Warner Bros.’ Decision to Dump Clint Eastwood’s ‘Juror #2’ Is Criminal — A New Home Release of His Debut Makes That Case
Earlier this month, Warner Bros. (barely) released Clint Eastwood‘s 40th film as director, the exquisitely crafted and morally probing courtroom drama “Juror #2.” Like many of Eastwood‘s movies, it somehow feels like both a summation of all that came before it and something new in his oeuvre; it’s filled with the aesthetic preferences and thematic preoccupations that have obsessed him going back to the 1970s, but the abundance of rich visual and philosophical ideas are expressed with more clarity and concision than ever. With nothing to lose and nothing to prove, Eastwood has created a film as clean and fast as one of his 1990s programmers (“Absolute Power,” “True Crime”) but as wrenching in its internal tensions as masterpieces like “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River.”
This is all in keeping with the overall trajectory of Eastwood’s career, as his filmmaking has grown increasingly confident with each film. Not every experiment has worked — even as an Eastwood partisan, I found “The 15:17 to Paris” pretty rough going — but the overall arc has been toward a refinement of technique and a deepening of perspective, culminating in the subtle, restrained effects of “Juror #2.”
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Yet what’s most amazing about Eastwood isn’t where he’s gotten to but where he started from. A new 4K release from Kino Lorber provides the opportunity to revisit Eastwood’s directorial debut, “Play Misty for Me” (Universal, 1971), via a presentation that looks and sounds better than any home video incarnation to date, and to watch it 53 years after its release is to recognize how fully realized Clint’s talent was right out of the gate.
Like so many of the Eastwood films that would follow, “Play Misty for Me” is a deceptively modest genre piece whose traditions give Eastwood room to probe deeply personal obsessions and conduct bold experiments with style — as long as he hits the requisite narrative beats, the audience will come along for the ride. The core story of “Play Misty for Me,” in which Northern California disc jockey Dave Garver (Eastwood) is terrorized by a one-night stand (Jessica Walter) after he tries to cut her loose, has been imitated many times (most famously and slavishly in “Fatal Attraction”). Still, its power remains undiluted because, as is always the case with Eastwood, this isn’t just a movie that’s about what it’s about. It’s about how it’s about what it’s about.
The film’s first innovation comes in Eastwood casting himself as both hero and victim. Reportedly, Eastwood had offered the role to Steve McQueen, but McQueen turned it down, accurately surmising that the best role in the movie belonged to the female lead. Looking at the movie now, anyone but Eastwood as Dave Garver seems unimaginable for a number of reasons, the first being the simple fact that Clint Eastwood, the director, would spend most of his career questioning and reinventing Clint Eastwood, the actor.
Few screen icons have personas as clear and strong as Eastwood’s, yet in film after film he tries to break the persona down. From exposing and exploring Dirty Harry’s contradictions and neuroses in “Sudden Impact” and sublimating himself under one disguise after another in “Firefox” to deconstructing his image as a loner to shattering effect in “The Bridges of Madison County,” Eastwood has always been one of the most fearless and reckless of all major stars when it comes to testing the limits of his image.
In “Play Misty for Me,” Eastwood begins this process in a few interesting ways, picking up where director Don Siegel left off in “The Beguiled.” That film, the first of three Clint Eastwood vehicles to hit American screens in 1971 (“Play Misty for Me” was sandwiched in between it and another Siegel production, “Dirty Harry”), confined man of action Eastwood to a bed where he was ultimately maimed and murdered by the occupants of a Civil War-era school for girls.
The disconnect between the audience’s perception of Eastwood as the invulnerable “Man With No Name” of the Sergio Leone Westerns (not to mention the guy who singlehandedly mowed down about 300 Nazis in “Where Eagles Dare”) and the helpless, easily manipulated victim the actor played in “The Beguiled” may have asked a bit too much too quickly of the star’s fan base. After all, “The Beguiled” was one of his rare commercial failures. The pump was primed, however, for “Play Misty for Me,” a movie that would present the actor as a sexual predator who gets the tables turned on him in ways unthinkable for any of Clint’s cinematic ancestors.
Eastwood’s reconfiguring of his own image goes beyond undermining the masculine strength of his Western heroes by making Dave Garver a credibly impotent victim; there’s also the idea that he and the woman who’s victimizing him are two sides of the same coin. This would become a signature motif in Eastwood movies almost as prevalent as his squint or tendency to call other characters “assholes”; in his next Siegel collaboration, “Dirty Harry,” there are multiple visual cues to indicate that Harry and the murderous Scorpio exist on different ends of the same moral spectrum, and the entire plot of “Juror #2” revolves around the parallels between juror Nicholas Hoult and the defendant he is expected to judge.
In “Play Misty For Me,” both Garver and his stalker Evelyn are characters afflicted by pathological self-absorption. It’s what causes Garver to get into trouble with Evelyn in the first place, as he mistakenly assumes she sees sex as casually as he does (and cheats on the supposed love of his life with her, on the assumption that what Donna Mills doesn’t know won’t hurt her — or more importantly, him). Then, it’s what sends Evelyn spiraling into psychosis, as she assumes Garver shares her point of view that theirs is a romance for the ages.
This inability of people to acknowledge others’ perspectives, and the damage done by myopic points of view, is a key concern of Eastwood’s throughout his career in films like “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (which uses the Civil War to ask how a post-Vietnam America can ever reconcile its fundamental tensions), “Gran Torino,” and, once again, “Juror #2.” And that movie in a genre so in line with Eastwood’s main interests that it makes one realize how crazy it is that it took the director this long to make an old-fashioned courtroom drama. “Play Misty for Me” establishes not only the theme but also the visual means by which Eastwood expresses it in movie after movie.
Eastwood’s first film as director was his second film with cinematographer Bruce Surtees, who made his debut as director of photography on “The Beguiled.” (He was also a camera operator on the Siegel-Eastwood pictures “Two Mules for Sister Sara” and “Coogan’s Bluff.”) Surtees would also shoot “Dirty Harry,” and in the three 1971 Eastwood-Surtees collaborations, the lighting style Eastwood would embrace up through “Juror #2” emerged almost fully formed.
A year before Gordon Willis would garner attention for his uncommonly dark cinematography in “The Godfather,” Surtees was lighting Eastwood and the girls of “The Beguiled” with just a handful of candles, letting the edges of the frame — and sometimes the actors’ entire faces — drop off into blackness. In “Play Misty for Me,” Surtees’s film noir lighting takes on a deeper meaning, the shadows emphasizing the unknowability of Eastwood’s characters both to each other and themselves.
Part of Eastwood’s enduring appeal as an actor has always been his awareness of just how much to withhold from his audience, and the chiaroscuro lighting in his pictures is an extension of this idea, as his characters are rarely viewed in their entirety. (Even in a more conventionally lit movie like “The Bridges of Madison County,” Eastwood shoots himself from behind at key moments, keeping us from seeing the roiling emotions of his character.)
The pools of blackness surrounding the characters also give Eastwood’s movies a dreamy, hypnotic quality; when viewed in a darkened theatre, the boundaries of the frame disappear, blurring with the darkness of the room to place the viewer in a kind of intensified dream state. (This quality is one of many reasons why Warner Bros.’ decision to dump “Juror #2” into just a handful of venues with no support is a criminal act of aesthetic — and given Eastwood’s track record, probably commercial — malfeasance.)
Of course, in “Play Misty for Me,” the darkness serves an additional, more basic function, which is simply to scare the crap out of the audience because we never know where Evelyn is lurking. But Eastwood doesn’t settle for conventional jump scares (though “Play Misty for Me” has several very effective ones). There’s also a lyricism to the horror of “Play Misty for Me” that comes from another of Eastwood’s ongoing practices: his astute attention to the value of landscape and environment.
This probably comes from Eastwood’s emergence in a genre, the Western, that’s all about using exterior locations as projections of interior states, and as a director, he’s often at his best when he returns to that form — the gold hidden beneath the jagged rocks of “Pale Rider,” for example, serves as a fruitful metaphor for several ideas in that film that Eastwood follows through on in all their potential. Even in “Play Misty for Me,” however, Eastwood uses the Carmel locations as far more than just pictorial backdrops.
The natural beauty of the seaside town is alternately soothing and hostile, skillfully utilized to both let the viewer’s guard down and ramp up the tension depending on the demands of any individual scene. Often, Eastwood uses the surroundings as a kind of misdirect, indicating through their prettiness that all is right with the world — as in a romantic montage featuring Eastwood and Mills that plays for far longer than its narrative function requires.
In this scene and others, Eastwood lulls the audience into a different kind of dream state than the shadowy interiors; placing the action in direct sunlight, the director indicates there’s nothing to fear — then pulls the rug out by revealing the menace lurking just outside the frame. There are other striking moments, both romantic and terrifying at once, as when a long lens compresses the space on a beach to make it look like Eastwood and Mills are about to be engulfed by the ocean like one of the characters in Eastwood’s “Hereafter.”
Images like this represent both Eastwood’s economy — right from the beginning, he had an unerring eye for compositions that could convey a multitude of emotions in a few simple strokes — and his preference for location shooting, which would characterize most of his work moving forward. There’s not a single set in “Play Misty for Me,” and this is another source of the film’s power; it feels grounded in a way that more studio-bound thrillers don’t.
Yet Eastwood’s greatness lies in his ability to calibrate that sense of documentary reality — something he pushes to the limit in a passage shot on the fly at the Monterey Jazz Festival — with his films’ more archetypal, mythic moments. “Play Misty for Me” ultimately plays like a sort of Grimms’ Fairy Tale for adults, tapping into primal, timeless fears as much as it addresses then-current conflicts in the age of Nixon and the women’s movement. But it’s a Grimm Fairy Tale crossed with the observational eye of a naturalistic director like John Cassavetes, who openly admired and praised “Misty.”
“Play Misty for Me” is, like Walter Hill’s “Hard Times” or Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat,” kind of a perfect first film: limited in scale (and thus more controllable by an inexperienced director) but rich in visual and narrative ideas. It works so well on its own terms that it would have been impossible at the time to imagine Eastwood had so much further to go — that films like “Josey Wales,” “Unforgiven,” “Mystic River,” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” would leave “Misty” in their artistic dust. Most directors would be thrilled to have a movie as great as “Play Misty for Me” on their resume, representing the best work of their career. For Clint Eastwood, it was only the beginning.
The Kino Lorber 4K UHD edition of “Play Misty for Me” will be released on November 10.
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