American Rebel (16 page)
Authors: Marc Eliot
To replace Taylor, Universal chose Shirley MacLaine, a Broadway dancer who had become a glittering movie star after her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Trouble with Harry
(1955). Now that she had just finished making
Sweet Charity
at Universal for Bob Fosse, the studio, believing that was going to be huge, pushed for her to be in the picture. Clint, Rackin, and Siegel all agreed, and MacLaine was in.
“There was no question that Shirley was a fine actress with a great sense of humor,” Siegel later recalled.
But her skin was fair, her face—the map of Ireland. She most likely would look ridiculous if she played a Mexican nun. Nevertheless, Shirley was assigned to the picture … naturally the script had to be rewritten to fit her appearance … After working with Marty and Clint on the script, I made a startling discovery. Budd Boetticher, in addition to writing the story, had also written the script. He was a well-known director and a good friend of mine … I asked him why he wasn’t considered to be the director, and he claimed that Marty never gave him a straight answer. He needed money, so he sold his story and script to Marty, who took the property to Universal, got their okay, and hired Albert Maltz to write another script. I felt funny about being his director. Budd laughed and told me that everything was settled with Marty long before I appeared on the scene. We remained good friends.
As shot by Siegel, the film resembled nothing so much as the Man with No Name trilogy cut with the moral high ground of
Coogan’s Bluff
. Siegel deepened Clint’s familiar cigar-chomping character (here
called Hogan), contemporized and Americanized his feelings toward women, expanding his need for self-redemption by rescuing them. What had been a one-line backstory in the Leone films now became the main plot in
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, which couldn’t have pleased Clint more.
The setting of the film is mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, during the Juarista rebellion to oust Napoleon’s occupying French army. A plan is in the works to attack a French army post in Chihuahua. Hogan (Clint) is an American mercenary (as was the Man with No Name) who comes upon a group of outlaws about to rape a woman (MacLaine). In a quick but fierce gun battle (like the opening sequence in
A Fistful of Dollars)
an unshaven Hogan, smoking a cigar butt and wearing an approximation of the Man with No Name’s iconic poncho, kills the men and agrees to help the woman to safety after he discovers she is a nun trying to escape the French who want to kill her for having aided the Juaristas. Along the way he discovers she is no ordinary nun. She swears, she drinks, she seems comfortable with her womanliness, and she uses all of her considerable charm to get him to help her sabotage a French supply train. Hogan is wounded during the attack, and Sara nurses him back to health. Then he discovers Sara is really a prostitute disguised as a nun. They fall in love, and when the mission is completed, this curious and mysterious couple ride off together, disappearing into the beautiful Mexican terrain.
The film was scored by Ennio Morricone, who had written the unforgettable scores for the Leone trilogy, further linking Hogan to the Man with No Name and making the film an informal kind of Americanized sequel. Said Clint:
I think [the Leone films] changed the style, the approach to Westerns [in Hollywood]. They “operacized” them, if there’s such a word. They made the violence and the shooting aspect a little more larger than life, and they had great music and new types of scores. I wasn’t involved in the music, but we used the same composer, Ennio Morricone, in
Sister Sara …
They were stories that hadn’t been used in other Westerns. They just had a look and a style that was a little different at the time: I don’t think any of them was a classic story—like [John Ford’s 1956]
The Searchers
or something like that—they were more fragmented,
episodic, following the central character through various little episodes … Sergio Leone felt that sound was very important, that a film has to have its own sound as well as its own look.
Clint’s intention was to develop the Siegel-Eastwood connection as an extension of the Leone-Eastwood one, to Americanize the spaghetti westerns and hopefully duplicate their phenomenal commercial success and restore Eastwood’s prime film persona as a soft-spoken, charming killer with a redemptive soul. Clint later claimed to have done his best acting to date in the film, especially in the scene where Sara removes the arrow from his shoulder. The sequence is done in medium close-up, and Clint had to play “drunk,” which Sara has gotten him, in order to extract the arrow, an unmistakably evocative scene. During it he softly sings a song, an unexpected choice that both quiets and deepens his character. Here the film defines itself as something other than a retroactively slick sequel; it reveals itself for what it really is, a love story. For Clint, this was a crucial step forward in his development as a romantic leading man whose box-office reach would take him beyond fans of action films and dopey musicals to include a wider audience.
