But I've always thought that Siegel insulted his "Dirty Harry" fan base by so soon making a movie where we were asked to root for a bank robber who, indirectly or not, led a gang who killed cops. This may have killed "Charley Varrick" at the box office. Or helped kill it.
ecarle, your theory is inventive, but I'm not sure about it. First, most of the masses who flocked to
Dirty Harry probably weren't aware of the director. Second, Eastwood played career criminals in such seventies movies as
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and
Escape from Alcatraz (under Siegel's direction), and both of those films were sizeable hits. Eastwood also played a rapist in
High Plains Drifter not too long after
Dirty Harry, and that film proved to be one of the most commercially successful Westerns of the decade. Moreover, I don't think that the attraction of
Dirty Harry had much to do with notions of the law and the police (there's no explicit dedication, either), bur rather an individual's frustrations and his sense of independent justice. In a way,
Charley Varrick is broadly similar. Also, Eastwood kills cops in his 1973
Dirty Harry follow-up,
Magnum Force, and although they're bad cops, they are men in uniform.
Magnum Force, as it turned out, surpassed
Dirty Harry's grosses. And in the late sixties, cop-killing
Bonnie and Clyde had been a similarly huge hit.
I'd say that
Charley Varrick failed because it was a quirky, quiet film (at once tight and bemused in tone), its advertising was probably poor, and Matthau could not approach Eastwood for star power. As a result, it slipped through the cracks. Universal president Lew Wasserman's title change from the strikingly declarative
The Last of the Independents to the ambiguously bland
Charley Varrick also didn't help matters.
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ecarle
19 years ago
ecarle, your theory is inventive, but I'm not sure about it.
--
Well, we try.
--- First, most of the masses who flocked to Dirty Harry probably weren't aware of the director.
--
Agreed. I've posted elsewhere on writer Joe Queenan's article about theater-goers knowing movie directors; they don't.
-- Second, Eastwood played career criminals in such seventies movies as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Escape from Alcatraz (under Siegel's direction), and both of those films were sizeable hits. Eastwood also played a rapist in High Plains Drifter not too long after Dirty Harry, and that film proved to be one of the most commercially successful Westerns of the decade.
--
Yes, but I'm speaking here to SIEGEL -- who followed "Dirty Harry" (whose opening salute to fallen police officers probably put a few leftists on edge) with this ode to a bank robber. I remember that I noticed the contrast. Of course, I'm just one person.
Clint Eastwood probably trumped a lot of assumptions regarding "what people could play." Pauline Kael despised him, among other reasons, for playing guys who couldn't or wouldn't love women or relate to other people or society. Funny thing: Kael was pointing out exactly part of Eastwood's allure. He was a very successful "selfish loner" who meted out rough justice enough for us to like him -- and OCCASIONALLY warmed to other people (like Jeff Bridges in "Thunderolt and Lightfoot" or the dwarf in "High Plains Drifter.")
---
Moreover, I don't think that the attraction of Dirty Harry had much to do with notions of the law and the police (there's no explicit dedication, either), bur rather an individual's frustrations and his sense of independent justice. In a way, Charley Varrick is broadly similar.
--
As are many Don Siegel movies. I am thinking of "The Killers" (1964) in which hit man Lee Marvin rather bizarrely seeks justice for the man (John Cassavetes) he has just killed on contract. Cassavetes didn't care about dying; Marvin had to find out why -- and indirectly avenge the man he was hired to kill.
--
Also, Eastwood kills cops in his 1973 Dirty Harry follow-up, Magnum Force, and although they're bad cops, they are men in uniform. Magnum Force, as it turned out, surpassed Dirty Harry's grosses. And in the late sixties, cop-killing Bonnie and Clyde had been a similarly huge hit.
--
Well, those were bad cops in "Magnum Force." (ANOTHER Eastwood-hating female critic, Judith Crist, wrote, "Harry kills the death squad cops -- evidently because they forgot to check with him first.") And Bonnie and Clyde weren't quite heroes -- a lot of audience members enjoyed seeing them get killed at the end for their cop-killing ways.
--
I'd say that Charley Varrick failed because it was a quirky, quiet film (at once tight and bemused in tone), its advertising was probably poor, and Matthau could not approach Eastwood for star power. As a result, it slipped through the cracks. Universal president Lew Wasserman's title change from the strikingly declarative The Last of the Independents to the ambiguously bland Charley Varrick also didn't help matters.
--
All true. I've read the part was offered to Eastwood first, though I can't imagine him in such a non-physical role (Eastwood wouldn't RUN from Joe Don Baker -- he'd fight him.) We Walter Matthau fans were smaller in number, but we enjoyed seeing Matthau act serious for the first time in a long time. Matthau offered an alternate fantasy figure to "Supertough Clint": the "regular guy" -- like us -- who could somehow outsmart tougher men (and bed a gorgeous woman, which was a bit of a stretch.)
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joekiddlouischama
19 years ago
Yes, but I'm speaking here to SIEGEL -- who followed "Dirty Harry" (whose opening salute to fallen police officers probably put a few leftists on edge) with this ode to a bank robber. I remember that I noticed the contrast. Of course, I'm just one person.
