The superstar was at the top of his form in the under-rated White Hunter, Black Heart.
As we celebrate the 95th birthday of the enduringly iconic and remarkably resilient Clint Eastwood — who reportedly is in the midst of pre-production for yet another movie — many folks have turned to social media to sing the praises of their favorite Eastwood film performance.
For some, of course, the No. 1 choice is Eastwood’s authoritative portrayal of the laconic yet lethal Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and its subsequent sequels. Others will argue that, no, the actor’s finest moment was his initial turn as rule-breaking, life-taking San Francisco cop Harry Callahan in Don Siegel’s 1971 classic Dirty Harry. (“Well, do you feel lucky, punk?”) And more than a handful will make a strong case for his Oscar-nominated performance as aging outlaw turned avenger-for-hire in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992), which earned Eastwood an Academy Award as Best Director.
And yet, contrarian that I am, I must admit that the Eastwood performance I enjoy and admire most is showcased in another movie he directed, White Hunter, Black Heart, the 1990 drama is which he masterfully portrayed… revered filmmaker John Huston.
OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. Eastwood actually played a fellow named John Wilson, a character inspired by Huston who was introduced in Peter Viertel’s 1953 novel of the same title. Which, not incidentally, was in turn based on Viertel’s experiences while working with Huston on location in Africa during the production of The African Queen (1951).
Eastwood so totally immersed himself in the John Wilson role that, when White Hunter, Black Heart had its world premiere at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, some of my critical brethren and I were convinced that, in several scenes, he actually sounded like John Huston.
Not that he was trying to slavishly imitate the great director. “The way the script is written,” Eastwood told me a few months later at the Toronto Film Festival, “you just find yourself delivering the lines, and commanding people to listen, much like he would. It just comes out of the material — it takes you over, and you can't do it any other way.”
Surprisingly — or maybe not surprisingly, come to think of it — Eastwood, after years of being typecast as the taciturn man of action, was most envious of John Wilson’s dexterity with wordplay. He was particularly pleased with the scene in White Hunter, Black Heart where, faced with a haughty antisemite, Wilson improvises a long, elaborate anecdote simply to give her an embarrassing comeuppance.
“I would love to have his ability to sit down and zap somebody I don’t agree with, or somebody who’s made a racist statement or something like that. I’d love to be able to conjure up some imaginative, crazy little story, and turn around and hit them from behind, instead of just saying, ‘You're just out of line, shut up.’
“Those are the fantasy elements, I suppose. It's a fantasy like Dirty Harry saying, ‘Do I have five bullets, or six? I've forgotten!’ And just teasing the person, even when he knows exactly how many bullets he has. Everybody wishes he had that kind of precision to his mind. How many times in your life has it been where you’ve had an argument, and an hour later, you think, ‘You know what I wish I'd said to that bastard?’ And you didn’t do it. But everybody dreams of a fantasy character within himself that could do that — come up with the right line, at the right time, with the right rhythm.”
Eastwood rides into White Hunter, Black Heart at full gallop — literally — and pounces on his every line, dominates every scene in which he appears, with much the same ferocious vigor.
As John Wilson, he paints a character study in bold strokes and dark shadings. All the complex, contradictory facets of the real John Huston's public (and, judging from biographical accounts, private) personality are here: the condescending courtesy and the tripwire rage, the insinuating charm and the tyrannical bullying, the fanciful grandiloquence and the impulsive recklessness. Each time John Wilson smiles, you can’t be certain if he isn’t merely showing you his teeth.
Eastwood brings each of those complex and often contradictory facets into sharp relief, in a grand performance of great wit, style and cunning, under his own confident, accomplished direction.
At first glance, the plot of Peter Viertel’s novel would seem to be a natural for the movies, with something for everyone: a glamorous antihero, an exotic setting, a sharply-defined character conflict, a gossipy behind-the-scenes look at a movie location. But it took someone with the muscle of a Clint Eastwood finally to push the project onto the screen, if only because the story is not nearly as simple, or commercial, as it might appear. (Yes, you guessed it: Eastwood’s adaptation turned out to be a flop at the box-office, though its reputation has only grown since its first theatrical run.)
