1980 Week: Bronco Billy

          As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, Clint Eastwood was ready to expand his range as an actor and as a director, often simultaneously. One of his most admirable experiments was this character study of a modern-day cowboy leading a motley group of participants in a Wild West revival show. Although the picture is so hopelessly old-fashioned that it feels like it could have been made in the ’40s with Joel McCrea playing the lead, Eastwood puts the picture over fairly well. In terms of his leading performance, Eastwood mostly suppresses his familiar screen persona, playing an idealistic dreamer instead of a grim avenger. Yet some of Eastwood’s bad directorial habits trip him up; the pacing is sluggish, the reliance on familiar character actors gives certain scenes a mechanical quality, and there’s a distinctive lack of effervescence, which is exactly the quality the movie needs most badly. Still, the script by Dennis Hackin is a charming throwback, the themes embodied by the central character are meaningful, and the inherent parallels between Bronco Billy and the man who portrays him add resonance.

          Set in the American West, the picture introduces viewers to Bronco Billy’s Wild West Show, an enthusiastic but tacky operation featuring clowns, Indians, and—as the main attraction—Bronco Billy’s expert displays of horsemanship, knife-throwing, and sharpshooting. Billy (Eastwood) is also the manager of the traveling show, spewing a steady stream of can-do aphorisms while demanding that his people give their all for the “little pardners” who come out to see them perform. Never mind that the show is perpetually in the red, and that Billy regularly provides free shows to orphanages. In a plot twist straight out of an old Preston Sturges movie, Billy encounters Antoinette (Sondra Locke), a shrewish heiress dumped in the middle of nowhere by her business manager-turned-husband, John (Geoffrey Lewis), who steals all her money. Billy charms Antoinette into joining his show as an assistant participating in dangerous stunts, ostensibly in exchange for transit back to civilization. Opposites-attract sparks of the It Happened One Night mode ensue.

          The romantic aspects of Bronco Billy don’t quite work, perhaps because Eastwood and Locke had done so many movies together by this point. (Plus, quite frankly, Locke lacks the spunk of, say, a Barbara Stanwyck.) The plotting gets turgid after a while, stretching the movie to 116 minutes when a frothy 90-minute span would have suited the material better. What saves Bronco Billy from mediocrity, besides the consummate professionalism of Eastwood’s presentation, is the late-movie reveal about the true nature of Billy and his people. In this case, pulling back the curtain on an illusion adds magic, because the revelations transform Bronco Billy into a celebration of reinvention. Could the picture have done without a few scenes, such as the bit of Eastwood warbling a tune called “Barroom Buddies” as he drives? Sure. But a few indulgences are small prices to pay for watching an iconic performer stretch with largely meritorious results.

Bronco Billy: GROOVY

1980 Week: Any Which Way You Can

The box-office success of Every Which Way But Loose (1978) all but ensured that audiences hadn’t seen the last of Clint Eastwood playing Philo, a trucker with an orangutan for a pet and a side career as a bare-knuckle fighter. Whereas Every Which Way But Loose is an awful movie that can be explained away by assuming that Eastwood wanted a break from playing tight-lipped avengers, Any Which Way You Can is inexcusable crap. Rehashing the narrative elements of the previous film and sprawling across an absurd 118-minute running time, Any Which Way You Can is punishingly stupid. The die is cast during the opening-credits scene, a dull montage of a pickup truck driving while Eastwood and Ray Charles croon a ghastly country song titled “Beer’s to You” on the soundtrack. Then comes the insipid storyline. After being dumped by country singer Lynn (Sondra Locke) in the previous film, Philo retires from fighting, but gangsters offer him $25,000 to tussle with Jack (William Smith), a brawler with a reputation for beating his opponents to death. Meanwhile, Philo has misadventures with his drinking buddy Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and Orville’s foul-mouthed mother (Ruth Gordon). Everything unfolds predictably. Friends ask Philo not to fight, and then criminals blackmail him into participating. At regular intervals, the movie stops dead for musical performances (by Locke, Glen Campbell, and others), as well as scenes of Clyde defecating in police cars and sharing a hotel room with a frisky lady orangutan. At one point, Clyde cavorts to the accompaniment of a song called “Orangutan Hall of Fame.” By the time Any Which Way You Can reaches its nadir—cross-dressing bikers, a 20-minute fistfight, homophobic dialogue—the idiocy has become intolerable. Although Eastwood wasn’t done scratching his comedy itch (please give the 1989 clunker Pink Cadillac a wide berth), at least Any Which Way You Can ended the actor’s orangutan era.

Any Which Way You Can: LAME

The Beguiled (1971)

          Clint Eastwood went to several strange and interesting places, dramatically speaking, during his late ’60s/early ’70s transition from playing cowboys to being the fully-realized icon known as Clint Eastwood. (Dirty Harry, released in 1971, completed his ascendance.) Eastwood’s wilderness years featured everything from musicals to war movies, but there’s something particularly fascinating about The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me, both released in 1971 (quite a year for Eastwood), because these two movies pit Eastwood against the unlikely but formidable opponents of scorned women. Of the pair, The Beguiled is the more provocative, since the narrative of Play Misty for Me provides an escape valve—the villain of that piece is a psychopath. In The Beguiled, the principal antagonistic force is the savagery churning inside Eastwood’s character.

