American Rebel (17 page)

But before they can, McBurney dies of a heart attack (although they think at first they have indeed killed him). Afterward they erect a shrine to him to acknowledge how he has changed all of their lives forever.

The film’s metaphor for devilish (or Christian) imperfection, McBurney’s broken leg, is double-edged, symbolizing at once the inability (or unwillingness) to be free, physical injury (crucifixion), and moral defection (less than whole). The film’s very loose retelling of the Christ tale—a man walks among us, is killed, is worshipped and immortalized by the very group that planned to kill him—is also one of the devil, of sexual passion, physical imprisonment, and moral domination.

However one chooses to read this unusual and absorbing film,
The Beguiled
is about a social rebel and an unrepentant ladies’ man who becomes both a hero and a burden to those who care most for him. In that sense the film was his most autobiographical to date.

Even before Clint returned from Yugoslavia, the studio had assigned Julian Blaustein to produce, a decision that Clint, through Malpaso, meant to do something about. He had had enough of assigned studio “help,” and just before production began on
The Beguiled
, Malpaso boldly dismissed Blaustein. Clint went to Don Siegel to convince him to direct, and Maltz to work on the script. Universal did nothing to stop any of these moves.

But, despite several rewrites, Maltz could not get down on paper what Clint was looking for. He wanted, more than anything, to have
McBurney’s dark side emphasized and, in turn, the girls’ as well. He was interested in shadows, not in sunlight, a choice that would make an even stronger contrast between the Sex Machine with No Name and the women who are both enthralled by and eventually driven to kill him. He envisioned the school as a metaphor for the dark chambers of the soul.

When Clint and Siegel could not make Maltz go as dark or as deep as they wanted, they enlisted the services of Irene Kamp, who had helped create the moody, jazz-framed script for Martin Ritt’s 1961
Paris Blues
, a film that held strong appeal for Clint. He loved the subtle way the script moved, and the open and frank adult sexuality among its four leads.

Kamp worked closely with Clint, adding nuance upon nuance to the script to make it more adult, more complex, and ultimately more personal. Still not completely satisfied, however, Clint turned to Claude Traverse, one of Siegel’s longtime associates. In the end, Clint may have felt a man had to do the final draft. Maltz, meanwhile, so objected to anyone else working over his script that he took his name off it, using “John B. Sherry” as his on-screen credit (Irene Camp, as “Grimes Grice,” shared the official on-screen credit).

Shooting on
The Beguiled
began in early April 1971, on location on a plantation in Baton Rouge, where the original novel was set. Among Clint’s hand-chosen cast of female schoolgirls was Jo Ann Harris, who quickly became his newest on-set romance. Neither one made any secret of their affair (which would burn brightly and then die out by the last day of production), and filming progressed smoothly and without incident. Then Lang, who had not seen the finished script before the film started production, loudly protested that he hated the ending. For the first time Clint Eastwood would die on-screen, an ending that was radically different from the novel and that made an already dark film that much darker. But, Clint (via Malpaso) by contract had the last word, and the ending stayed the way he wanted it.

The film opened late spring and bombed at the box office, grossing less than $1 million in its initial domestic release. Journalist James Bacon complained that Universal’s advertising campaign had totally missed the meaning of the film, promoting it “as another spaghetti Western.” In the few interviews he gave to promote it, Clint mused
that his character’s death was the problem, or that blind faith was a subject too dark for most audiences.

Reflecting on the film’s failure, Don Siegel had this to say:

Clint’s intention to make more personal movies that somehow also appealed to the mainstream was proving harder than he had thought. To interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky, Clint explained why he had wanted to make the movie and to shape it the way he had:

There was some talk of submitting
The Beguiled
to Cannes, but Lang objected, and the film disappeared quietly and has been seen only rarely ever since. If it really was a career misstep for Clint, it was a good one, at least as far as he was concerned.