White Hunter, Black Heart is a film of dark obsession and unspoken dread, with bracing undercurrents of savage, sardonic humor. Beautifully filmed on location in Zimbabwe, it begins by establishing John Wilson as a maverick genius who defies his producers and rebels against the tyranny of audience expectations. “To write a movie,” Wilson tells screenwriter Pete Verrill (the Peter Viertel surrogate well played by Jeff Fahey), “you've got to forget that anybody’s going to see it.” He does it his way, and let the critics, the money men, and the “popcorn eaters” be damned.
Once in Africa, however, it quickly becomes obvious that Wilson is less interested in creating a work of art than turning his own life, and the lives of those around him, into high drama. He casts himself in the lead role of the dashing, daring man of letters and action, taking great glee in insulting lesser mortals (especially bigots, antisemites and Hollywood producers) who dare to annoy him. Sometimes, the supporting players rebel, and improvise; at one point, Wilson picks a fight with a racist hotel manager, and is soundly thumped. Most times, however, even the rational Pete Verrill is content to follow direction.
The turning point, for the drama as well as the Wilson-Verrill relationship, comes when Wilson fixes on the idea of going on safari and killing a bull elephant. Verrill is dismayed, charging that such wanton slaughter is “a crime.” But Wilson disagrees: “It’s bigger than that — it’s a sin. It's the only sin that you can buy a license and go out and commit.”
And a sin so great is impossible to resist if you're a man who wants to play God.
White Hunter, Black Heart keeps us guessing. Is Wilson really so obsessed with shooting an elephant that he blithely disregards his responsibility to shoot a movie? Or is the hunt simply Wilson’s way of delaying, maybe even avoiding, the inevitable moment when he has to back words with deeds, when he must make the great movie he has been promising everyone?
Eastwood, in his performance as well as his direction, appears ultimately to come down on the side of obsession. But there is more than enough tantalizing ambiguity to the storytelling, and enough complexity to Wilson’s character, to allow the audience to make either interpretation.
“That goes along with the theory,” Eastwood told me in Toronto, “that, sometimes, when you have great recognition at an early age, and everybody’s waiting for everything you touch to be some sort of piece of magic — that’s a great burden, a great responsibility, to be hanging over your head. Like, I think that happened to Marlon Brando as an actor. I think he was so revered in the ’50s, and came on strong, and was so imitated — every time he went to the movies, he’d see people trying to imitate him — I think it must have been terribly tough on his psyche.”
“I think, as a filmmaker, there is an anxiety in having to answer an endless barrage of questions, and come up with answers, whether they’re right or wrong. And maybe you seek a diversion that takes you away from that.” — Clint Eastwood
And John Huston, who made an instant classic the first time he sat in the director’s chair for The Maltese Falcon? Or, for that matter, Orson Welles, who was forever haunted by the success of his directorial debut, Citizen Kane?
“I think, as a filmmaker, there is an anxiety in having to answer an endless barrage of questions, and come up with answers, whether they’re right or wrong. And maybe you seek a diversion that takes you away from that.
“Like, I’ll just knit this pillow here,” Eastwood said, grabbing at the plush rectangle perched on the couch of his posh hotel suite, “because that will keep me from having to face everybody over there. And I believe that was case for [John Wilson]. If it wasn’t [the elephant hunt], it might have been a horse running at the track, because he was interested in horses, or it might have been a woman he was interested in. It was always something that he could be on the phone about, while he was telling the crew, ‘Oh, yeah, set that up, I’ll be right there.’ It's like, not having to sit there and wallow in all this mechanism, all these people — 60, 70, 80, whatever the crew is, all these people standing around, wondering what's going to happen next.