          Set in the South during the Civil War, the picture begins when a young girl, Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), wanders through a forest and finds a wounded Union soldier, John (Eastwood). She guides him back to the boarding school where she lives with a handful of other young women, some of whom are near adulthood. The school is run by tough but psychologically fragile Martha (Geraldine Page). Initially, Martha says John should be handed over to Rebel soldiers, but, as do the other females in the school, she becomes enchanted by the handsome stranger. While John is nursed back to health, he woos not only Martha but also her second-in-command, the virginal Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman). Meanwhile, coquettish Carol (Jo Ann Harris) makes her sexual desires plain to John. Thus begins a dark odyssey involving betrayal, lies, schemes, and temptation. John plays every angle to his advantage, figuring he’ll soon be well enough to exit the school on his own power, and each woman with whom he builds a relationship accepts the face he shows to her. (As viewers, we know he’s lying to all of them.)

          Director Don Siegel, the reliable B-movie helmer who emerged during this period as Eastwood’s mentor, does some of his best-ever work in The Beguiled, employing the candlelit interiors and mossy exteriors of the Southern setting to create powerful visual metaphors—the school at the center of the story is a fertile place where wild passions grow. Siegel also stages the movie like a slow-burn horror story, and the revenge Martha takes on John once she realizes his true nature is memorably brutal.

          The Beguiled runs a little long, and a director with a subtler touch could have added further dimensions, but nearly everything in the movie works, at least to some degree. Furthermore, the female performances are so good that they sell the story’s premise. Page is stern and twitchy, adding a thread of Gothic grandeur, while Harris, Hartman, and the other supporting ladies present a spectrum of complicated femininity. Eastwood stretches to the outside edges of his skill set, but the role neatly twists his macho energy into menace. While it’s tempting to brand The Beguiled as misogynistic cinema (the same criticism often lobbed at Play Misty for Me), the picture has too many dimensions to support that simplistic a reading. In the world of The Beguiled, everyone is guilty of succumbing to vile impulses.

The Beguiled: GROOVY

Play Misty for Me (1971)

          Clint Eastwood stepped well outside his comfort zone for his first feature film as a director, setting aside the action genre for a psychosexual thriller, and although his casting in the lead was inevitable—trading acting for opportunity is how most stars get their first directing gigs—it’s admirable that he took on the additional challenge of playing a textured role. Instead of incarnating his usual tight-lipped tough guy, Eastwood portrays a man who makes his living by talking (a radio DJ), and instead of battling some formidable male equal, he squares off against little Jessica Walter.

          The story is basically the same as that of Fatal Attraction, which was made more than a decade later—a man has a fling with the wrong woman, and then pays for his misdeed when he tries to dump her and thereby invokes her violent wrath. Eastwood plays Dave, a radio personality based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the quaint Northern California enclave that, incidentally, has been Eastwood’s offscreen home base for decades. One of Dave’s regular callers is a sexy-voiced mystery lady who asks him to play the smoky jazz standard “Misty” every night. The woman, Evelyn (Walter), soon appears in Dave’s real life and offers herself to him. Yet while Dave made it clear all he wanted was a one-night stand, Evelyn has different ideas. She becomes obsessed, intruding into every aspect of Dave’s life, making public scenes that hurt his career, and eventually threatening the real object of Dave’s affection, his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills).

          Play Misty for Me is a straightforward stalker picture, and the best parts of the movie illustrate how easily Dave falls into Evelyn’s trap and how impossible it is for him to extricate himself. He’s complicit in his own crisis. Screenwriters Jo Heims and Dean Riesner carefully foreshadow Evelyn’s dark side even in the character’s first scenes, and the script emphasizes that the only thing preventing Dave from sensing Evelyn’s danger is his arrogance. Well, that and lust, since Dave is a swinger whose relationship with Tobie is forever being tested by his extracurricular conquests. Like Fatal Attraction, this movie is a warning to men who play the field—as Dave’s fellow DJ, Al (James McEachin), says with a wink, “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”

          The last hour of the picture pays off the premise nicely, with several vivid scenes of suspense and violence, and Walter devours her role, creating a memorable movie monster grounded in believable, if deranged, emotions. Many of Eastwood’s directorial tropes manifested in this first effort, notably dark lighting and languid pacing, and the only major flaw with Play Misty for Me is that it sometimes meanders—for instance, was the indulgently long scene at the jazz festival really necessary? Still, this is well-executed popcorn entertainment, and it’s touching that Eastwood cast his directorial mentor, Don Siegel, in a minor recurring role as Dave’s favorite bartender.

