Against The Grain: When 1970s Superstars Do The Unexpected

By Erin Free

CLINT EASTWOOD: THE BEGUILED (1971) Throughout the 1960s, Clint Eastwood had established himself as an actor of rare grace and muscularity with hard-bitten performances in action hits like Where Eagles Dare, Coogan’s Bluff, Hang ‘Em High, and Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy. Though previously not afraid to try something different (see – or rather, don’t see – the justifiably maligned 1969 western musical, Paint Your Wagon), Eastwood went way out on the ledge with 1971’s The Beguiled, which has just been remade by Sofia Coppola. In this dark, perverse, Civil War-set exercise in gender warfare, Eastwood’s wounded Union soldier, John McBurney, hides out in a Southern girls’ boarding school, and soon has the staff and student body swooning, eventually to his detriment. The film’s bizarre tone is change enough for Eastwood, but it’s the character of McBurney that represents the greatest shift for the actor. Cruel, selfish, exploitative, and predatory, he’s a true cad, and still stands as Eastwood’s only real on-screen villain. “The performances are uniformly excellent,” said The Hollywood Reporter of the film, “with Clint Eastwood being the most impressive, particularly in the second half of the film in which he is called upon to break with the more passive dimensions of the role and demonstrate a greater versatility and range than his past work has indicated.”

STEVE MCQUEEN: AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (1978) The resume of Steve McQueen is dotted with lesser known curios (such as The Reivers and Tom Horn), but none are as strange and seemingly out of character as 1978’s An Enemy Of The People. About as far from McQueen classics such as Bullitt, The Towering Inferno, and The Great Escape as you could get, this adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play sees a bespectacled, bearded, and shaggy-haired McQueen playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a Swedish scientist who stands up against an entire town when he discovers their medicinal spa is polluted. Yes, this is another Steve McQueen middle-finger-salute rebel, but the film’s literary, cerebral qualities place it at odds with everything else in the actor’s impressive canon. McQueen is superb in the role, but the film was barely released. “Warner Brothers didn’t know how to market the film because it was McQueen in an Ibsen play,” explained McQueen biographer, Marshall Terrill. “He chose to go totally against type, and rather than try and misrepresent the film, the studio canned it. My personal belief is that he chose the project to sabotage his First Artists [McQueen’s production company; Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, & Sidney Poitier were also partners] deal, but then he fell in love with the picture after its release. McQueen found himself in a real Catch-22.”

CHARLES BRONSON: FROM NOON TILL THREE (1976) “One of the strangest and most overlooked film westerns,” begins the description on Turner Classic Movies, “From Noon Till Three begins with a nightmare, ends with madness, and in between unreels as both a light romantic comedy, a send-up of heroic period pieces, and a revisionist look at the making of myths of the Old West.” Helmed by occasional director and Pulitzer prize winning playwright and author, Frank D. Gilroy – the father, incidentally, of filmmakers, Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy) – From Noon Till Three turns famously facially immobile tough guy, Charles Bronson, into an unlikely comedy player. The muscled up star of The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, The Mechanic, The Dirty Dozen, Death Wish, and Once Upon A Time In The West is surprisingly spry as Graham Dorsey, an outlaw whose affair with a lonely widow (Bronson’s real life wife and frequent co-star, Jill Ireland) makes him famous, and then drives him insane. This lazy, cowardly, but charming criminal is like nothing that Bronson had ever played before or since, and the film’s brand of comedy is deliriously perverse and pitch black. Not surprisingly, From Noon Till Three was a box office disaster, but it remains a fascinating wrinkle on Bronson’s resume. “Charles Bronson is usually at the silent centre of action movies,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review of the film. “He says little, but his muscles are coiled and his eyes are alert, and sooner or later, he will unleash violence. That’s why it’s interesting and even a little unsettling to find him in a whimsical Western romance. We don’t expect Bronson to make small talk, to be charming, to sweep a pretty woman off her feet – but that’s what he does in From Noon Till Three. And he does it with a certain rugged grace.”