Women.
O
nce
Two Mules for Sister Sara
was completed, Clint returned to Carmel and Maggie only long enough to repack his bags and take off again, this time to London and Yugoslavia. For the next eight months he would serve as one of the stars of MGM’s
The Warriors
, a film Clint was allowed to do because of his nonexclusive contract with Universal. The title was later changed to
Kelly’s Heroes
, and it was a satire protesting the Vietnam War. Robert Altman’s
M*A*S*H
(1970) had been the first anti-Vietnam film, set in Korea to ease the pain.
Kelly’s Heroes
was set even farther back, during World War II, making its satire even more striking (and safer), set against the most hallowed, uncriticized war in American history.
Clint agreed to make the movie for a number of reasons. Although he was a Nixon man, having voted for him in the explosive year of 1968, he rejected the president’s constant bombing of Vietnam as unnecessary, both politically and morally. In no way could Clint ever be described as a liberal, but neither was he ever a proselytizing
Republican. The best way of describing his politics would be “pragmatic independence.” By 1970, after seven years of a blistering war that was going nowhere, he, like many Americans on both sides of the political fence, was simply fed up with it. The script of
Kelly’s Heroes
(in which he plays the title role) brought just the right amount of cynicism to the whole affair.
Supporting him on-screen were Telly Savalas, who had made an impact a few years earlier as fellow inmate Feto Gomez in Burt Lancaster’s star-turning prison biopic, John Frankenheimer’s
Birdman of Alcatraz
(1962); insult-comic-with-a-heart-of-gold Don Rickles, who had appeared in Robert Wise’s
Run Silent Run Deep
(1958, in support of Clark Gable), Robert Mulligan’s
The Rat Race
(1960), and a host of less memorable TV appearances before breaking into live late-night television on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
in the vicious but lovable stand-up-comic persona that finally made him a star; Donald Sutherland, coming off his portrayal of Hawkeye in
M*A*S*H;
and Carroll O’Connor, who later that year would find his best role as the bigoted but somehow lovable Archie Bunker in TV’s
All in the Family
. All these supporting players here planted the seeds of their coming personae (and Rickles the elements of the “wise guy” that he never fully realized on film) that helped focus the attention on Clint’s lead.
He really wanted Don Siegel to direct, so much so that he had signed on to the film because Siegel had agreed to do it. But at the last minute Siegel had to pull out because of postproduction editing problems with
Two Mules for Sister Sara—
he and Rackin clashed over the editing. The picture was offered instead to Brian Hutton, with whom Clint had last worked on
Where Eagles Dare
. Although his aesthetic side may have hesitated to go with him, Clint’s practical side knew that Hutton’s films made money, and he approved his being assigned to the picture.
But the addition of Hutton and the subtraction of Siegel upset the directorial skill needed to maintain the balance between satire and “clever caper.” Under Hutton, the film focused far more on the blocks of gold bullion than on the bombs and bureaucracy.
In the end,
Kelly’s Heroes
looked more bloated than big, more bulky than expansive; the complicated location shoot went on for what felt like forever to Clint, although by all accounts the on-set chemistry was great. According to Rickles, Clint was easy and fun to work with:
I worked on
Kelly’s Heroes
, with Clint Eastwood. They told me the shoot would take three weeks. It took six months. I also had a problem with the food. Everything was swimming in oil. Some of us became track stars as we broke the sound barrier to the bathroom. Bottom line, though, was that the cast and I became buddies. “You’d be great, Clint,” I told Eastwood, “if you’d ever learned to talk normal and stop whispering.” Clint gave me that Eastwood look and whispered something I couldn’t understand.