Play Misty for Me: GROOVY

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

          Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy screen persona had solidified by the mid-’70s, as had his stringent control over projects—even when he wasn’t also directing, Eastwood ensured that his films were brand-consistent and supremely efficient. Given this closely held authority, it’s interesting to look at the handful of ’70s pictures for which Eastwood gave other filmmakers more latitude than usual. A good case in point is Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the directorial debut of Michael Cimino, whose subsequent films—notably The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980)—are known for their epic scale. Obviously, “epic” wasn’t going to fly with Eastwood, so Cimino, who also write Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, confined his ambitions to a tight storyline, although Cimino’s taste for big-canvas cinema is evident in the John Ford-style panoramic shots of various Montana locations.

          A straightforward crime picture with an undercurrent of fatalism, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot begins when exuberant young car thief Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) encounters a country preacher (Eastwood) who is inexplicably running from a maniac with a machine pistol. After helping the preacher escape, Lightfoot learns his new pal is actually the infamous bank robber known as “Thunderbolt” because he once used a cannon to bust into a vault. The man trying to kill Thunderbolt is a former accomplice, Leary (George Kennedy), who mistakenly believes Thunderbolt stole the haul from a heist they committed together. Eventually, Leary catches up with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and accepts Thunderbolt’s story that the money was lost, so the three men—together with Leary’s nervous wingman, Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), conspire to rob another bank and replace the missing cash. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t precisely a buddy movie or a heist picture, nor is it merely a car-chase flick or a thriller. Rather, it’s an ingenious amalgam of all of those genres, a sampler plate of manly-man tropes.

          Individualization is generally kept to a minimum so characters can function as archetypes, although Brudges’ buoyant performance distinguishes Lightfoot from everyone else—he’s brash and irresponsible, yet so full of life he makes even the worst situations feel like exciting adventures. Cimino avoids romanticizing the lifestyles of his characters, accentuating the collateral damage criminals inflict and illustrating the cost criminals pay for making dangerous choices. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is so offbeat and so well made, from the atmospheric production values to the painterly cinematography, that it’s tempting to read deeper meanings into the material, especially when Bridges’ vibrant acting raises Eastwood’s game in their shared scenes. Alas, this is really just an elevated brand of escapism, which means its virtues are, on close inspection, quite modest. That said, the picture is highly rewarding for viewers with appropriately calibrated expectations.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: GROOVY

High Plains Drifter (1973)

          After making a strong directorial debut with 1971’s Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood decided to put his stamp on the genre that originally made him famous as an actor: the Western. Yet instead of simply churning out a moralistic shoot-’em-up in the John Wayne mold, Eastwood made High Plains Drifter, a creepy revenge tale so heavily allegorical it might actually be a ghost story. Considering this was only his second directing job, Eastwood’s artistic ambition is impressive. Yet while the movie is brisk, nasty, and stylish, it has major narrative weaknesses. One big problem is that the protagonist is a cipher—we never learn the character’s background, name, or true motivation—and another is the way the movie fails to clarify whether onscreen events are happening in “reality” or taking place in a supernatural netherworld. Eastwood gets points for attacking heavy themes, but his inability to bring everything together is disappointing.

          The story begins when a character referred to as the Stranger (Eastwood) rides into the lakeside frontier town of Lago. He gets into a hassle with a group of thugs, and then kills all of them with his frightening gunplay. Impressed, the townspeople ask the Stranger to plan an ambush: Three murderers who have just been released from prison are pledged to ravage Lago, so the townspeople are terrified. Courtesy of (confusing) exposition and flashbacks, we learn that some time ago, the murderers slaughtered Lago’s do-gooder sheriff while the townspeople watched—and that the tragedy stemmed from a conspiracy related to the mine from which the town derives its livelihood. Furthermore, Eastwood’s character may or may not actually be the sheriff’s reincarnation and/or spirit—never mind the fact that no one recognizes him.

          Anyway, the Stranger is given carte-blanche throughout Lago, so he installs a local dwarf (Billy Curtis) as the new mayor/sheriff, seizes a local tramp (Marianna Hill) as his personal concubine, and makes the townspeople paint all of Lago’s buildings red so the town looks like a vision of hell. This sets the stage for a showdown with the murderers, although the townspeople start to wonder if their “savior” is worse than the killers he’s been hired to fight.

          The gist of the piece is painfully obvious right from the beginning—the people of Lago are being punished for their sins—but the script, by Ernest Tidyman, muddies the narrative waters. The Stranger is a bloodthirsty, crude, sarcastic outlaw capable of violent sexual assaults, so it’s not as if he’s the personification of justice. Therefore, the movie has virtually no morality on display, making it difficult to care what happens to any of the film’s characters. And since the movie doesn’t compensate for this deficit by providing a tidy parable, what’s the point? Still, High Plains Drifter looks great, especially during the moody nighttime scenes, and Eastwood surrounds himself with interesting faces. Curtis stands out as the town’s perverse voice of conscience, and Eastwood favorite Geoffrey Lewis is effectively odious as the leader of the murderers.

