American Rebel (24 page)

With Locke in
The Gauntlet,
1977

M
id-1975, several months before
The Outlaw Josey Wales
went into production, a script called
Moving Target
had come to Clint directly, via the Hog’s Breath Inn, written by two Oakland High School graduates. Clint read it, liked it, and turned it over to Bob Daley, to see if it was worth dipping into Malpaso’s discretionary fund to attach a professional screenwriter to develop it. Daley liked it as well and put in a call to Stirling Silliphant, an established Hollywood writer who in his salad days had written an episode
of Rawhide
, then moved up to the big screen with his script for Don Siegel’s 1958 post-noir big-screen
policier, The Lineup
, based on a popular TV show. A decade later he won an Oscar for the screenplay of Norman Jewison’s
In the Heat of the Night
(1967). Clint had always liked Silliphant personally as well as his abilities and agreed with Daley
that Moving Target
could be the next Dirty Harry film.

They sent Silliphant the script, then met to discuss it. Silliphant all but dismissed the writing, but liked the film’s central notion that Dirty Harry takes on a politically subversive terrorist organization, with an added twist that his partner is a woman. Clint liked what Silliphant had to say and green-lighted money to develop a script.

Not long after
Josey Wales
was released, Silliphant completed a first draft. Clint read it and wasn’t thrilled with it. It didn’t have the necessary delicate balance to keep Dirty Harry’s antisocial character intact while softening him enough to allow for a woman to “get” to him. Clint turned it over to Dean Riesner. Meanwhile Silliphant had suggested young and up-and-coming (and decidedly non-leading-ladylike) Tyne Daly for the partner role. She read it and turned it down, not once, not twice, but three times. Changes were made with each revision, but she felt that playing off a hard-ass like Harry would make her sympathetic character look like a total ditz, too laughable to be believable. Clint ordered several more rewrites, which he hated to do
because of the delays and the added expense and because he had always preferred first instincts over studied deliberation as the best method to make a Clint Eastwood movie. But this time the waiting paid off, and when Daly read a version of the screenplay that was acceptable to her, she agreed to play the role.

Still not ready to pick up the reins of directing again while producing and starring in the same film, Clint looked for someone who would not challenge his opinion, would not screw with themes, and would get the film done quickly and within budget. Looking to avoid a repetition of the Kaufman fiasco, Clint turned to James Fargo, his longtime assistant director, to helm what was now called
The Enforcer
.
^*

When Daly suggested the basic story line be changed so that her character and Harry did not have a romantic involvement, he quickly agreed. Clint never wanted romance in his films. He didn’t see himself as a leading man and believed his audiences would stay away from anything that even resembled a love story between the great loner and some moony costar. Dirty Harry in love? That would be like having a love interest in a film about the invasion of Normandy. It was an insane notion, and Clint was grateful that Daly recognized that.

    
P
roduction began on the streets of San Francisco during the summer of 1976. Until then Clint had been relatively absent from the proceedings. The reason was simple: he was by now hot and heavy with Sondra Locke, a fact later confirmed by several people who knew and/or worked with Clint at the time, including James Fargo.

The affair continued throughout the shooting of
The Enforcer
. Several times he stayed overnight at one of the several apartments he kept in San Francisco and Sausalito. So frequently was he away that his usual tight control and supervision were missing when it came time to edit the film. Two scenes simply didn’t match, no matter how cleverly Ferris Webster, who had a reputation for being able to fix anything, tried to put them together.

Fortunately for this action film, imperfect scene-matches did not matter all that much. In
The Enforcer
Callahan battles a group of terrorists
(who were not explicitly political; in 1970s action movies a
terrorist
was a conveniently generic “bad guy” more interested in getting an enormous amount of money than in overthrowing a government), with a female newbie of whom he reluctantly becomes fond. She is (naturally) killed, prompting Callahan, angrier than usual, to dispose of the terrorist group with a single blast from his giant bazooka, a phallic symbol that made Callahan’s hitherto-famous Magnum seem like a cap gun.

Although the film had some good moments—Tyne Daly would use it as a springboard for her own cops-and-robbers TV series,
Cagney & Lacey—
critics excoriated it. Not surprisingly, Kael with heightened glee noted that “Eastwood’s holy cool seems more aberrant than ever.”

Kael may have actually picked up on the one thing that other critics had chosen to ignore: Clint had grown weary of the role and perhaps of moviemaking in general. In retrospect, passing off directorial duties to Fargo may have been less an act of insecurity than of indifference. During the filming of
The Enforcer
the real action for Clint was more likely with Locke than on the set. The film looks more complacent than violent, more repetitious than revelatory, more tired than tough, and poorly edited, with a story that was strictly formulaic. Clint’s performance borders on the somnambulistic.

Typical of most critics was the always-too-easily-offended-by-genre-films Rex Reed. Writing in the
New York Daily News
, Reed said,
“The Enforcer
is the third or fourth Dirty Harry movie with Clint Eastwood blowing people’s heads off and creating the kind of havoc Batman would find juvenile … it all went out of style years ago with Clint Eastwood’s mumbling … save your money, it’ll be on TV by Easter.”

None of the film’s criticism was very objective, and none of it mattered. Audiences still couldn’t get enough of Clint as Dirty Harry. The movie grossed a phenomenal $60 million in its initial domestic release and doubled that overseas, making it Clint’s biggest moneymaker to date.