Although about to turn forty-one, an age considered “old” for a leading man, or at least “older” by Hollywood’s standards, Clint felt younger than ever. With this, his first big-time flop coming as it did so soon after the death of Irving Leonard, he decided the time was finally right to take complete creative control of his career. He intended to direct the next film himself, to ensure that anything that went up on the screen looked exactly the way it did in his head.

Dirty Harry,
1971

T
he last deal Irving Leonard put together before he died was the one that meant the most to Clint. Leonard had set up
Play Misty for Me
so that Clint would be able, for the first time, to direct as well as star in and produce the film, all under the auspices of Malpaso.
^*
Timing has a way of accentuating changes—in this instance the departure of Don Siegel, who had become his unofficial creative partner and, more than Sergio Leone, his directorial mentor. It may be seen as the teacher giving way to the student, or the father stepping back to allow the son to take over the family business. The father-son aspect had a deep resonance, as Clint lost not only both Leonard and Siegel but his real father as well.

After moving from the Container Corporation to Georgia-Pacific, Clinton Eastwood Sr. had retired from the box and paper business and moved to Pebble Beach. While getting dressed for a day on the golf course, he dropped dead of a heart attack in July 1970. He was sixty-four years old.

Clint was, of course, shaken up by the death, but after a short and intense period of private mourning, he resumed preproduction on his new film. Familiarly reticent, Clint would be able to talk easily about the loss of his father only years later, expressing both regret and caution: “My father died very suddenly at sixty-three
[sic]
. Just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I’d ask myself, why didn’t I ask him to play golf more? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? But when
you’re off trying to get the brass ring, you orget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just forge on.”

He told himself that if he didn’t want to wind up like his father, he had better start cleaning up his own act—give up the smoking and cut back on the drinking. Exercise and health food were already part of his daily regimen, but several cold beers interspersed throughout the day remained and still are an essential part of his daily intake.

At the same time he promoted Bob Daley to full producer for Malpaso. One of Daley’s first assignments under his expanded duties was to pull together the rest of the preproduction
of Play Misty for Me
.

The original screenplay had been written by Jo Heims, another longtime female friend of Clint’s from his days as a contract player at Universal, when she was one of the studio’s many legal secretaries. Like everyone else in Hollywood, she really had two professions, her own and the movies. All the while she was working her day job, she spent her nights writing screenplays. When she finally had what she considered a strong sixty-page treatment for a film, she took it to everyone she knew who might be able to help get it made. She got it into Clint’s hands while he was still shooting
The Beguiled
. He promised Heims he would read it. He did and liked the story about a disk jockey who has a one-night stand with a caller to his late-night radio request show, who turns violent when she refuses to accept that it’s over between them.

Clint turned the sixty pages over to Dean Riesner and asked him to work his magic and turn them into a shooting script that, since Malpaso was producing, could be made quickly and cheaply. As he later recalled, “It was just an ideal little project. The only downside to it, it wasn’t an action-adventure film in the true sense of the word … but you have to keep breaking barriers.”

Under the provisions of the deal he had made with Universal, Malpaso was going to have to underwrite the film. That meant a lot of nearby location shooting, so Clint chose to film it in Carmel, closer to home than any previous movie he had made; it meant few if any special effects or outdoor setups, and no large and expensive cast.

None of that especially mattered to Clint. The only thing that did now was the chance to direct. As Clint would later remember,

The key to making the film work, Clint felt, was the casting of Evelyn, the murderously obsessed fan. The actress would have to make him believable as the victim of her sexual advances and violent abuse—not an easy thing to do. He saw and tested numerous actresses before catching Jessica Walter’s performance in a screening of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 film version of Mary McCarthy’s controversial novel,
The Group
. Despite the studio’s stubborn insistence that he cast a star in the role, something he never liked to do—Clint was not a big sharer in that way, as the roster of his costars reveals—he felt Walter was a perfect Evelyn and gave the part to her. She was attractive without being “bombshell,” good-looking enough to do the nude-scene montage but not overly voluptuous (which would get in the way of her neediness), yet explosive and capable of projecting the kind of craziness the script required.