High Plains Drifter: FUNKY

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

          With the possible exception of Dirty Harry (1971), the offbeat Western The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood’s best movie of the ’70s, and also one of the most textured films in his long career. Blending a sensitive approach to character with Eastwood’s signature meditations on violence—a unique combination that resulted from Eastwood’s fractious collaboration with co-screenwriter Philip Kaufman—the picture delivers the intense action fans expect from Eastwood Westerns, but also so much more. Based on a novel by Forrest Carter, the picture was written by Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, with Kaufman originally slated to direct. Alas, Eastwood, who was the film’s de facto executive producer (though not credited as such), got into a disagreement with Kaufman partway through filming and fired Kaufman, stepping into the director’s chair himself.

          Eastwood had already helmed four features, so he was well on his way to developing a recognizable style—deep shadows, long takes, quick-cut bursts of bloody violence. Yet while it’s possible to watch the film and make educated guesses about which bits remain from Kaufman’s tenure behind the camera, the blending of two sensibilities goes much deeper than that, since Kaufman wrote a script he intended to direct and Eastwood followed that script. In any event, fused authorship gives The Outlaw Josey Wales more tonal variety than one finds in Eastwood’s other ’70s Westerns, especially because so much screen time is devoted to presenting idiosyncratic supporting characters.

         The story begins when pro-union bandits led by the craven Terrill (Bill McKinney) murder the family of Missouri farmer Josey Wales (Eastwood) during the Civil War. Joining the Confederate cause to seek revenge, Wales annihilates several enemies but witnesses the treachery of Terrill’s commander, Captain Fletcher (John Vernon). Soon Wales becomes a fugitive, with Fletcher and Terrill his relentless pursuers. Wales embarks on a long journey through the South, inadvertently gathering a surrogate family of frontier stragglers while preparing for his inevitable confrontation with Terrill, and possibly a second showdown with Fletcher.

          As in many Eastwood pictures—notably Unforgiven (1991), which can be seen as a successor to Josey Wales—this picture investigates the question of whether a man can preserve his soul after succumbing to bloodlust. Wales is a decent, hard-working man when we meet him, but tragedy turns him into a ruthless killer. Then, once he’s out on the frontier, protecting and being protected by his oddball friends, he becomes something more than a vigilante; he’s a strange sort of gun-toting patriarch, struggling to claim high ground while mired in moral quicksand.

          Simply by dint of the nuanced script, Eastwood’s acting has a broader range of colors here than usual, and the way his performance is decorated with weird details—like spitting tobacco onto nearly every living thing that crosses his path—makes Wales as indelible an Eastwood characterization as Dirty Harry or the Man With No Name. McKinney and Vernon provide different colors of villainy, with the former essaying a violent zealot and the latter portraying a world-weary pragmatist capable of shocking ruthlessness. Reliable character actors including Matt Clark, Woodrow Parfrey, and John Quade populate the movie’s sweaty periphery. Yet it’s the actors playing members of Wales’ surrogate family who often command the most attention. Sondra Locke, appearing in the first of many films she did with Eastwood, lends fragile beauty that contrasts the ugliness of Wales’ world, while Chief Dan George is dry, funny, and wise as Lone Watie, an aging Cherokee Indian who joins Wales’ entourage.

          Holding the movie’s potentially disparate elements together is slick technical presentation, courtesy of cinematographer Bruce Surtees and composer Jerry Fielding (both frequent Eastwood collaborators) and others. From its unique spin on gunslinger mythology to its colorful use of vivid Western archetypes, The Outlaw Josey Wales feels consistently interesting, literary, and personal.

The Outlaw Josey Wales: RIGHT ON

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

          The final collaboration between director Don Siegel and his superstar protégé, Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz is a smart thriller about exactly what the title suggests—the only known successful escape from the titular prison, a fortress-like structure built on a small island in the San Francisco Bay. For three decades, from 1933 to 1963, “The Rock” was considered one of the most secure federal prisons in the U.S., and the real-life jailbreak that inspired this movie occurred in 1962, just one year prior to the prison’s closure. (J. Campbell Bruce wrote a nonfiction book about the incident shortly afterward, and screenwriter Richard Tuggle adapted the book.) Although Eastwood and Siegel reportedly had a tense relationship on the project—it’s rumored that Eastwood directed much of the picture because his aging friend was losing his touch—the film is as smooth as anything either man made during this era.

          Siegel’s storied efficiency is visible in the minimalistic storytelling, while Eastwood’s penchant for gloomy lighting and leisurely pacing adds a meditative quality. It helps, tremendously, that the material plays to the strengths of both men. Portraying a career criminal obsessed with breaking out of an “escape-proof” prison, Eastwood seethes as only he can, forming a community of like-minded inmates while enduring the cruel machinations of a nameless warden (Patrick McGoohan). Siegel meticulously depicts every step along the would-be escapees’ dangerous path, from carving a secret tunnel to preparing for a brazen leap into the choppy waters surrounding the prison. Some of the story mechanics feel like standard prison-picture stuff, like the development of a sympathetic geezer (Roberts Blossom) whom we can sense from his first appearance will not breathe free air, but the use of stock characters suits the milieu. Similarly, loading the cast with workaday character actors—Eastwood and McGoohan notwithstanding—helps accentuate the idea of prison as an equalizing environment.

