Something to Do with Death

People like that have something inside, something to do with death."
Cheyenne (Jason Robards) in "Once Upon a Time in the West"



The funny thing about life is that death has been on our mind a lot lately. Upon the 2010 release of director Clint Eastwood’s "Hereafter," critic A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, "Death has never been a stranger in Mr. Eastwood’s cinematic universe." In his youth, Eastwood the movie star had no qualms about dispensing death via the business end of a gun, especially in the so-called "Man with No Name" spaghetti westerns he made with director Sergio Leone and as maverick San Francisco cop Dirty Harry Callahan in five films, but as a director in his 70s and now 80s, he looked at death through a glass darkly as something profound, intimate, and often deeply unsettling. "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby" come immediately to mind.

Writing in USA Today, Claudia Puig, who called "Hereafter" "a meditation on mortality," noted, "The idea has been repeatedly put forth that ‘Hereafter’ represents the 80-year-old Eastwood’s contemplation of his own mortality. But you don’t have to be an octogenarian to be fascinated with comes after life as we know it." "Maybe there is a hereafter," Eastwood said in an interview for LA Weekly, "but I don’t know, so I approach it by not knowing, I just tell the story."


Thinking about Eastwood thinking about mortality got us to thinking about the number of times the actor has portrayed characters who die before film’s end, which got us to thinking the same thing about the man who once considered Eastwood a youthful rival to his venerable status as the screen’s go-to cowboy-and-war hero, John Wayne.


Years before achieving stardom, an unbilled John Wayne appeared as the corpse of a Broadway actor in the 1931 murder mystery "The Deceiver." Nor did he receive screen credit for his role in 1933’s "Central Airport" as a copilot killed in a crash.





In "Reap the Wild Wind" (1942), produced and directed by master showman Cecil B. DeMille, Wayne and costar Ray Milland are searching a submerged shipwreck when a giant squid attacks (above). After saving Milland’s life, Wayne is swept away into a watery grave as the ship slips off an underwater shelf.









This plot point was virtually repeated, along with an attack by an octopus, six years later in "Wake of the Red Witch," when Wayne, as a 19th-century captain in the East Indies becomes fatally trapped by debris on a sunken ship teetering on an underwater ledge.





The rousing 1944 film "The Fighting Seabees" became one of the most popular pieces of U.S. propaganda entertainment during World War II. John Wayne stars as the boss of a construction company working for the Navy, building an airstrip on a remote Pacific island. Costar Susan Hayward calls Hayward’s character "a hotheaded ape with a hair-trigger temper," who, nevertheless, becomes personally responsible for the formation of a new Navy unit, the Seabees. After single-handedly dispatching legions of Japanese troops - stereotypically portrayed as buck-toothed, squinty-eyed soldiers with thick eyeglasses - Wayne mounts a bulldozer loaded with dynamite and plows into an oil tank, blowing up the enemy and himself.





One of Wayne’s best known roles was as Marine Sgt. Stryker (above) in 1949’s "Sands of Iwo Jima," depicting the fierce seven-week battle to capture the Japanese island. Initially, Stryker is presented as a harsh martinet, unpopular with his men, but Wayne’s performance gradually reveals a believable vulnerability beneath the thick skin. A single sniper’s bullet cuts Wayne down. It is a sudden and startling moment, without a heroic act beforehand or farewell speech afterward, simplistic in its truth about war. Three of the men who raised the American flag atop Mount Suribachi for the historic photo, Ira Hayes, Rene Gagnon and John Bradley, recreated the emotionally charged moment, with actors, for the film.





Wayne considered the film "a beautiful personal story." Radio commentator Walter Winchell raved, "The original story was written in blood by the glorious United States Marines! John Wayne must be everybody’s idea of a good actor! He’s immense in ‘Iwo Jima,’ the best of the war pictures." Wayne was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award but lost to Broderick Crawford for "All the King’s Men." In 1950, Wayne became the No. 1 box office star in the U.S.








