The Eiger Sanction

The Zurich sequence (a round trip from assassination to revenge) is based on The Big Sleep. It describes the study of art as the acquirement and defense of the past.

In Arizona, the second stage involves the reduction of æstheticism and the beginning of activity. Eastwood and George Kennedy are represented as climbing one of the pinnacles of Ford Country, and finally are seen at the top from a helicopter shot. The theme is "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan."

The Eiger introduces Keatsian "negative capability" to the formula, and culminates (by way of the metaphor) in student and master as critical equals.

In short, nothing less than a film about art, artists and artistry. Naturally, none of the critics had a clue. But as I think Flaubert says, the top of the heap is a great place to spit down from.

The richness and complexity of the construction rivals anything by Bunuel. Dmytryk accomplished the same thing on a sound stage, but Eastwood compounds the difficulties by filming on the mountainside.

The decisive work of accomplished style by this director.

The Gauntlet

Sufficient unto the story are all the precedents which need not be cited. Discernible nonetheless is Blaise Cendrars' "Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France", about a train trip to Siberia with a prostitootsie.

The supremely beautiful style is strictly from Breezy or is a bright blue clear distillate of The Eiger Sanction's planked-down next-to-hand realism. You can't do more in the way of scope than The Eiger Sanction, unless it's Firefox or Space Cowboys.

The subjective handle has two motives: the supplanting of reality in the observable cosmos, as you might say, with a comfortable if absurdly static (in this context) borrowing of the ideal works of Roy Lichtenstein, and the liquidation of the residue still clinging "like primordial mud" to the assassination in Dallas, by an application of the paranoid-critical method to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

It opens at daybreak in Phoenix. Shockley enters the scene from a film noir bar and crosses the street to a late modern civic building, in front of which is his car. Jazz deplores his fate.
The house shootout inspired Hopscotch to a comical apotheosis. "God Makes House Calls", says a road sign.

The long sequence in the constable's car shows the technique. A master shot through the windshield features a black-bound ticketbook (with a blue and a yellow pen stuck in it) next to a large pink can of Tab forming a composition in the foreground, sitting on the dashboard. Close-ups of Eastwood and Bill McKinney abstract the background, but a further close-up of Locke in the back seat presses in to a trademark dissolution of the view out the rear window, which occurs nowhere else.

The night ambush immediately resumes the landscape feeling of Play Misty for Me in a few frames of fog and mountains, before setting up Bonnie and Clyde for the thematic resolution of the finale, which is surprising even though carefully prepared. "God gives Eternal Life", another road sign says.

Just before this, Roy Lichtenstein in excelsis at the phone booth, panning out to Ruscha.

The motorcycle gang puts the camera behind Eastwood's pistol out of not so much Spellbound as Lichtenstein. The furious helicopter pursuit is Lichtenstein ending in a suggestion by Baldessari.

The cattle car shows a knowledge of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, and is a rare tour de force as the second biker is hurled past a camera on the train onto the ground, perfectly matched with a zoom-out beside the track. A last shot from that vantage point gives satori to the open-slatted car, lens out to a long shot.

Nu dans le bain... Locke's feet, left arm, sharp fingernails...

Duane Hanson's sculptures people the bus. Given internal armor, it inspires The A-Team to derring-do.

Eastwood's boss is a hireling of the mob. Discussions are held on the subject of public assassination on a public thoroughfare by police officers in the light of day, marvelously. Squad cars are sent out. In a high long shot, you see Bressonian passersby walking along the same street.

The great finale is set downtown. Now, the master of this is Cassavetes, and the hallmark is Minnie and Moskowitz. Eastwood tunes up as Hingle steps on the bus, under a sign advising patrons that some law or other "prohibits operation of this bus while anyone is standing in front of the line," with another sign in the distance over his shoulder reading "Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home". Into the vortex, past another sign: "First National Bank-Give Us a Chance", and it's James Cagney running the gauntlet at the end of Blood on the Sun, a final homage to Bonnie and Clyde with an excoriating twist, after torrential reference to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch, before a last stupefying citation from Frank Capra.