          More than anything, however, Escape from Alcatraz works as a mood piece, building ambience and tension as we, the viewers, become more and more invested in seeing the “heroes” succeed. (Regular Eastwood collaborators including composer Jerry Fielding and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute immeasurably to the film’s menacing quality.) Escape from Alcatraz may not be about much, beyond the usual pap about man’s inhumanity to man and the sweet nectar of freedom, but it’s an offbeat action picture in that many of the thrills stem from characters scheming in private; rather than building toward confrontations, it’s a movie about characters avoiding confrontations.

Escape from Alcatraz: GROOVY

The Gauntlet (1977)

          A meat-and-potatoes action picture blending brutal violence and cynical humor, The Gauntlet is a lowbrow crowd-pleaser featuring elements that dominated direct0r-star Clint Eastwood’s outlet for years afterward: The acting is perfunctory, the camerawork is loose, the gunplay is expertly filmed, and the politics are militaristic. So, while The Gauntlet is highly entertaining, it’s also, arguably, the production with which Eastwood and his production team learned how to make movies on autopilot.

          In fact, the picture is so formulaic that it’s basically a Dirty Harry sequel without the brand name. As in the Dirty Harry pictures, Eastwood plays a rogue cop assigned to an impossible case—and as in the Dirty Harry pictures, Eastwood’s character becomes a target for cops and criminals alike, blasting his way to freedom with a pocket-sized cannon of a handgun. Virtually the only deviation from the Dirty Harry formula is that Eastwood’s character, policeman Ben Shockley, is an alcoholic bum rather than a respected badass.

          Therefore, when he’s assigned to escort prostitute Gus Mally (Sondra Locke) from Las Vegas to Phoenix, where she’s set to testify against mobsters, it’s seen as a nothing assignment for a nothing cop. However, criminals have Mally in their crosshairs, so Shockley realizes keeping her alive long enough to testify will be tough. Furthermore, Shockley gets framed for a crime by the corrupt cops on the mob’s payroll, meaning he must transport Mally across the Southwest with legions of gun-toting policemen in hot pursuit.

          During the movie’s most memorable scene, the duo hides in a small building that gets surrounded by an army of cops who open fire with so many guns that the building gets perforated until it crumbles to the ground; Eastwood and cameraman Rexford L. Metz have fun creating stylish shots of Mally and Shockley dodging beams of light as gunshots let the sun into their dark hiding place. The ability of these characters to survive impossible odds eliminates any possibility of narrative credibility, just like the trite banter between crusty cop Shockley and sassy prostitute Mally grates after a while. Eastwood’s strong-and-silent bit is just as entertaining as always, but Locke, costarring with then-real-life companion Eastwood for the second time, gives a shrill performance.

          Still, there’s no denying that Eastwood and his people know how to stage action, so The Gauntlet is filled with intense chases, shootouts, and stunts. After all, even if this picture represents the moment when Eastwood locked into a formula, there’s a reason why the formula scored at the box office time and again throughout the ’70s and ’80s.

The Gauntlet: FUNKY

The Eiger Sanction (1975)

          The mountain-climbing flick The Eiger Sanction is one of the silliest action movies Clint Eastwood ever made. Working outside his comfort zones of cowboy melodramas and urban crime thrillers, Eastwood plays a college professor (!) who moonlights as a hit man (!!) and must employ his mountain-climbing skills (!!!) to smoke out the identity of an elusive murderer (@#*#!!!!). Based on a novel by one-named ’70s escapist-fiction phenom Trevanian, The Eiger Sanction features a plot so contrived it would give Alistair MacLean pause. Every single element of the film, from the ridiculous lengths government agents take to whack one inconsequential killer to the presence of an albino control freak running a vicious black-ops organization, stretches credibility way beyond the breaking point.

          The Eiger Sanction is also one of those movies in which so much time is spent preparing for the big event (in this case, a treacherous climb up a sheer mountain face) that the purpose of the mission gets hopelessly obscured. If several mountain climbers are suspects, for instance, why not simply capture and interrogate all of them instead of wasting so much time? Furthermore, the idea that reluctant hired gun Dr. Jonathan Hemlock (Eastwood) is the only man for the job is laughable: He’s expensive, famous (and therefore ill-suited to undercover work), insubordinate, and unpredictable, yet somehow hiring him is deemed pragmatic. Still, movies like The Eiger Sanction ask viewers to turn off their brains in order to groove on visceral thrills, and with Eastwood pulling double-duty as director and star, thrills are never in short supply.

