Sprawling helicopter shots bracket the tale, the superstar on the Carmel coastline and the painted portrait with slashed eyes. Witching hour is when fantasies come out to play, the throaty voice over the airwaves materializes in the flesh to bewitch the hotshot disc-jockey (Clint Eastwood). "Hey, you're talking to your number-one fan!" She (Jessica Walter) begins as a string of one-nighters and refuses to be discarded, her desire and neediness and fury prove too much for the weary Lothario who prefers the docile artist (Donna Mills). "I was trying to join the revolt against the representational," sighs the maiden in her atelier, though Eastwood in his directorial debut is more interested in discovering his own brand of classicism, a sort of sturdy cement that reveals its fissures slowly. Telephoto lens on sun-dappled exteriors contrast with modulating shadows, handheld POV inserts in the vandalized pad build up to a tumbling scrim and a blade swinging at the camera. Congealed lyricism for the slushy romantic ballad and rough vérité for the Monterey Jazz Festival, formal experiments both. Above all, an inquiry into the Eastwood persona itself, the pricking of the stud's complacency until the Man with No Name finds himself staring in terror at the audience, trapped in a freeze-frame with the tenacious conquest. The main kinship is with The Beguiled and there's Don Siegel at the bar to give his blessing, a pan from Victrola to sleeping protagonist prepares the Munch scream with castrating knife erect on pillow. "What is this, some kind of Kinsey report?" A Hitchcockian game of brunettes and blondes (Psycho figures in the scissors attack on the police sergeant), a would-be poet faced with a ferocious blast of Poe. Nothing but "lonely lovers on a cool, cool night" in the end. With John Larch, James McEachin, Clarice Taylor, and Irene Hervey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |