American Rebel (13 page)

Clint’s American version of the Man with No Name in
Hang ‘Em High,
1968, the first film produced by his production company, Malpaso
.

C
lint’s vision of Malpaso as a self-contained, in-house movie production company that he owned and operated in the ser vice of his own career would take a little longer to realize than he had anticipated. Although his success in Hollywood via the Leone trilogy was impressive, he still did not have enough clout to be able to make his own movies independently, and he knew even less about running a company. For the time being, he would still have to rely totally upon studio financing and therefore remain in the service of others. He brought in Irving Leonard to be Malpaso’s president and watch the books and act as Clint’s personal business manager.

Clint used Leonard’s business savvy to flex Malpaso’s newborn muscles. The final decisions were mostly Clint’s, but they were shaped, refined, and delivered by Leonard. UA had initially wanted a name director for
Hang ‘Em High
to ensure that their investment would be well protected, shot in a commercial fashion, and kept within budget. Picker and Krim thought that either Robert Aldrich or John Sturges, both action directors, could do the job. Aldrich’s
The Dirty Dozen
(1967), an ensemble war movie heavy on testosterone, made him a top choice, as did Sturges’s
The Magnificent Seven
(1960).

Clint’s choice, however, was Ted Post. Post had directed only two theatrical features, both quickies that created not so much as a ripple of interest (or revenue),
^*
twenty-four
Rawhide
episodes, and dozens of other TV episodics and was, according to Clint’s way of thinking, especially good with dialogue, which most episodic television is. The primary difference between film and TV in the 1960s was that film was about what the audience saw and TV was about what it heard. Having never had much dialogue to deliver on either
Rawhide
or the Leone trilogy, Clint wanted someone who could help him handle the wordy
Hang Em High
script. The job went to Post.

Once Clint’s choice of director was on board, casting for the rest of the picture went relatively quickly. Post hired veteran character actor Pat Hingle, twitchy bad boy Bruce Dern (whom Clint had befriended in the years when they were both knocking about in Hollywood trying to find work), Ed Begley, always dependable to play a dangerous old loony, and Charles McGraw. Not coincidentally, all had appeared in episodes of
Rawhide
that Post had directed.

For the female lead, Clint wanted Inger Stevens. Women had not been much of a factor in the Leone trilogy, except to act as symbolic Madonnas in the films’ heavily suggestive faux religiosity.
Hang ‘Em High
emphasizes the Madonna theme via Rachel (Stevens), a local businesswoman who nurses Jed Cooper (Clint) back to health after he is nearly hanged in the opening scenes, a violent graphic depiction that recalled Leone.
^*
A good-time prostitute (played by Arlene Golonka) completes the triangle. According to Post, by the end of the film Golonka had become another notch on Clint’s real-life sexual gun belt: “She [Golonka] began to like him very much … then, very
very
much, et cetera. When we got to the love scene, they had already found their way together. At the end of the picture she came over to me and said, ‘Anytime you do a picture with Clint and there’s a part in it, call me.’” On the other hand Stevens, a tall, statuesque blonde with a sophisticated air, was not all that eager to work with Clint, regarding him as something of a philistine.

The film was shot relatively quickly and under budget—something that would become one of Malpaso’s trademarks inside the industry. It was filmed on location (something else that would also come to define a Malpaso picture) in the Las Cruces territory of New Mexico, with the interiors done at MGM studios in Culver City, California. The plot followed the Leone blueprint—for most of the film Clint pursues the men who tried to kill him and kills them instead in a spectacular shoot-out and, ironically, a suicide-by-hanging of the man who had tried to lynch Cooper, Captain Wilson (Begley).

Released in the summer of 1968, following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and during the self-destructive Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
Hang ‘Em High’s
star-powered, testosterone-driven blood and gore was a welcome dose of adolescent action escapism and cleaned up at the box office, grossing approximately $7 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, nearly a half-million more than
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Unlike some films that have to find an audience,
Hang ‘Em High
, made for approximately $1.5 million, took off from day one and became the biggest-grossing film in UA’s storied history, a tribute to the times and to Hollywood’s newest action star, Clint Eastwood. It went into profits almost immediately, and established both Clint and Malpaso as power players in the independent film scene of 1970s Hollywood.

Some critics bemoaned the fact that the Man with No Name had taken on a real identity, “Americanized” and softened for a broader appeal; but most believed that westerns were still best (meaning most popular) when made in Hollywood in English with gorgeous women and familiar-faced villains. Archer Winston, one of the more popular daily New York City print critics, called the film “a western of quality, courage, danger and excitement, which places itself squarely in the procession of old fashioned westerns made with the latest techniques.” Even the
New York Times
(Howard Thompson this time, in place of Crowther, who was on the way out after his grossly negative reading of Arthur Penn’s 1967
Bonnie and Clyde)
, which had had no use for the Leone-Eastwood movies, begrudgingly admitted that
“Hang Em High
has its moments.” But the
Times
still didn’t get Clint: “Most unfortunate of all, Mr. Eastwood, with his glum sincerity, isn’t much of an actor.”

But he was enough of a star to ensure that his films made money, and the bottom line was the only critique that mattered to Jennings Lang, the head of Universal. Following the completion
of Hang ‘Em High
, Lang offered Clint a cool $1 million to star in his first “big” (i.e., fully studio-financed) American major studio film, the fish-out-of-water
Coogan’s Bluff
, to be directed by Alex Segal, about an Arizona horseback deputy assigned to bring back a murderer hiding out in New York City.