          Eastwood stages exciting chase scenes in European cities, enjoyable training montages in which his character is coaxed and teased by a shapely coach (Brenda Venus), and, of course, death-defying climbing scenes set on the rocky surfaces of snowy mountains. Eastwood’s efforts to conjure crowd-pleasing nonsense are aided by the work of composer John Williams, who contributes rousing adventure music, and by the enthusiastic performances of supporting players Jack Cassidy (as a queeny international operative), Thayer David (as the aforementioned albino), George Kennedy (as Eastwood’s friend/trainer), and Vonetta McGee (as Eastwood’s duplicitous love interest). So, even though The Eiger Sanction is preposterously overlong at 123 minutes, and for that matter simply preposterous, at least it’s energetic and good-looking.

The Eiger Sanction: FUNKY

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

          Picking apart the logic of the offbeat Western action-comedy Two Mules for Sister Sara would take little effort, but since the picture never aspires to be anything except Hollywood hogwash, quibbling seems pointless. Clint Eastwood plays Hogan, a gunslinger wandering through Mexico. He stumbles across a nun named Sara (Shirley MacLaine), who’s being assaulted by a gang of thugs. After rescuing her, Hogan is conflicted by his attraction to the woman and his respect for her vows, so he reluctantly agrees to escort her to safety. He soon discovers, however, that she’s part of a guerilla force rebelling against French occupation of the region, so Hogan is inadvertently drawn into dangerous political intrigue. Thus begins a contrived but enjoyable odyssey involving an impregnable fortress, superstitious Indians, violent rebels, and various other action-flick tropes.

          The joke of the movie is that Sara uses her wiles to manipulate Hogan even though she’s betrothed to Jesus, so there’s a bickering It Happened One Night quality to Eastwood’s interactions with MacLaine. Is their dynamic believable? Not even for a minute, but who cares? Eastwood is churlish and rugged, while MacLaine is bawdy and sexy, so they mesh well. In fact, watching Two Mules for Sister Sara reveals what a shame it was that Eastwood mostly avoided going head-to-head with strong women in later movies; it wasn’t until he costarred with Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County a quarter-century later that Eastwood tackled another role this purely romantic in nature.

          As written by the manly-man duo of Budd Boetticher and Albert Maltz, and as directed by Eastwood’s mentor in no-nonsense cinema, Don Siegel, Two Mules for Sister Sara delivers the popcorn-movie goods from start to finish, even though it’s bit fleshier than Siegel’s usual efforts, sprawling over 116 minutes. (The extra screen time comes, in part, from an overly long and overly violent climax.) Nonetheless, the picture’s problems related to logic and tone don’t change the fact that Two Mules for Sister Sara is solid escapist entertainment. For instance, why question the way MacLaine complements her nun’s habit with thick mascara when she looks so great that it’s easy to see how she wraps Eastwood around her rosary-clenching fingers?

Two Mules for Sister Sara: FUNKY

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

          One of those lowbrow hits whose immense popularity defies all reasonable explanation, the Clint Eastwood action-comedy Every Which Way But Loose feels like a bad country song come to life, with random gags about a rascally primate thrown in for good measure. Eastwood plays Philo, a truck driver who moonlights as a bare-knuckle brawler and happens to own a pet orangutan. When he falls for a flighty country singer (Sondra Locke) who skips out on him, Philo chases her from California to Colorado, picking up nasty pursuers along the way: a pair of bruiser cops who hold a grudge after Philo kicked their asses in a bar fight, and a gang of bikers whose members have been humiliated by Philo. The movie comprises a string of stupidly macho episodes, interspersed with charmless scenes of Eastwood romancing Locke, the pale blonde actress who was his paramour in several films (and his private life) from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s. Every Which Way But Loose also makes room for musical cameos by country singers including Charlie Rich and Mel Tillis, plus a grating supporting performance by Harold and Maude star Ruth Gordon, doing the potty-mouth shtick she contributed to a number of bad movies.

          Every Which Way But Loose drags on forever and can’t maintain a consistent tone, since some of the fighting bits are way too intense for lightweight escapist fare. However, the really confusing thing is that Every Which Way But Loose doesn’t feel like a bad movie. With several Eastwood regulars among the crew—and, more likely than not, Eastwood looking over nominal director James Fargo’s shoulder—the picture has a degree of technical spit and polish its idiotic script simply doesn’t deserve. Still, audiences loved the damn thing enough to warrant a more-of-the-same sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980). On a happier note, when Eastwood pal Burt Reynolds heard about Every Which Way But Loose, he told his friend to expect payback for infringing into Reynolds’ domain of brawling comedy; true to his word, Reynolds retaliated by making Sharky’s Machine (1981), a terrific cop thriller in the vein of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry flicks.