“Apropos of Orson Welles,” Eastwood added, “this is a story that the assistant director on Touch of Evil told me. They were shooting in Hollywood, on some street they had blocked off. They had a lot of extras out there, a whole big street sequence, a lot of things coming and going — and they couldn't find Orson. He was off shooting a little insert shot, just a little insert of an ashtray or something. A very simple shot that you could do with a couple of people around, with a camera. And they went over and said, basically, ‘Mr. Welles, We’re ready now, we've got 400 extras, we're ready to go.’ And he said, ‘No, I want to do this now.’ And he just let the day sort of go on.
“It was like he was intimidated by the idea of going out. Like, ‘Four hundred people! What am I gonna do with all that? All these shots of people walking around! Maybe I’m not in a brilliant mood today! Or maybe I ate too much last night! Or I had an argument with my wife!’ Whatever it is. ‘Something's gone wrong! What am I going to do? They're expecting more of me maybe than they would from someone else! My reputation is on the line.’”
John Huston invented his own roguish image, then played the larger-than-life role to the fullest throughout his life.
If Eastwood ever was immobilized, as a director or as an actor, with such cruel self-doubt, you’d never know it by looking as the risky projects he tackled during the years following White Hunter, Black Heart.
Never mind Unforgiven, his sternly ambiguous view of the elements that made most of us so fond of westerns in the first place. Consider such bold directorial efforts that did not have the benefit of his on-screen star power, such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his 1997 filmization of John Berendt’s best-selling non-fiction book about life, death and looking fabulous in Savannah, Georgia. Or Letters from Iwo Jima, his 2006 drama that told the story of the pivotal World War II battle from the perspective of Japanese soldiers? Or, most recently, Juror No. 2, his 2024 courtroom thriller that, not unlike his under-rated 1999 star vehicle True Crime, reflected Eastwood’s profoundly mixed feelings about capital punishment.
All three of those films were commercial disappointments. But Eastwood — perhaps taking his cue from John Wilson’s view of the “popcorn eaters” — remains unfazed when gambles don’t pay off.
“You know the greatest thing about getting old?” he told me years after our Toronto encounter. “You can do anything you want. Really. I was talking about this with a friend one time, and he agreed. He told me: ‘You get to be 65 or 70 — you can do what you want, and you don’t have to take any more crap. Because what can they do to you if you fail?’”
Eastwood chuckled heartily as he remembered the conversation. “And you know what? He’s right. I mean, what can they do if I fail? Take back the Oscar?”
All of which helps explain why, despite the underwhelming box-office returns for White Hunter, Black Heart, John Wilson has remained one of his favorite roles.
“I think I have more respect for the people who agree to finance my films than John ever did,” Eastwood said with a mischievous grin. “But I agree with him when he said, ‘You must take chances.’ Or even when he says, ‘You mustn’t think about what the audience reaction is when you’re making a film. You have to make the film, and then turn it over to them.’
“I even agree with his cynical sentiment when he makes self-demeaning statements like, ‘I’ll die flat broke in a flophouse, and they’ll name an Academy Award after me — and all the wrong people will win it.’ That’s kind of a cynical attitude, but there’s probably truth in there. I’m not sure that Irving Thalberg, and whoever they name special awards for, isn’t rolling over in his grave when he sees some of the people that they’ve given it to.”
Spoken just like John Wilson. Or John Huston.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that Peter Viertel — who’s credited with co-scripting White Hunter, Black Heart with James Bridges (The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy) and western movie specialist Burt Kennedy (The War Wagon, Support Your Local Sheriff!) — never pretended that his original novel was anything but an artfully fictionalized version of real-life events. Huston himself recognized as much when he read it prior to its publication.
Still, he gave the book his approval — and even offered Viertel suggestions for a plot twist that made John Wilson seem even more heartless.
John Huston invented his own roguish image, then played the larger-than-life role to the fullest throughout his life. Apparently, like so many other stars, he couldn't resist the chance to beef up his part.