SYLVESTER STALLONE: F.I.S.T (1978) After becoming famous in 1976 with the smash hit boxing drama, Rocky, toplining a film called F.I.ST might not seem like a major detour, but this weighty drama was indeed a surprising early-career switch-up from Sylvester Stallone. Co-written with Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) and directed by Norman Jewison (In The Heat Of The Night), this drama is loosely based on the real life figure of Jimmy Hoffa, with Stallone playing Johnny Kovak, a stand-tall Cleveland warehouse worker who rises through the ranks of a trucking industry union to become union president. Kovak’s links to organized crime, however, will eventually spur his downfall. Stallone is strong in the role, and the film is a fine and fiery effort from the always accomplished Norman Jewison, but it has sadly withered in the shadow of what came before it. “After Rocky was such an enormous success, anything was gonna be an anticlimax,” Stallone has said. “I made F.I.S.T which people think was a flop, but it made $28 million.” The film’s inability to land a box office knockout certainly didn’t deter Stallone from going left when most thought he should go right. While he has constantly returned to the ring in the long-running Rocky franchise, he has also continued to make unusual choices both as an actor (Rhinestone, Cop Land) and a director (Paradise Alley, Staying Alive). “I regret that I didn’t expand my acting when I was building my career,” Stallone has said. “You can do commercial films and then do small, independent, acting films. I wish I had done it, but that wasn’t the style back then. You were either a studio actor or an independent actor. So I regret that.”

PAUL NEWMAN: BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976) A western legend thanks to films like The Left Handed Gun and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and a bona fide superstar off hits like The Towering Inferno and The Sting, Paul Newman was a typically incisive and ironic casting choice from director, Robert Altman, for his bizarre 1976 revisionist western, Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Co-written by Altman with frequent collaborator, Alan Rudolph, and adapted from the play, Indians, by Arthur Kopit, this curio is weird even by the often very weird standards of its creators, and is never mentioned in the same breath as obvious Altman masterpieces like Nashville, M*A*S*H, or McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Visually audacious, plotless, and difficult to access, the film is a vicious satirical attack on, well, just about everything: showbusiness, America’s decimation of its indigenous peoples, the corrupting power of myth, the essential lies at the heart of history, the cult of celebrity, and the immorality of fame. Smashing his screen image upon the rocks, Paul Newman is brilliant as the primping, theatrical Buffalo Bill Cody, a real life western legend all too happy to mine his own life – and gleefully lie about his past – for his ridiculous showbiz dreams. While he was best known as a box office draw, Paul Newman had toyed with his movie persona from early in his career (his acting masterclasses in The Hustler and Hud prove that evoking sympathy from the audience is not essential when it comes to making your mark on them), and would continue to do so until his passing in 2008, but Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson remains his oddball tour de force.

BURT REYNOLDS: THE END (1978) What do you do after you’ve established yourself as the seeming embodiment of the idealised American male in films like The Longest Yard, White Lightning, Gator, Smokey & The Bandit, Deliverance, and Semi-Tough? Well, if you’re Burt Reynolds, you direct and star in The End, an off-the-wall black comedy about a real estate huckster who looks for a painless way out when he’s diagnosed with an incurable disease. That’s right, this largely forgotten 1978 flick sees tough guy, Burt Reynolds, playing a man unwilling to fight, and who can’t even succeed when it comes to killing himself. Yes, there’s a shift at the film’s climax, but for much of its duration, this is far from the Burt Reynolds that had won over the world’s movie audiences. “At the risk of sounding like a pompous ass, I knew that no one else could direct The End but me,” Reynolds says in his hilariously hubristic autobiography, My Life. “No one I’d encountered had my sort of completely dark, bent, tortured sense of humour. From the first time I read the script, I saw the film as a chance to say something about my philosophy of living. My goal was to experience everything and go out swinging. I’d seen few movies where before someone dies, they scream, ‘Screw you!’ I’d been in the tunnel myself, seen the white light and fought kicking and screaming, ‘I want to live!’ I wanted that in this film.” Rarely spoken of today, The End is biting, uncompromising, and very funny, and a fine example of an actor going wildly against the grain.