Every Which Way But Loose: LAME

Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

          Entertaining despite an overlong running time and some dubious stylistic flourishes, Kelly’s Heroes is one of the myriad smartass World War II romps that followed in the wake of The Dirty Dozen (1967). Like the earlier picture, Kelly’s Heroes assembles an unlikely crew for an impossible task, all the while mixing anti-Establishment sentiment and broad characterizations in order to present everyman soldiers looking out for themselves instead of buying into the mission that brought them to the battlefield. Yet while The Dirty Dozen cleverly depicted criminals becoming soldiers, Kelly’s Heroes more crudely depicts soldiers becoming criminals; it’s a heist picture in war-movie clothing.

          Clint Eastwood stars as Private Kelly, an enlisted man with an attitude problem who accidentally discovers the hiding place for a cache of Nazi gold worth millions. He convinces his gruff NCO, “Big Joe” (Telly Savalas), to lead an excursion behind enemy lines so they can rip off the loot, and their crew soon expands to include “Crapgame” (Don Rickles), a supply sergeant who outfits the crew with munitions and other gear, and “Oddball” (Donald Sutherland), a space-case longhair who happens to have three Sherman tanks under his command. Sutherland’s characterization is simultaneously the funniest thing in the movie and the hardest element to believe; bearded and, though this is never explicitly stated, apparently high as a kite throughout the story, he’s a ’60s stoner in a ’40s setting, so it’s never clear, for instance, how he rose to the rank of sergeant.

          Yet logic isn’t really what makes this sort of movie work, because Kelly’s Heroes is a big, silly adventure story about entertaining characters blowing stuff up, cracking wise, and pulling one over on the man. The production values are impressive—the picture was shot in Yugoslavia, where a wealth of WWII-vintage gear was available for filming—and everyone delivers the requisite goods in terms of onscreen charisma. Eastwood is sly and quiet, always one step ahead of everyone else; Savalas is a dese-dem-dose tough guy; Rickles does his insult-comic thing, bitching and sassing with every breath; and Caroll O’Connor, going way over the top, appears as a ridiculous general who mistakes Kelly’s mission for a nervy invasion. All of this goes down fairly smoothly in a guy-movie kind of way, though it doesn’t seem unreasonable to lament the lack of anything resembling substance in the movie’s 144 minutes.

Kelly’s Heroes: FUNKY



Breezy (1973)

          Clint Eastwood’s choice to direct this soft-spoken romantic drama was one of the first clues that he wanted his career to include more than just action pictures. Instead of the usual Eastwood tropes of cops and cowboys, the movie depicts May-December sparks between a teenaged hippy, Breezy (Kay Lenz), and her much-older Establishment paramour, Frank (William Holden). For viewers who can look beyond the skeeviness of a sexual relationship between a 19-year-old and a man three decades her senior, Breezy is pleasantly entertaining if a bit overlong and schematic. While Frank’s embarrassment at being perceived as a cradle-robber is one of several predictable plot complications, the intelligent script by Jo Heims tries to define the main characters as individuals instead of mere archetypes.

          Adding some much-needed edge, both characters acknowledge ulterior motives in the early days of the relationship, because Breezy needs a meal ticket and Frank’s excited by the prospect of a nubile partner. As her name suggests, Breezy is a breath of fresh air when she drifts into Frank’s life, because she’s as hopeful as he is cynical. Therefore it’s believable that their relationship falters whenever they venture into public—he lives by society’s rules, and she doesn’t acknowledge the existence of any rules at all. Holden, smartly cast because he was an aging matinee idol who could still believably appeal to a younger woman, delivers a characteristically professional performance; he hits all the right notes, but not with any extraordinary flair. Lenz is appealing, though she struggles with making her moon-eyed character seem like more than just a male fantasy, and there’s some irony in the fact that Lenz later found her groove portraying cynics.

          Employing long takes, gentle dissolves, and a few tastefully lyrical montage sequences, Eastwood shows his versatility by delivering the exact opposite of the stoic cinematic violence for which he was known at the time, so Breezy is most interesting as a transitional chapter in his titanic directing career: It’s the first movie that Eastwood directed without also appearing as an actor, notwithstanding a wordless blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. Yet Breezy also merits examination as an awkward attempt to grapple with the early-’70s generation gap. Though the picture cops out in the end, it captures some things quite well, like the portrayal of Frank’s buddy Bob (Roger C. Carmel), whose midlife-crisis lust for young flesh speaks to a deeper bewilderment about what happens when the promise of youth fades into painful abstraction.

