this interview was very brave. I asked
him tough questions and often not flattering ones, like “Why do people think
you’re stupid?” He answered them all reasonably and with a deep understanding
of his craft.
I think that maybe this interview is the first time
anyone saw how smart he really is, and how he might morph into the great
actor/director he is today.
///
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