American Rebel (36 page)

Two more years would pass before Clint made another movie.

Clint’s long overdue double Oscar win in 1992 for
Unforgiven:
Best Picture and Best Director
.

I
n April 1990 Locke’s movie,
Impulse
, opened to fairly decent reviews, including a coveted thumbs-up from the influential TV and print critics Siskel and Ebert, which usually helped boost a film’s box office. Nevertheless, according to Locke, “Warner barely released the film. And on opening weekend in the few theaters in Los Angeles, the ad in the newspaper didn’t even use the Siskel and Ebert review.” Even worse for Locke, a few weeks after the movie’s spring release, Lucy Fisher told her that, regrettably, Warner was dropping the other three projects she had in various stages of development with them.

As emotionally undone as Locke was during this time, and as fiercely as she pointed the finger at Clint for everything that had gone wrong in her life, she had no legitimate reason to believe that he had had anything to do with Warner’s decision. Perhaps Warner dumped Locke because she had violated the industry-wide dictum against washing dirty laundry in public; if so, it was presumably a business decision, pure and simple. Business in Hollywood is a constant tightrope walk, attempting to balance art and commerce. In the years between her Academy Award nomination and
Impulse
, Locke’s career had gone nowhere. She had not become a big star, and her films were never going to produce the kind of revenue Clint Eastwood’s films had. In other words, she was expendable.

But, according to Locke, all of it was personal and connected, and all of it was due to Clint’s furious need for vengeance. In her memoir she quotes Clint telling a friend, “Does she want to become a director or become Michelle Marvin? I’ll drag her ass through court, until there’s nothing left. I’ll never settle with her; I paid her for jobs in movies, now she wants to be paid for love too?”

The postdeposition litigation was going nowhere, and meanwhile, Locke was racking up huge bills. Hoping to cut through it all, she
simply picked up the phone and called Clint, asking if they could meet. Clint agreed, and the next day she came over to his office. She insists that Clint then started to flirt with her. In response, she asked him to drop his lawsuit. He exploded, insisting that she had started it, that if now she was desperate or broke, she should get a job as a waitress, and that he would accept a rapprochement, in which she also accepted returning to him as his lover, only “with no strings attached.”
^*

Locke then wrote to Clint, hoping that the printed word would prevent his emotions from interfering with her attempt to settle. Clint’s written reply to Locke was short and impersonal: “I owe you nothing.”

    
H
oping to get a new start in Hollywood, Locke left the William Morris Agency and signed with agent David Gersh, who quickly got her a new deal at Orion Pictures for
Oh Baby
, a romantic comedy that she could easily direct.

She was all set to begin casting when she noticed a lump on her right breast. It proved malignant. That September of 1990, instead of beginning work on the new film, she entered the hospital for a double mastectomy.

In November, while she was still in the early stages of recuperation, producer Al Ruddy told her that he was willing to act as a go-between, to try to settle things between her and Clint before the start of the trial, scheduled for March 1991. Ruddy told her that Clint was willing to drop his lawsuit if she would drop hers; that Gordon could keep the house on Crescent Heights; and he would see to it that she got her development deals back at Warner. She would also receive $450,000 in cash if she gave up all future claims to Stradella Road and agreed never to sue him for anything again.

Locke was weary from her battles with Clint and her recent surgery; and her medical bills were piling up. Without thinking about why Clint would suddenly change his position and try to make peace, Locke accepted the offer.

    
I
t had taken two years to settle with Locke (and to settle another unrelated but nagging lawsuit that had erupted with a civilian over a car accident). Now Clint felt he was finally ready to make another movie, and he chose a western to do it with. It was a wise choice; westerns had always been good to him. He had, after all, begun his career with TV westerns and had made his big-screen breakthrough with westerns; now he would make his comeback in one, something called
Unforgiven
.

Clint had had the script under option for several years. Written by a relatively unknown screenwriter, it had stayed on the back burner until Clint could find someone other than himself who could better play the lead role (unlikely, as the part was perfectly suited for Clint), or (as he sometimes told interviewers after it opened, and which was far more likely) he felt he was old enough to credibly play the lead role. Even more revealing, perhaps, was what he told
Cahiers du cinéma
just before its European run:

Unforgiven
was the kind of story Clint could film in his sleep. Even before a single shot was filmed, he knew exactly how he wanted it to look.

    
O
riginally called
The Cut-Whore Killings
, the film’s name was later changed to
The William Munny Killings
. Neither title Clint
especially liked.
Unforgiven
was the brainchild of David Webb Peoples, a Berkeley English major who upon graduation worked as an editor in TV news, then moved on to documentary films. In 1981, with his wife, Janet, and Jon Else, he wrote and edited the documentary
The Day After Trinity
, about the development of the atomic bomb. Directed by Else, it was good enough to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

The film’s success sent Peoples searching his desk drawers for anything he had that was immediately salable. There he found the screenplay he had written five years before
The Day After Trinity, The Cut-Whore Killings
. At the time it had gone nowhere, but now he was able to get it optioned.