Ten years later, John Wayne directed and starred (as Davy Crockett) in "The Alamo," a romanticized reenactment of the 13-day defense of the fortified Texas mission in 1836 by 187 Americans and Texicans facing Mexican General Santa Anna and his force of more than 7000 troops. Wayne’s Batjac Productions spent more than $15 million ($1.5 million alone on the meticulous reproduction of the Alamo and surrounding village) on an old-fashioned patriotic film, made at a time when such flag-waving sentiment was unpopular. "I put my heart and soul into that picture," Wayne told author Michael Munn in John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth. "It said everything I felt about my country, about freedom, and about dictatorships. It was seen by those to the left as a piece of propaganda, and hell, it was…"





Davy Crockett, according to some historical (albeit debatable) accounts, was among a handful of Alamo defenders who surrendered to Mexican General Ferandez Castrillon. (Above) Crockett allegedly claimed he was merely a traveler who had sought refuge in the mission. Angered that his order to give no quarter to prisoners had been ignored, Santa Anna insisted on the immediate execution of the survivors. After Castrillon refused the order, officers who had not taken part in the combat drew their sabers and summarily killed the unarmed men.






Such an ignoble demise would be beneath the Duke’s personification of the legendary frontiersman. And so, in "The Alamo," the wounded Crockett goes down fighting, swinging a lit torch like a battle mace before falling back into a roomful of gunpowder and exiting in a literal blaze of glory.

In "The Cowboys" (1972), eleven boys, age 9 to 15, are hired by a rancher for a 400-mile cattle drive when his regular hands run off for a nearby gold rush. The script was written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., the husband-wife team whose impressive credits include "The Long, Hot Summer," "Hud," "Hombre" and "Norma Rae."






Director Mark Rydell originally pictured George C. Scott as the rancher, but John Wayne humbly asked for the role. "I was absolutely stunned by John Wayne," Rydell later recalled, "he was the exact opposite of all my ideals - he was very right wing, one of the founders of the blacklist in the fifties - and I was this Jewish musician from the Bronx with pretty liberal views…He shook my hand - my hand disappearing inside his, it was so big - and he said, ‘I’d really appreciate it if you gave me the chance to play this part, sir.’ I was completely seduced by him. I told him, ‘Let’s never talk about politics, let’s just talk art.'"

Rydell noted, "And he was fabulous; the first guy on the set every morning, and the last guy to leave at night. This man I had loathed…I had disagreed with every position he’d ever taken, but I learned a lot from him, about determination, and commitment."





Cast as the leader of a band of rustlers, rattling with snake venom from his first appearance, was Bruce Dern, a veteran character player who would soon find himself reviled as the first actor to kill John Wayne onscreen. In John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, Dern told author Michael Munn, "I had always played small roles as heavies in films before ‘The Cowboys.’ I’d been a villain in ‘The War Wagon.’ I tried to kill Clint Eastwood in ‘Hang ‘Em High,’ and I had a go at bumping off Charlton Heston in ‘Will Penny,’ so I figured I might as well be the guy who killed John Wayne by shooting him in the back. But it was a good part, I got to play a really awful guy. There’s a scene where I grab one of the boys and I drag him into the river and just scare the shit out of him, and he was really scared. And so was his mother, who watched from the sidelines, convinced I was going to drown her son. So to do that and kill Duke Wayne was something an actor doesn’t get to do very often."

On the set, Wayne told Dern, "America will hate you for this." Dern replied, "Yeah, but they’ll love me in Berkeley." The death of Wayne’s character, according to director Rydell, "comes like a slap in the face." Wayne recalled, "Usually when I die in my pictures I go out in a blaze of glory, but the character I played…was no gunfighter. Sure, he was a tough old boot, but he was a cattleman, not a gunman."




Rydell noted, "Bruce only half-jokingly said it ruined his career." Several years later, Dern was asked if he actually received death threats after killing Wayne in "The Cowboys." "People were very angry that I killed their buddy," Dern said, "It was a movie, folks."







Wayne thought Dern "was so good he should have been nominated for an Oacar." As for the Duke’s performance, critic Rex Reed called it "the best role of his career. Old Dusty Britches can act."





Finally, Wayne’s 50-year career came to a poignant and deservedly dignified conclusion when he portrayed a gunfighter dying of cancer, out of time and out of place in the no-longer wild West of the early 20th century, in "The Shootist" (1976). Confronted with an extended, excruciatingly painful bed-ridden death, the once-dreaded gunslinger arranges a saloon showdown guaranteed to expedite his demise.





In the book American Movie Classics Classic Movie Companion, the film is singled out as "one of Wayne’s finest…directed with economy and finesse by master craftsman (Don) Siegel." In agreement, Roger Ebert wrote, "Don Siegel’s direction reveals a sensitivity we didn’t suspect after films like ‘Dirty Harry.’" Calling the film "quiet, elegant and sensitive," Variety’s review noted, " ‘The Shootist’ stands as one of John Wayne’s towering achievements. Don Siegel’s terrific film is simply beautiful, and beautifully simple…"


















Although he portrayed a ghostlike entity in both "High Plains Drifter" and "Pale Rider," wreaking vengeance from beyond the grave (The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, in his review of "Hereafter," said that "if anyone could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Clint Eastwood"), the actor has rarely allowed his screen characters to die, either overtly or implicitly.






Early in his career, the action hero of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "Hang ‘Em High," "Coogan’s Bluff," "Where Eagles Dare" and "Kelly’s Heroes," threw his fans a curve ball when he starred in "The Beguiled" (1971), a moody, mossy gothic tale of Corporal John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier in the Civil War who is given sanctuary in a Southern finishing school for young ladies (evocatively filmed at the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation near Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Inevitably, the young man’s presence stirs up erotic desires and lustful appetites for a who’s-manipulating-whom stew, culminating in a tragic end for McBurney.















Director Don Siegel, who made five movies with Clint Eastwood, including "Dirty Harry" and "Escape from Alcatraz," found the original novel by Thomas Cullinan "strange and fierce, like the novellas of Ambrose Bierce." Invoking the spirits of Edgar Allan Poe, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Siegel said the basic motif of "The Beguiled" was "the basic desire of women to castrate men." (At a crucial point in the film, the women amputate McBurney’s leg, which may or may not be infected with gangrene.) The director remarked, "Women are capable of deceit, larceny, murder, anything. Behind that mask of innocence lurks just as much evil as you’ll ever find in members of the Mafia. Any young girl, who looks perfectly harmless, is capable of murder."




Clint Eastwood related to writer Stuart Kaminsky, "Don Siegel told me you can always be in a western…but you may never get a chance to do this type of film again." Eastwood said, "It wasn’t a typical commercial film, but we thought it could be a very good film, and that was important…(The studio) tried to sell it as if it were another western. People who go in expecting to see a western are disappointed…People who like Clint Eastwood won’t like ‘Beguiled’ because I get offed." In another interview he commented, "I wasn’t sure an audience was ready for that, or wanted that, but I knew I wanted it." It was "something I could act, something besides just gunning people down."

The allusive title "The Beguiled" itself became the subject of debate, over concern for Eastwood’s fans expecting the usual action flick, and memos suggested such alternatives as "A Nest of Sparrows" and "The Beguiling Bastard."

Both Siegel and Eastwood were encouraged by a French critic to premiere the movie at the Cannes Film Festival. Universal Pictures, which controlled marketing and distribution, decided against it. According to Siegel, the studio released the film in a "stupid" fashion, with inadequate publicity and misleading advertising. As a result of Universal’s "ineptitude," "The Beguiled" never earned a profit, grossing less than $1 million.





Producer Jennings Lang said, "Maybe a lot of people just don’t want to see Clint Eastwood’s leg cut off." The actor noted that his fans didn’t want to see him "emasculated." He added that perhaps playing a "loser" was the problem. "Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino play losers very well. But my audience likes to be in there…with a winner…My characters have sensitivity and vulnerability, but they’re still winners."

Richard Schickel, author of a 1996 biography of Eastwood, remarked, "The finished film justified…Clint’s initial responses to the material: It was a terrific movie, one of the most powerful and interesting films he ever made, and it was, indeed, a picture for which there was no appreciable audience. ‘The Beguiled’ would be one of the few unambiguous flops of his career."