There is perhaps another allusion, to The Fighting Seabees, which is directly quoted in Heartbreak Ridge.

Only The Parallax View and The Conversation exhibit so consciously an elucubration of modern art.

Honkytonk Man

A surprising, ingenious film, dilapidated, charming, etc. It is devoted to a major retrospective of the life or works of a fictional musician, a man who plays guitar and sings (Eastwood's impressionism) and fills in piano at a blues bar if called upon. An invaluable personage, bumping up against the strictures of a non-imaginary world somewhat, and fizzling out in a blaze of minor glory.

A sort of tragic companion to Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, the same idea, to find the musician in the music by isolating him. The technique is a period application of The Eiger Sanction (or White Hunter, Black Heart), startling compositions utilizing wide-screen and focus, and a settled approach to moviemaking in the most varied style.

It opens with a decisive element from Bound for Glory, and twice early on alludes to the first frames of The Third Man. The manner of presentation is critical: these are Chinatown's Okies, not Ford's. In town, Eastwood finds the local folks at the end of Deliverance.

His singing, which has a dramatic value toward the end, is the whiskey tenor of a jazz musician.

Various picaresque adventures gradually coalesce into The Reivers, and after still more, one-half of the equation has been stated. The rest, surprisingly, is the bitter truth about art on the receiving end. The allusions are to Keats, who was contemned and tubercular, and Whistler, who went to London and found the Royal Academy painting with treacle.

The ending is taken from The Third Man.

A restatement of High Plains Drifter from the outlines of Shane.

To the extent that Pale Rider is a remake or restatement and refinement of Shane, it benefits the time by clarifying the issue.

George Stevens' film was still able to elicit an immediate response. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought it a masterpiece and said so.

However, in the early years of the management revolution, it began to be recalled with a kind of hollow irony, which Crowther himself foretold, as Master de Wilde calls to Shane receding in the distance.

The tooling up is Biblical, drawn as a choice between an earthly lord and a divine one. At the critical juncture the preacher puts on the whole armor of God.

De Tocqueville saw a great threat to American democracy in the feudal tendencies of the corporation. Most writers are impressed by his foreseeing of America and Russia as rivals, but some of his other observations are just as good.

The equilibration of all the elements of the story, fixed within Eastwood's style, precisely answers the mythic original with a plain-spoken variant.

Heartbreak Ridge

A subtle operation, largely derived from Jack Webb, divined along the lines of the Grenada campaign, from the point of view of a Marine gunnery sergeant. The surety of this position establishes the precise vortex of the comedy.

In the first place, Eastwood is able to draw a clinically fine portrait of a drill instructor as a sort of Baudelairean albatross, not very good out of his element but nonpareil in it (Eastwood's acting in this role is remarkable, a variant of Webb's D.I. carefully modeled and finished).
Taking the squad into Grenada is forthright satire of the finest, ideal sort, because it isn't satire at all, it's a direct rendering of the events polished to the exactitude of the Marine higher-up who settles the rivalry between the gunny sergeant and the supply officer. Nothing's out of place in this portrait, or anywhere else in the film (with its Battle of Anghiari war game), and so it almost imperceptibly registers Frost's lines:

The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminished thing.

White Hunter, Black Heart

A carefully cultivated work of art, with a bit of what Orson Welles would call "sidearm snookery." The nature of the mummery calls for a background theme slowly filtered through the foreground. It explodes in the sublime and terrible catastrophe to lay bare the theme, which is the wishful thinking of Eliot ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") vis-à-vis the artist.

The successive stages of the argument, which is specifically formulated around the film director in a roman à clef, depict him wresting the apparatus from external control, escaping from its bonds by a device from Nemerov ("So with the poet and the secret wish"), entering upon The Conquest of the Irrational, and finally submitting to humility.

These are the necessary and bitter steps. A film about filmmaking, like 8½ or Hollywood Ending.

The opening nightmare pays homage to Hitchcock and J. Lee Thompson, and states the theme.