Each time the film’s option ran out, it got passed around for renewal. Eventually, via Megan Rose, it came to Clint, who read the script, liked it, and when it became available, bought it outright, and then put it in
his
drawer, waiting until the time felt right to make it.

It might very well have gotten made in 1985, as his elegiac summation and farewell to the genre that had launched his career, but then
Pale Rider had
come along and became that movie. Now, in search of something to push back the ever-louder industry rumors that he was washed up, Clint once more reached for his most dependable genre, the western, and produced, directed, and starred in
Unforgiven
. To ensure that the film was a big enough hit to return him to glory, he pulled out all the stops (or as many as he could bear without sending the budget skyrocketing).

In typical Clint fashion, the film was shot quickly and inexpensively, with very little done to the original script. According to Clint, “I started rewriting it and talked to David about it. I said I would like to do this, do that, write a couple of scenes … but the more I started fiddling with it, [the more I] realized I was disassembling a lot of blocks that were holding it together. I finally called him up one night and said, ‘Forget about all those rewrites I was talking about. I like it just the way it is.’”

Set in fictitious Big Whiskey, Wyoming, the film was shot in Calgary, Alberta, using the best talent in the business to bring the town and the movie to life. At the head of this list was Henry Bumstead, who had last worked for Clint twenty years earlier on
High Plains Drifter
and who was still one of Hollywood’s most sought-after production designers and art directors. Bumstead was probably best known to the
public for his work on Robert Mulligan’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962), for which he won an Oscar,
^*
and on Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1956) and
Vertigo
(1957).
^†

Mood was essential to
Unforgiven
, and Bumstead’s work proved a key ingredient to help visualize the feeling that the vengeful living walk among the living dead, waiting for their turn at mythic immortality. It took Bumstead only a month and a day to build the entire set, on which Clint wanted every scene filmed, including interiors, to give the film a stylistic cohesion no ordinary soundstage could match.

Also for
Unforgiven
, Clint chose to work with other big-name stars, something he rarely did on Malpaso films. Morgan Freeman played Ned Logan, Munny’s (Clint’s) former partner in crime who joins him one last time to collect the reward money posted by the town prostitutes, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher, another real-life girlfriend of Clint’s cast as a prostitute) for the capture of the men responsible for mutilation and murder of one of their own (Delilah, played by Anna Thomson), after Big Whiskey’s corrupt and bullying sheriff, the fascistic Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), let them go free. Several bounty-hunters are drawn to Big Whiskey hoping to collect the reward, including English Bob (Richard Harris) and his “biographer,” W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). The only lesser-known principal member of this cast besides Fisher was Jaimz Woolvett, who plays the Schofield Kid, a young gunslinger wannabe who longs to become the legend that Munny once was.

Several unexpected plot reversals give the film more irony and depth than any previous Clint Eastwood movie, while referencing many of them. Munny is a gunslinger of legendary proportions, who has renounced his murderous past and tried to make amends by going straight, marrying, having children, and raising pigs on a farm. Much of Munny’s character and action has been developed and performed before the film begins (not unlike Shane, the cinematic model for
Pale Rider’s
Preacher). Munny sets out to collect the reward with the same sense of mission that was suggested in the Leone trilogy. In
Unforgiven
it is as if the Man with No Name has returned to gunfighting, older, weary, and repentant, because he needs the money to raise his children after his wife has died, but also because that’s who he is, a gunfighter, a man whose destiny must be fulfilled. In that sense, the inevitable violent and horrific climax of
Unforgiven
, during which Munny avenges not just the murdered prostitute but also Ned Logan, killed by Daggett, is an elegant evocation of Heraclitus’ well-known dictum about character and fate being one and the same. It is Munny’s fate to kill Daggett because that is his character (much as it is Daggett’s fate to be killed because that is his). In
Unforgiven
, as in several of the Dirty Harry movies (perhaps most vividly
Magnum Force)
, justice may be evil but evil may be just.

And finally English Bob’s biographer, W. W. Beauchamp, as played by Saul Rubinek, is so corrupt, cowardly, self-promoting, and unconcerned about truth (and unable to stand up for it) that history itself becomes suspect. Legend blends into fact when, in a coda, the audience is left to wonder what really happened to Munny. In a sense, Beauchamp represents for Clint all writers (biographers included) and probably none more so than film critics, who too often play loose and easy with movies and set up straw heroes and villains to knock down in the name of their own brilliance.

Other strings that run through the film are racism, sexism, and vainglory, all of which come together to one incredible climax that resolves, as do all the great westerns—and in a larger metaphorical sense, all great movies—in one of the most powerful gunfights ever filmed.