"Honkytonk Man" (1982), based on the novel by Clancy Carlile, who also wrote the screenplay, recounts the final weeks in the life of fictional 1930s country western singer Red Stovall, an alcoholic drifter dying of tuberculosis. "Reprobate though he is, Red is not without hope," Richard Schickel observed. "After a lifetime of singing his songs and passing the hat in road- and cathouses, he has an invitation to audition for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville." The story inevitably becomes a road movie with Red’s teenage nephew (played by Eastwood’s son Kyle) as his designated driver, accompanied by the boy’s grandfather, portrayed by veteran character actor John McIntire in a role originally offered to James Stewart, who, at the age of 74, maintained he wasn’t ready to play a grandfather yet (although he had already played grandfathers in "Airport ‘77" and "The Magic of Lassie"). According to Schickel, Eastwood would later "treasure his memories" of working with an old hand like McIntire.

At the time of the film’s release, Schickel, writing in Time magazine, called it "a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people…but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys."

Eastwood admitted his fascination with what Schickel called "the self-destructive ends of the legendary figures of this world, the likes of Hank Williams and Red Foley." According to Eastwood, "You wondered why so many of them died on the hughway." Schickel noted, "If it is too late for Red (Stovall) to change his ways…it is not too late for him to enjoy a few sunny days before the shadows close in around him."

"Honkytonk Man" had an amazingly brief five-week shooting schedule on an unheard-of budget of a little more than $3 million. Director-star Eastwood steadfastly avoided a redemptive ending urged by the studio. When a French review compared the film to "The Grapes of Wrath," Eastwood responded, "My God." Iconoclastic author Norman Mailer saw in the movie "the steely compassion that is back of all the best country singing, and the harsh, yearning belly of rural America…making out with next to nothing but hard concerns and the spark of a dream that will never give up." In Red, Mailer saw "a subtle man, brought to life with minimal strokes, a complex protagonist full of memories of old cunning deeds and weary sham. It was one of the saddest movies seen in a long time, yet, on reflection, terrific. One felt a tenderness for America while looking at it."

At the age of 78, Eastwood directed and starred in "Gran Torino" (2008), portraying widower Walt Kowalski, a decorated Korean War veteran and retired auto assembly line worker, the last angry man in Detroit. Disgusted with his materialistic children, with the bogus piety of his clergyman, and mostly with the number of Hmong families moving into his neighborhood, he finds sole consolation in the companionship of a faithful dog and the ownership of the 1972 title vehicle. In the character’s remarkable personal odyssey, Kowalski becomes the unlikeliest of allies of his Hmong neighbors against local gangs. Ultimately, aware that he is dying of cancer, Walt sacrifices his life for them. "If the climax seems too generic and pre-programmed," Roger Ebert opined, "I like that better than if it just dribbled off into sweetness. So would Walt."

Richard Schickel, in his 2010 book Clint: A Retrospective, noted that the film was a huge success "perhaps because it was released in the midst of a recession that engendered widespread sympathy for the working class, perhaps because it reminded audiences of how much Clint’s taciturnity had meant to them over the years…perhaps because he was playing an old man, which, chronologically, he surely was, without really looking or acting the part…" Eastwood said, "I liked the fact Walt was kind of crazy and an equal opportunity insulter, a unique character." Schickel wrote, "Yes, by the end of the movie we come to love Walt Kowalski. But the deepest pleasure we derive from Clint Eastwood’s performance is how hard he makes it for us to do so."

Eastwood, according to Schickel, "was mildly annoyed, first by the rumor that this was a return to ‘Dirty Harry’ mode, then by a few critical interpretation of the film as such…(Walt) really wasn’t as hip as Harry had become. He was just a freak dinosaur, who turns out to be, somewhat to his own surprise, educable." Roger Ebert commented on the film being "about the belated flowering of a man’s better nature."

In the previously mentioned interview in LA Weekly, Clint Eastwood said, "There’s a certain charlatan aspect to the hereafter, to those who prey on people’s beliefs that there’s some afterlife, and mankind doesn’t seem willing to accept that this is your life and you should do the best you can with it and enjoy it while you’re here, and that’ll be enough."

"Dyin’ ain’t hard for men like you and me, it’s livin’ that’s hard."
Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) to Ten Bears (Will Sampson) in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"