The treatment of this prelude is conventional to the point of exasperation, and is therefore ironically placed in stylistic counterpoise to the surreal precision of the rest, which is a virtuosic synthesis of countless films (among them Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, High Noon, and Freebie and the Bean) in a running patchwork or a system of flourishes, as when Hi Diddle Diddle is leisurely invoked to cap the joke about the rookie's father buying protection for him.

The film begins with a tour de force: a car theft ring returning luxury models to a factory trailer, busted and pursued in a shower of sparks along the Harbor Freeway.

This gang is itself the high-priced spread, lunching at the rich young rookie's favorite restaurant. The underside of this noonday veneer is an unremitting spiritual vision of darkness in which the mind is overwhelmed.

There follows the twofold indoctrination of the untrained disciple and the incomplete master. The structure is remarkable for establishing a variation or variations on a theme with a complete finish closing and advancing the series.

In short, the material is treated with artistic exactitude not to exhaustion but to fruition. Eastwood's skill is quite evident in the flying gag between buildings with a burning background, as in Firefox.

This all works like one of Hitchcock's storyboarded gags, with each and every idea popping up like a light bulb. The free-floating tenor of Eastwood's style is adapted to a finely-modulated "bundle of discrete images," nowhere more evident than in the scene where a gangster with a police badge is playing up to the rookie's wife in the very home where the rookie's nightmare has him before a police board accusing him of having killed his brother (and so wearing a badge under false pretenses).

None of this is ever explicitly stated, so that the film hews close to the surface at all times, as closely as possible, stretching the point for affability and to get a taut laugh.

The technique is very dapper. As the Bullitt chase on the LAX runways bursts into The Killing, Eastwood interjects a POV of two million dollars lying on the tarmac.

The texts at the beginning and the end are presumably written by W.W. Beauchamp. The first movement lasts fifteen minutes and culminates in the image of the "cut whore." Thirty-five minutes in, English Bob brings on the train and the entire mechanism is working. There is a momentary homage to Death Wish.

One-Eyed Jacks (as well as The Rifleman) has its place in the scheme of things. "He's my biographer," says the Duke (or the Duck), and Eastwood went on Charlie Rose's show afterward with a biographer of his own.

"Whore's gold" buys the vengeance for a whore's grievance.

The debilitating effect of memory in Firefox, which is built into the apparatus, is assigned to an aria here. A measure of Welles' Touch of Evil occurs, and there is a startling effect in the drawings of the two "wanted" cowboys, which don't ring true at first but have a poetic justice all their own.

The expulsion and return theme is simply stated. The effect of this bit of dialogue-KID: They had it coming. WILLIAM: We've all got it coming, kid. -is Hamlet modified by Frost.

There is a subtle homage paid to Cat Ballou. Before Little Bill's demise, there's a flash in Gene Hackman's performance that makes a second or two of film worth the famous fight scene in Torn Curtain.

The ending resolves a lot of pussyfooting around True Grit's grand experiment, which is to represent the West as a state of mind reflected in language. It also pays tribute to The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, achieving a kind of apotheosis.

The rare alchemy of Peckinpah's editing in The Wild Bunch (not the gunfights but the rest of it) is perhaps consciously reflected here with two cameras.

Considerations of art, the more tangible side of White Hunter, Black Heart. This is significantly a co-production of Amblin and Malpaso (Kathleen Kennedy and Clint Eastwood are the producers). Baudelaire and Hawthorne meet in the film, whose secondary theme was stated in J. Lee Thompson's St. Ives, the equivalence of film and dreams.

The central situation figures in The 39 Steps. Eastwood displays the large farmhouse kitchen with a corner shot. In the prelude/interlude/postlude, Spielberg's dim suburbia is gradually permeated with sunlight and birds. "Casta diva" is borrowed from Malle's Atlantic City. Meryl Streep models her performance on the great Anna Magnani for various reasons.

Eastwood opens up in the pickup-truck scene (with a "floating" camera). "You just got off the train because it was pretty," says Francesca, "without knowing anyone there?"

His approach to the covered bridges is a cinematographic study, and also an adequate representation of a photographic session outdoors, with birdsong, etc.