    
A
t Warner’s urging, a commercially reinvigorated Clint soon began thinking about his next movie, which the studio hoped would be ready in time as its big Christmas 1977 release.
^*
Both the studio and the star
wanted a follow-up blockbuster that would capitalize on the momentum of
The Enforcer
and equal or surpass its box-office take.
The Gauntlet
was the film they chose, in which Clint is a policeman, not Callahan, charged with delivering a prisoner from Los Angeles to Arizona. The prisoner is a prostitute, and a virtual gauntlet of “bad guys” wants to kill them both: Clint because, presumably, he is, well,
Clint
, the ultimate enforcer who will deliver her no matter what, and the prostitute because she is the key witness to a politically charged sex scandal and her arrival will bring down the corrupt forces in the Arizona police.

Clint’s character, Ben Shockley, is actually an inverted Callahan, a shaky cop trying to get over his problems with alcohol when Phoenix police commissioner Blakelock (William Prince) assigns him to extradite the prostitute, Gus Mally (Sondra Locke). When Shockley realizes the trail of incrimination leads directly back to Phoenix, and that neither he nor his prisoner is meant to live, he becomes especially enraged and plots a spectacular revenge-fueled scheme that takes him through the final police gauntlet and results in Blakelock’s death instead of his own.

For the part of Mally, Warner had wanted Barbra Streisand, but Clint, who as always had the final say in casting, said no; his films were usually filled with lesser names than himself. He told the studio that he felt Streisand was too old to play opposite him (she was thirty-five, he was forty-seven). Instead, he insisted that Locke play the part. Casting his new girlfriend put her once more into Clint’s dark spotlight; she had already been sexually assaulted in
The Outlaw Josey Wales
before being rescued by Clint, and now in
The Gauntlet
she was to undergo a brutal near-rape, only to be rescued again by her knight in tarnished armor.

Warner, to say the least, was not thrilled. The studio had earmarked $5 million for production, making it a very expensive project, and it wanted a double-barreled, name-above-the-title star to decorate marquees across the country. It had already paid $200,000 for the script by Dennis Shryack and Michael Butler—they were very hot due to their much-buzzed-about script for Elliot Silverstein’s as-yet-unreleased
The Car
. And it had paid fifteen points of the net and another $100,000 for the future novelization rights (something that was then a very popular source of ancillary income). When Clint was informed of the terms Warner had agreed to get Shryack and Butler,
he was not happy.
^*
Clint, who through Malpaso was a partner in the deal, never paid much for scripts and
never
offered points as an inducement. Besides, he was always more interested in story than in dialogue, preferring to formulate a movie off a general plot idea and filling it in with as few words as possible.

Feeling perhaps that he had made enough of a concession by approving the writers, he stood firm on his decision to cast Locke instead of Streisand. Once Warner caved, principal shooting began in April 1977 on location in Nevada and Arizona.

The plot of
The Gauntlet
was leaner and more singular than usual. Neither Shryack nor Butler conceived its thundering, explosive violence—Clint had inserted it, and Warner happily encouraged it. As far as the studio was concerned, a Clint Eastwood movie could never have enough violence, sexual abuse of women, or raw brutality.

The resulting film was
Coogan’s Bluff meets Magnum Force
, minus the West Coast/East Coast trickery and the character of Dirty Harry. Ben Shockley’s frailty makes the story even more compelling, at least in theory, as he is sent, without knowing it, on a suicide mission. The set-piece of the film is the physical gauntlet that Shockley and Mally must pass through while driving a bus, attended by the entire Phoenix police force. At this point the film turns surreal but gains no potentially redemptive transcendence. The attack on the bus loses all sense of drama once it becomes obvious that shooting out its tires would stop it dead in its tracks. And the ending is even more absurd; once Shockley has delivered his prisoner and killed all his attackers, no one wants her or knows what to do with her. Presumably the two of them take another bus out of town and live happily ever after.

Despite its ridiculous plot and cartoonish denouement, Clint’s genre-driven star power was enough to make the film a bona fide box-office hit. As always, the negative criticism did not matter. Judith Crist, writing in the
New York Post
, summed up her opinion in five words:
“The Gauntlet
is the pits.” Vincent Canby, in the
Times
, didn’t like it either but at least acknowledged the film’s “Eastwood” touch.

The Gauntlet
grossed more than $54 million in its initial domestic Christmastime release and would top the $100 million mark by the time it finished its worldwide theatrical run.

    
A
s if to somehow compensate for all the private time he was spending with Locke, Clint made his home life with Maggie unusually public. For the first time in years he invited reporters to Carmel to witness for themselves how happy he was, what a normal married man he was, away from Hollywood.

Every magazine jumped at the chance to interview the elusive Clint, but if they were looking for anything candid or spontaneous, they didn’t get it. Then in the midst of all this publicity-spinning, the February 13, 1978, issue
of People
magazine “scooped” everyone with a cover shot of Clint and
—Sondra Locke
. No one missed it, including Maggie, who was rightly infuriated.

Maggie had tolerated a lot during their long marriage. She had looked the other way during all of Clint’s extramarital affairs. She had even strained her neck looking to the opposite side of the room when Locke showed up at several parties that the Eastwoods had recently attended. But the cover of
People
was too much, even for her. Public flaunting was the one thing Clint had never before done, allowing Maggie to maintain her public dignity. The week the cover story appeared in
People
, Maggie hired a lawyer and sought a legal separation. After much discussion, Clint persuaded her to take a Hawaiian vacation with him to see if there was any way they could save their marriage.