After nearly eight months of shooting and postproduction in London, Clint was obliged to do some additional promotion for
Paint Your Wagon
and to log some pieces for the still-unreleased (and still unfinished)
Two Mules for Sister Sara
. When he saw the final cut
of Kelly’s Heroes
, he was particularly unhappy with something he had missed, a late-in-the-film parody of the climax
of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, reprised here with Clint, Savalas, and Sutherland. It confirmed for Clint how far off the film had gone, and he attributed it to the loss of Siegel as its director: “It was [originally] a very fine anti-militaristic script, one that said some important things about the war,” Clint said later, “about this propensity that man has to destroy himself.”
In the editing, the scenes that put the debate in philosophical terms were cut and they kept adding action scenes. When it was finished, the picture had lost its soul. If action and reflection had been better balanced, it would have reached a much broader audience. I don’t know if the studio exercised pressure on the director or if it was the director who lost his vision along the way, but I know that the picture would have been far superior if there hadn’t been this attempt to satisfy action fans at any cost. And it would have been just as spectacular and attractive. It’s not an accident that some action movies work and others don’t.
Kelly’s Heroes
actually opened June 23, 1970, just one week after
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, which got much better reviews. None was more laudatory than the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s
, which declared that
“Two Mules for Sister Sara
is a solidly entertaining film that provides Clint Eastwood with his best, most substantial role to date; in it he is far better than he has ever been. In director Don Siegel,
Eastwood has found what John Wayne found in John Ford and what Gary Cooper found in Frank Capra.”
Both films ran simultaneously during the summer, something Clint wasn’t happy about. He felt he was competing with himself and he wasn’t entirely wrong. “Why should I open across the street from myself?” he complained to Jim Aubrey, the head of MGM, with whom Clint had butted heads before, at CBS. Nonetheless, both films proved successful at the box office, and with
Paint Your Wagon
still in theaters, three Clint Eastwood films were playing at the same time. Ironically,
Paint Your Wagon
proved the biggest hit of the three, its $7 million initial gross nearly doubling
Two Mules for Sister Sara’s
$4.7 million and well ahead
of Kelly’s Heroes’s
$5.2 million.
(Two Mules
was ultimately more successful than
Kelly’s
, as its ratio of cost-to-gross was much less.)
Clint should have been thrilled by his triple-header summer, with across-the-board hits and theaters all over the world filled with his image, but none of the three even came close to what he wanted to do in pictures, what he thought he could be, and what he thought he could earn. Instead, each had moved him closer to the ordinary mainstream and the bottom line of popular movie appeal—and taken his edge away.
He was still looking for the film that could cut him loose. He thought he found such a project in a script that Jennings Lang had sent to him during the making of
Kelly’s Heroes
. Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan and adapted into a screenplay by Albert Maltz (the onetime blacklisted, reformed alcoholic writer who had done the same for
Two Mules for Sister Sara)
, the script for
The Beguiled
was impossible for Clint to forget. He read it in a single night and had anticipated yet another grizzled-hero western, but early in realized that it was much more. Perplexed, he asked Don Siegel to read it and give him his opinion. Siegel said he loved it, and on that assessment Clint decided to do it.
The story tells of John McBurney (Clint), a badly wounded Union soldier who is discovered by a ten-year-old girl named Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin) while she is picking mushrooms near the broken-down school-house where she lives. She brings him back to the house, where headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) offers him shelter. Eventually several students, including Amy and Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), realize that if they let him go, he will certainly be captured
and killed by the Rebel army. So to save his life, they make him a prisoner, confining him to the schoolhouse. At first McBurney does not realize what is happening, distracted by the apparently easy seductive powers he enjoys over many of the seemingly willing schoolgirls and their sexually repressed headmistress.
All of this takes a (literal) bad turn when Edwina sees him making love to one of the girls and vengefully pushes him down a long flight of stairs. The fall reinjures his bad leg, and the headmistress decides it must be amputated. When McBurney awakens and realizes his leg is missing, he angrily accuses all the girls of doing it to keep him their prisoner. Eventually, though, he becomes the sexual master of them all, picking and choosing each of the girls as he pleases, using and abusing them until they plot to kill him with poison mushrooms.