Kincaid washing up might reflect John Sturges' The Capture; his gorilla story is part of a tribute to Woody Allen. There is a subtle emulation of Paul Newman's direction. "Ancient Evenings" and W.B. Yeats co-exist, as in Norman Mailer's novel. "Le Vin des Artistes" is transposed at first by a careless observer: "He's getting her drunk, that's what happened. Maybe he forced her, that's why she couldn't tell us." The confrontation is explicitly stated: "the American family ethic... seems to have hypnotized the country."

Nabokov expresses a novelist's wish for an art of painting capable of rendering a landscape reflected "mimetically" in a parked car. There's a Nabokovian awareness of cars as small enclosures. The abstract quality of the dialogue is coped with by Streep with an Italian accent (which gives rise to further developments, and complements the sculptural objectivity of the style); Eastwood finds a natural formality: "This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime." A famous scene from The Glass Menagerie is quoted.

A particularly fine night exterior at the bridge has the immediate registration of most of the backgrounds, with the inset quality of some of them (a close-up of Streep getting her picture taken shows their two trucks seen in the distance across the bridge; the family returns home and walks across the yard revealing an unused set of swings behind them); the lighting of this shot brings to mind the garage scene in Hollow Triumph (The Scar).

Eastwood makes use of Orson Welles' discovery in The Magnificent Ambersons that storefront windows are a reflective source of material. A very complicated effect is initiated by Streep's crestfallen look in the jazz club (out of Manhattan). A remarkable Steadicam shot moves from interior to exterior night seamlessly. Various films have a fleeting resemblance: D.O.A., Casablanca, Warren Beatty's Love Affair, The Year of Living Dangerously, Lolita, Anna Karenina, etc.

"Whatever it is that makes an artist look like an artist to the world," says Clint Eastwood as Kincaid, "is just a feature I don't have."

"That's what an artist does best," i.e., provide illumination, says Francesca about Kincaid, who earlier protests "I'm not an artist-that's the curse of being too well-adjusted ...too normal." The final shot expresses, by way of Byron, a conclusion like that of Wake of the Red Witch, for example.

Eastwood is one of a number of directors like Bob Rafelson who have come to grips with natural lighting; his sound editing is also among the best.

There is prodigious stage management of objects at the end (bracelet, book, medallion, etc.) forming a fugal stretto of symbolic language meant to express the whole film in about a minute, or accomplish a resolution.

The refinements of exposition isolate Eastwood at his Tribune desk like a Zen island whilst the waves of so-called journalism ebb and flow around him.

He breezes through the zoo because it's a breeze of a zoo.

The equipoise of Eastwood and Isaiah Washington as Beachum is clearly stated. Beachum's daughter draws a picture with blue sky and yellow sun and bird markings like a last Van Gogh.

Porterhouse, the accountant, is a throwaway. As in Firefox, memory is a crippling burden. "Reporters with hunches," reflecting the new amateurism, are undesirable.

Eastwood's mistress reveals their affair to her non-smoking husband (his editor) by saving his cigarette butts in an ashtray by her bed. This is not shown but stated by the husband to Eastwood, a bit of Alpine comedy.

"Isolated" is the way one is said to feel, yet "the crooked shall be made straight." There is the cigarette gag from Meet John Doe.

Blood Work

Los Angeles is portrayed at the opening as a helicopter night exterior that develops into a crime scene. The evocations of L.A. (between Long Beach and Burbank) have a cumulative accuracy, and in one case lead to a joke: the factory scene is lightly sketched-in out of D.O.A. by way of Chinatown, and the receptionist is a Valley girl.

The structure draws in a tight rein of "connectedness", then dazzles in the manner of Seurat's portrait of Félix Fénéon, to give a complex picture of Los Angeles as a city dying of its own flakes.

The sound editing registers a great deal (which is to say, a useful amount) of subtlety.
The acting is excellent, an expression of its settings (in the lapidary sense), and rises to Eastwood's rendition in the last scenes of a man with a heart transplant, a fine coup.
In view of the immediate critical response, there is a prophetic touch in the killer's identification with the name of Eastwood's boat (The Following Sea), and thus with hangers-on of the type satirized in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories.

The ending suggests The Martian Chronicles as an ultimate provenance.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002