I understand, but I just don't think that the box office would have broken around Siegel himself. There was a Siegel cult following, but I doubt that, in and of itself, it could really make a commercial dent.
By the way, I should have mentioned that Siegel's
The Shootist was also a minor hit in the seventies, but again, that was because of John Wayne, not the director.
Pauline Kael despised him, among other reasons, for playing guys who couldn't or wouldn't love women or relate to other people or society. Funny thing: Kael was pointing out exactly part of Eastwood's allure.
Yes, Eastwood represented a shock to the system for highly cultured people like Kael. The idea of someone rejecting culture, period, proved outrageous to her.
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ecarle
19 years ago
Sometime probably over at Clint's site here, I'd really like to talk about Pauline Kael and him. A rather fascinating multi-decade feud, if you can call a movie critic fighting with an ultra-rich super star evenly matched.
Kael hated Eastwood as an artist right up to and through "Unforgiven," ending probably only with her own death. For his part, Eastwood finally had enough, I guess, and had a Kael-like female movie critic viciously murdered as one of the victims in "The Dead Pool." I've read the Schickel book, where Eastwood is quoted as eventually seeing Kael's bias as being almost like hating someone for racial or ethnic reasons. "Movie star bigotry?"
But it is the substantive nature of their battle which is worthy of some cultural debate. Soon we'll talk...
Meanwhile, back at Charley Varrick: I don't know how to read grosses, but I think maybe Don Siegel had minor early hits with "Flaming Star" for Elvis Presley and "Hell is for Heroes" with Steve McQueen.
Of course, film culture and box office are oftimes separate. The very famous Robert Altman had only one big hit in 35 years -- "MASH" -- but people can't stop writing about Altman and screening his films in the cultural vanguards of New York, Hollywood, and Europe.
Siegel's pretty much the same way. Hell, in recent years, Woody Allen has been the same way.
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joekiddlouischama
19 years ago
Meanwhile, back at Charley Varrick: I don't know how to read grosses, but I think maybe Don Siegel had minor early hits with "Flaming Star" for Elvis Presley and "Hell is for Heroes" with Steve McQueen.
I haven't found any box office figures for those films, which indicates that they didn't register a substantial commercial impact. Whether or not they were minor hits, I can't say, since these figures become harder to track the farther back one goes.
Of course, film culture and box office are oftimes separate. The very famous Robert Altman had only one big hit in 35 years -- "MASH" -- but people can't stop writing about Altman and screening his films in the cultural vanguards of New York, Hollywood, and Europe.
Siegel's pretty much the same way. Hell, in recent years, Woody Allen has been the same way.
But of course, Siegel was not that popular with Kael. She did acknowledge
Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a classic, but she preferred Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake.
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Doc-McCoy
19 years ago
"Meanwhile, back at Charley Varrick: I don't know how to read grosses, but I think maybe Don Siegel had minor early hits with "Flaming Star" for Elvis Presley and "Hell is for Heroes" with Steve McQueen."
"Flaming Star" was released not long after Elvis got out of the Army, and was a big hit with the public, if not the critics. "Hell is for Heroes" was the opposite - critics and industry people liked it (Stanley Kubrick said McQueen's portayal of the loner soldier was the best he'd ever seen of that type of character) but the box-office was disappointing. McQueen, having had two war films released in 1962 that did not do very well, had decided to stay away from further war films - but then he received the script for "The Great Escape" and wisely changed his mind.
"But of course, Siegel was not that popular with Kael. She did acknowledge Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a classic, but she preferred Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake."
Did this woman like anything, or anyone? Kael was the critics equivalent of Jim Aubrey.
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joekiddlouischama
19 years ago
It's too bad that even after the success of Flaming Star, Don Siegel was not held in higher esteem by Hollywood. Siegel only directed Hell Is for Heroes (an underrated little war film) because Robert Pirosh, the original director (and writer and producer) could not get along with McQueen.
As for Kael, here's what Richard Schickel writes on page 434 of Clint Eastwood: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1996):
... what is one to make of her career-long infatuation with Marlon Brando? Her shorter, more self-destructive crush on Warren Beatty, for whom she briefly abandoned reviewing to become his story editor?
In her review of Last Tango in Paris ("Last Tango in Paris," The New Yorker, October 28, 1972), Kael wrote, "On the screen, Brando is our genius as [Norman] Mailer is our genius in literature" (page 453 of Kael's For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies). In her review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller ("McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Pipe Dream," The New Yorker, July 3, 1971), Kael wrote the following about Beatty:
An actor probably has to be very smart to play a showoff so sensitively; Beatty never overdoes McCabe's foolishness, the way a foolish actor would. It's hard to know what makes Beatty such a magnetic presence; he was that even early in his screen career, when he used to frown and loiter over a line of dialogue as if he hoped to find his character during the pauses. Now that he has developed pace and control, he has become just about as attractive a screen star as any of the romantic heroes of the past. He has an unusually comic romantic presence; there's a gleefulness in Beatty, a light that comes on when he's onscreen that says "Watch this—it's fun." McCabe pantomimes and talks to himself through much of this movie, complaining of himself to himself; his best lines are between him and us. Beatty carries off this tricky yokel form of soliloquy casually, with good-humored self-mockery. It's a fresh, ingenious performance; we believe McCabe when he says that Mrs. Miller is freezing his soul.
