Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel

Author:Richard Schickel [Schickel, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-78813-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

On July 23, 1971, not long after Dirty Harry wrapped, Judy Fayard’s piece ran in Life—as a cover story, no less, the first major American magazine to accord Clint this distinction. The cover line may have been snide (“The world’s favorite movie star is—no kidding—Clint Eastwood”) and its rationale may have been dubious—Fayard cited a poll of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and his number-two standing in the latest Quigley poll of exhibitors (behind Paul Newman, but ahead of John Wayne and Steve McQueen)—but it was the act, not the facts, that was important. By risking that week’s all-important newsstand sales on his image, the fading but still-powerful magazine altered perceptions of him. Up to now, given the odd route he had followed to stardom, the media had treated him as a curiosity, very possibly a short-lived one. Life, in contrast, was suggesting that an authentic force, perhaps even a new sociocultural icon with whom everyone was now obliged to reckon seriously, had been born.

The solid box-office performance that fall of Play Misty for Me tended to confirm that impression, and, in Clint’s mind, so did Warner’s hopeful attentiveness as Dirty Harry moved through postproduction. Its executives drew director and star into their marketing plans, treating them not as wayward “talent,” but as intelligent adults with something to contribute to this effort. Says Clint: “They called us over and said, ‘We want to show you guys what we got, kind of get your enthusiasm,’ and they had this whole layout of stuff, how to release it and promote it, and it seemed so progressive compared to what they were doing at Universal.” To this day he keeps on his office wall one of the posters that was eventually rejected. The headline reads: “Dirty Harry and the Homicidal Maniac. Harry’s the One with the Badge.”

Clint began thinking that perhaps Warners was the place for him. He also began thinking Dirty Harry “could be a successful movie.” Even so, he was quite unprepared for the public’s response to it, let alone the critical controversy it engendered. By the time it was ready for a sneak preview at Graumann’s Chinese, Clint was on location near Bishop, California, shooting Joe Kidd. He remembers a phone report from someone at the studio telling him “the place just came unglued; people were going crazy,” as the audience cheered Harry on.

Similar responses greeted the picture as it went into release during the 1971 Christmas season, where it far outstripped the other holiday releases, eventually returning some $22 million to the studio in domestic theatrical rentals alone. Critical reaction was much more measured. Roger Greenspun in The New York Times found it “a sad and perhaps inevitable step downward” from Siegel’s previous police dramas, with Harry an “iron-jawed self-parody” of the dutifulness Siegel had previously celebrated. He noted, but brushed off, Harry’s carelessness about civil liberties, insisting instead that it was the film’s failures of “credibility” that fatally flawed it. Others linked the film to a readily discernible

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