Breezy: FUNKY

Joe Kidd (1972)

          Possibly Clint Eastwood’s least interesting Western, this threadbare action flick has an impressive pedigree—celebrated novelist Elmore Leonard wrote the screenplay, and macho-cinema veteran John Sturges, of The Magnificent Seven fame, directed. Despite the participation of these boldfaced names plus that of Robert Duvall, who plays the heavy, Joe Kidd tells a forgettable story unimaginatively, so it’s only watchable because of production values, star power, Lalo Schifrin’s assertive score, and Bruce Surtees’s robust cinematography. Also working in the movie’s favor is brevity, since Joe Kidd runs just 88 minutes. After a lugubrious first act, the story gets going when rapacious developer Frank Harlan (Duvall) hires former bounty hunter Joe Kidd (Eastwood) to track Mexican revolutionary Luis Chama (John Saxon), whose rabble-rousing has interfered with Harlan’s schemes. Beyond some minor drama involving Joe’s shifting allegiances, there’s not much more to the plot, so lots of screen time gets consumed by macho posturing and lengthy sequences of characters stalking each other. A probing exploration of frontier morality this is not. One can find glimmers of Leonard’s signature pulpy style in Kidd’s bitchy dialogue, but while the best Leonard-derived Westerns have rock-solid conceits (see both versions of 3:10 to Yuma), the storyline of Joe Kidd is leisurely and unfocused, with characterizations—usually a Leonard strength—given depressingly short shrift.

          The movie looks good enough with Surtees behind the lens, though it seems he was asked to light sets more brightly than he usually does and he’s hampered by Sturges’s stodgy compositions. As for the actors, Eastwood conjures a few mildly amusing tough-guy moments, for instance when his character casually sips beer while watching a shootout. Duvall does what he can with a role so trite and underwritten it would stifle any actor, though his trope of mispronuncing the name of Saxon’s character conveys an appropriate level of arrogance. The wildly miscast Saxon snarls lines through a silly Spanish accent, and he also fails to demonstrate the charisma one might expect from a grassroots leader—one imagines that Leonard envisioned a more nuanced portrayal. Adding minor colors to the movie’s canvas are Paul Koslo, Don Stroud, and James Wainwright, who play nasty hired guns. Anyway, while some of the shootouts in Joe Kidd are moderately entertaining, the fact that such incidental details as the use of unusual firearms and an appearance by Dick Van Patten as a hotel clerk stick in the memory more than the main narrative underscore why the watchword here is unremarkable.

Joe Kidd: FUNKY

Dirty Harry (1971) & Magnum Force (1973) & The Enforcer (1976)

          In the years following the Supreme Court’s landmark Miranda v. Arizona decision, which laid out the rights of persons arrested by police, an outcry rose from crime victims and others incensed by what they perceived as kid-gloves treatment given to accused criminals post-Miranda. Hollywood responded with films including Dirty Harry, a powerful action movie about a vigilante cop who personifies the “shoot first, ask questions later” ethos. Pacifists hate the very idea of this franchise, maligning Dirty Harry’s violent exploits as fascist pornography, but despite the diminishing sophistication of later entries in the series, the first movie (and to a lesser degree the second) are as thought-provoking as they are exciting. Segueing gracefully from his triumphs in a string of European-made Westerns, ascendant star Clint Eastwood is unforgettable as San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan, because his mixture of seething anger and swaggering confidence perfectly illustrates the film’s concept of an archaic gunslinger adrift in morally ambiguous modern times.
          Eastwood’s mentor, B-movie specialist Don Siegel, directs the first film, Dirty Harry, with his signature efficiency, briskly and brutally dramatizing Callahan’s pursuit of the “Scorpio Killer” (Andrew Robinson) as well as the policeman’s clashes with bosses including a politically opportunistic mayor (John Vernon). The legendary “Do I feel lucky?” scene is a perfect introduction to Callahan’s perverse attitude, and Eastwood and Siegel really soar in the climax of the film, when they reveal how little separates Callahan and the killer, ethically speaking; though the fine line between cops and crooks later became a cinematic cliché, it was edgy stuff in 1971. So whether it’s regarded as a social statement or just a crackerjack thriller, Dirty Harry hits its target.
          The first sequel, Magnum Force, features a clever script by John Milius, with Callahan facing off against a cadre of trigger-happy beat cops who make him seem tame by comparison. Milius’ right-wing militarism sets a provocative tone for the movie, forcing viewers to identify the lesser of two evils in a charged battle between anarchistic forces. Hal Holbrook makes a great foil for Eastwood, his chatty exasperation countering the star’s tight-lipped stoicism, and fun supporting players including Tim Matheson, Mitchell Ryan, and David Soul add macho nuances to the guns-a-blazin’ thrills. (Watch for Three’s Company starlet Suzanne Somers in a salacious bit part.)
          The last of the ’70s Dirty Harry flicks, The Enforcer, gets into gimmicky terrain by pairing Callahan with his worst nightmare, a female partner, but the producers wisely cast brash everywoman Tyne Daly (later of Cagney & Lacey fame) as the partner; since she’s not Callahan’s “type,” it’s believable that even with his Neanderthal worldview, he develops grudging respect for her once she holds her own in a series of chases and shootouts. The movie makes terrific use of Alcatraz as a location for the finale, but a bland villain and an undercooked plot make the film a comedown. After The Enforcer, Eastwood wisely took a break from the Dirty Harry character, returning several years later for a pair of uninspired ’80s sequels.

Dirty Harry: RIGHT ON

Magnum Force: GROOVY

The Enforcer: GROOVY