[Page 377 of For Keeps.]
Although I agree with much of what Kael writes in these cases, it's very clear that she fawned over certain individuals while disdaining others, like Eastwood. In the middle was probably someone like McQueen, of whom Kael wrote the following in the February 1969 edition of Harper's:
If we don't deny the pleasures to be had from certain kinds of trash and accept The Thomas Crown Affair as a pretty fair example of entertaining trash, then we may ask if a piece of trash like this has any relationship to art. And I think it does. Steve McQueen gives probably his most glamorous, fashionable performance yet, but even enjoying him as much as I do, I wouldn't call his performance art. It's artful, though, which is exactly what is required in this kind of vehicle. ... Even in this flawed setting, there's a self-awareness to his performance that makes his elegance funny.
[Page 217 of For Keeps.]
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Doc-McCoy
19 years ago
I had forgotten about Kael's infatuations with Brando and Beatty - it's possible (especially with Beatty) that they may have brown-nosed her and thus received favorable reviews. For her to wax eloquently about a competent but unspectacular actor such as Beatty, as though he was Sir Laurence Olivier, causes her to lose credibility.
Kael never did like McQueen though, even in Papillon, considered by many to be McQueen's finest performance. McQueen was not above sucking up to powerful critics either, he did some of that with Hedda Hopper and she returned the favor by giving him good reviews in his early films - but NOT to the extent that Kael fawned over Beatty. As a rule McQueen did not indulge in that type of behavior but for some reason had a soft spot for the aging Hopper, who was fading but still powerful in the late 1950's/early 1960's.
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joekiddlouischama
19 years ago
The only vaguely similar situation that I know of with Eastwood is that he had an affair with Bridget Byrne, a film critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. However, that seemed like a case of Byrne currying favor with Eastwood rather than vice-versa (although Byrne claimed to be objective, anyway). Here's a quote from page 355 of A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), with Siegel relating an anecdote from the set of The Beguiled in 1970. Siegel is discussing the day when Eastwood remained in his trailer, surrounded by "agents, lawyers, accountants and other advisers," arguing with MGM chief Jim Aubrey over Aubrey's editing of Kelly's Heroes.
In the meantime, not only was I somehow supposed to film Clint, but other chores loomed up to plague me. For example, the Herald Examiner film critic, Bridget Byrne, was standing by that day, observing. To show her common politeness and keep her from being too aware of what was going on, I talked to her all day, giving her no hot story information. She wrote a long article for the Examiner, extolling the virtues of Mr. Eastwood: how he worked, how pleasant he was (he never even noticed her on the set), and how he represented the best in American men. I was mentioned in the article: 'The director, Don Siegel, a small man who never stopped chattering. ...'
Perhaps more revealing of Eastwood's attitude toward critics is what David Thomson wrote in the September/October 1984 edition of Film Comment (20, no. 5, "Cop on a Hot Tightrope, pages 64-73):
He [Eastwood] is very natural, very strong; his mind is very made up. You don't have to be too imaginative to see the rock against which some of your questions break. It is startling and intimidating when an actor has so little need for your love, and not much softened if he still wants your respect.
[Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, eds., Clint Eastwood: Interviews (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999), page 82.]
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Doc-McCoy
19 years ago
"Perhaps more revealing of Eastwood's attitude toward critics is what David Thomson wrote in the September/October 1984 edition of Film Comment (20, no. 5, "Cop on a Hot Tightrope, pages 64-73)"
I find this mention of David Thomson interesting, because back in the day he was a notorious critic of Steve McQueen, almost on the level that the biased Pauline Kael dislked Eastwood (although typically Thomson was an informative, unbiased critic). Thomson considered McQueen a "non-actor", saying that in the early 60's with films such as "Hell is for Heroes" McQueen took his profession seriously, but that he eventually only made films only to indulge his love of cars, motorcycles or stunt work.
However, some time after McQueen's death, Thomson changed his tune and stated he had inititally misunderstood McQueen's appeal and abilites, while maintaining that it's easy to see why audiences both liked and disliked the enigmatic actor.
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joekiddlouischama
19 years ago
However, some time after McQueen's death, Thomson changed his tune and stated he had inititally misunderstood McQueen's appeal and abilites, while maintaining that it's easy to see why audiences both liked and disliked the enigmatic actor.
It is curious to see how some critics have looked back and changed their tune. That's certainly happened to Eastwood, too. In fact, it's slightly amusing to read some of
Time critic Richard Schickel's contemporary commentary in his Eastwood biography and then to go back and read his actual
Time reviews from the 1970s, especially on a film such as
High Plains Drifter. As for Thomson, he's always been ambivalent towards Eastwood and sometimes a bit unfair, in my view, with his attitude occasionally condescending and disapproving and his praise sometimes backhanded. But then he turned around and loved
Million Dollar Baby.
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