Writer Herman Miller originally conceived the script as a two-hour pilot for Universal TV, but Lang ordered it revised for a big-screen feature and assigned the task to Jack Laird. As it happened, both Miller and Laird were
Rawhide
alumni.

Lang had convinced Hirshan that
Coogan’s Bluff was
the perfect vehicle for Clint’s next film, and when Clint signed on, pending script approval, Lang took Miller and Laird off the project—reportedly Clint did not like their version. They were replaced by a succession of writers assigned to tailor the script to Clint’s satisfaction.
^*
Once the script met with Clint’s approval, director Alex Segal was the next to go, replaced, at Clint’s insistence, by Don Siegel. How that happened is a story only Clint should tell:

More than a little skeptical, Clint agreed to screen a couple of Siegel’s films before setting about to find a real director. But Siegel’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) made him sit up and take notice. It was, as he later recalled, “one of the two or three finest B movies ever made and I realized that this was a man who could do an awful lot with very little.
Coogan’s Bluff
was a [relatively] modest-budget picture, but perhaps we could get a lot more on the screen for the dollar
and push the film on to a higher echelon of ‘look.’ So I said, ‘Yes, let’s go with Don Siegel.’”
^*

Siegel was something of an oddity in Hollywood. He had worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s making shorts, and on dozens of hit movies in various subdirectorial roles. After bouncing around from studio to studio, he landed at Universal, where he directed
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, one of the most spectacular and disturbing films of the 1950s, a classic sci-fi horror crossed with political paranoia that did to falling asleep what Hitchcock’s
Psycho
(1960) did to taking showers. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, it had perfectly captured the fear and loathing of an America that believed communism was to individuality what the pods were to human beings—irretrievably stealing one’s individuality. (Its stylistic use of stairs and heights, and the climactic relentless pursuit through the streets and into the hills, would be echoed in
Dirty Harry.)
Siegel’s next assignment at Universal was to direct
Baby Face Nelson
, which received terrific reviews but went nowhere. A series of ho-hum jobs followed, including
Spanish Affair
(1957),
The Line-Up
(1958; adapted from the hit TV series, its stark semidocumentary view of San Francisco police work and the pursuit of maniacal killer Eli Wallach foreshadow the action, mood, and pace of
Dirty Harry), The Gun Runners
(1958),
Hound-Dog Man
(1959),
Edge of Eternity
(1959),
Flaming Star
(1960),
Hell Is for Heroes
(1962),
Stranger on the Run
(1967—TV), and
Madigan
(1968). The thirty-eighth film (out of the fifty he would eventually make) was
Coogan’s Bluff
, the smash he had been looking for to return him to the spotlight. It was the first of a series of films that Clint and Siegel would make together.

Clint, the temperamental don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-unless-you-know-what-you’re-doing
star, and Don Siegel, the just-do-what-I-tell-you authoritarian, each marked his turf, and neither would let the other upset the power balance necessary to get this movie made.

Many on the set were surprised by how well they did get along, after a couple of early and minor bumps in the road. The key was mutual respect; Clint had been looking for someone (who spoke English) to show him how a movie was put together, and Siegel was more than happy to show Clint how the tricks were done.

Early on in the shoot, according to Clint,

Siegel agreed: “I thought we did very well.”

One aspect of the film that seems unmistakably Siegel is its heavy, at times obvious, metaphorical overlay. In the turbulent 1960s, when the country was divided by the unpopular and ultimately unwinnable war in Vietnam, uncomplicated heroes in popular movies were hard to find.
Coogan’s Bluff works
precisely because it depicts New York City as an urban, lawless “jungle,” commandeered by a tough yet ineffective cop. Detective Lieutenant McElroy was played by the always powerful Lee J. Cobb, an actor who couldn’t be more different onscreen from Clint. Cobb, heavyset, rough, sneering, and street-smart, was the polar opposite of the tall, lean country boy Clint. If the American psyche was desperate for someone to come in and end the Vietnam nightmare, it found its savior in the movies. Cobb is reminiscent of General Westmoreland, while Clint is the heroic rebel who comes in, cleans up the situation, and removes the bad guy. As Coogan, he was a Central Casting American hero who single-handedly captures the villain by waging a guerrilla-type war on “foreign” turf.

The sub-rosa Vietnam symbolism, overlaid with a good-guy-gets-bad-guy formula that is as old as film itself, was right in Siegel’s wheel-house. The alien fighting the bad guy was a kind of inversion of the
plot structure of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and became the cinematic glue that held the film’s spine in place.

Coogan’s Bluff
, which stretched Clint beyond his Man with No Name, was highly anticipated by audiences and critics alike. But reviews for the film were mixed at best; critics either loved or hated it. Judith Crist called the film, in
New York
magazine, “the worst happening of the year.” But Vincent Canby, the
New York Times’s
newest and most astute film critic (and its best overall writer yet about film), in a combination review and think piece, enthusiastically compared Clint to screen icon James Dean. Archer Winston, writing in the
New York Post
, noted Don Siegel’s directorial contribution but more or less ignored Clint, as did the weekly edition of
Variety
.

    
K
itty Jones, an agent during the late 1960s, was someone Clint had befriended in his early TV days and had remained a member of his inner circle of friends. She regularly held social salons in her apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard, which Clint often attended with a couple of his friends from the old studio days. A young starlet by the name of Jill Banner remembered those afternoons and, in particular, Clint’s presence at them: