John Baxter's Adventures in the Movie Trade (4) - An encounter with Don Siegel after watching DIRTY HARRY

Editor's Note: Paris-based Australian expat John Baxter sent in this memoir after reading David Hare's review of Don Siegel's The Lineup. You can read David's note if you click here. 

Don Siegel

February 1972 was a better time than most for me to discover the United States. While the last Christmas trees were still clogging up the trash, Richard Nixon gratified the long-time science fiction reader in me by inaugurating the Space Shuttle program.  Later in the year he would make his visit to China, and, less publicly, send in the burglars to bug Democrat headquarters in the Watergate.  America was not only satisfying all my hopes but exceeding them.

Cresting the Hollywood Hills on US101 we took the off-ramp onto Lankershim, skirting the edge of the San Fernando Valley. 

“Guess that’s it,” said Mary Lou, my driver, as we pulled up at the gate of Universal Pictures. Above our heads, a stubby tower of black glass blotted out the morning sun. From his penthouse office, Universal president Lew Wasserman could look out over the film industry of which he was, by common consent, the chief architect. That I would one day meet him, introduced by the director of The Creature From the Black Lagoon,  was of an improbablity verging on the surreal.

The guard who bent to peer into Mary Lou’s ten-year-old Pinto made no comment on its smoky exhaust and the duct tape repairing the back seats. Poverty and success were the twin faces of show business, separated by the thin-ness of a coin.

“Do you have an appointment?” 

Lew Wasserman

Mary Lou handed him the documentation showing that I came with the blessing of the US State Department, anointed under its program to aid scholars from less fortunate nations, among which Australia apparently ranked. Perks included the services of Mary Lou, my amiable volunteer guide. Without her Pinto and intimate knowledge of Greater Los Angeles, the City of Angels would long since have swallowed me up. 

(As an added bonus, she was also the former daughter-in-law of an important figure in Hollywood special effects, responsible for, among other tasks, parting the Red Sea at the orders of Charlton Heston’s Moses. She had asked him how it was done, and, this being Hollywood, he gave an order – I always imagined it being delivered in Chuck’s Stentorian tones: “Behold His mighty hand!” – and a detailed photographic breakdown was created, complete with custom box the size of a large suitcase. It still sat in her loft, from where we wrestled it down one afternoon. Portions found their way into the book. Wonderful place, Hollywood. 

The chain link gate rolled back squeakily.

“Park over there,” said the guard, “and wait for your driver.”

In an industry as tightly unionised as the American cinema, there was no prospect that we would be left to find our own way to the person I was there to meet. Time to reflect of the improbability of my being there in the first place.  I was about to meet one of my most admired artists, an occasion which, when I was  growing up in an Australian country town,  would have appeared as impossible as walking on the moon.  What was a kid from outback Australia doing here?

After ten minutes,  a member in good standing of Teamsters Local 399 arrived at the wheel of a pink and white electric golf cart decorated with an incongruous fringed roof.  Grizzled, and with ham-like arms crawling with tattoos, he would have looked more at home in the cab of an 18-wheeler. However he seemed cheerful enough. After all, he was in the movies!

Universal Studios (2019)

Beyond the tower, the only buildings of any size were sound stages. White-painted, uniform and unremarkable, ranged along wide concrete alleys, they were a reminder that Hollywood’s “dream factory” was, after all, just that – a factory. In films that take place behind the scenes of Hollywood, exotically costumed extras and leggy showgirls peopled these streets, but this morning they were deserted. In those days before the razzmataz of the Studio Tour turned it into a fun fair, Universal had the air of a country town. Grass poked from cracks in the cement and dumpsters overflowed with the debris of construction. A teenaged Steven Spielberg found it a simple matter to sneak in, take possession of an empty office and hang out there for weeks, waved through the gate each day by a complaisant guard who assumed he was the son of some studio bigwig.  

Raymond Burr, Ironside

Five minutes brought us to the far side of the lot, and  a sloping tree-shaded avenue lined with bungalows, each , I knew, reserved for a director or star currently working for the studio. Competition for these was fierce, and possession energetically defended.  Recent tenants had included Raymond Burr, star of the detective series Ironside, and his former employer, Alfred Hitchcock.  Richard Franklin, who bluffed his way into a job as Hitchcock’s assistant before starting his own career as a director, had told me how Hitch, glancing across at his neighbour’s bungalow, had seen, propped up in the window of his bathroom, one of the life-size cardboard cut-outs created to promote Psycho. They showed the portly Hitch pointing to his watch as a warning that nobody would be admitted after the first seven minutes. He sent Richard to learn the reason for the actor’s eccentric behaviour.  “Mr. Burr says he’s tired of people talking about ‘Raymond Burr in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window,’ ” Richard reported on his return. ”Now you can see Alfred Hitchcock in Raymond Burr’s rear window.“

The obligatory five-minute wait in the outer office that precedes any Hollywood rendezvous gave me time to think over what I’d say to the man I was about to meet. 

Memories of his newest film were still vivid in my mind, as were the circumstances of seeing it a few days before, during my first visit to Washington DC. Leaving my motel, map in hand, I’d navigated to the cinema, bought a ticket, taken my seat in the dark and sat through the film, only to look around for the first time as the lights went up to find myself the sole white face in the house. Retracing the route I’d taken so casually to get there, I did so looking over my shoulder every ten seconds, even though nobody gave me a second glance. 

A buzz from the inner office interrupted my thoughts. Before we could get to our feet, a grinning face, decorated with moustache and glasses, appeared at the door into the inner sanctum. 

“Cummon in.”

Fifty-ish, greying, tanned,  in  hibiscus-red aloha shirt and cotton trousers, Don Siegel looked less like a movie director than a Toyota dealer just back from an Hawaiian holiday. But, arms folded, pipe drawing well, and feet up on the desk, he watched us over the top of his spectacles like an old tomcat watching a kitten playing with a ball of wool. 

Leo Gordon, Neville Brand, Riot in Cell Block 11

While Siegel’s work didn’t invite the superlatives lavished on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford, to many of us who admired a leaner, meaner and more urban cinema, he had few equals.  As an editor for Warner Brothers he created the montages for Casablanca that explained the location of that Moroccan backwater. He went on to direct such skilled exercises in urban tension as The Lineup and Riot in Cell Block 11, the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, two of Elvis Presley’s early films, Hound Dog Man and Flaming Star,  then Coogan’s Bluff, Two Mules  for Sister Sara and that slice of Southern Gothic, The Beguiled,  all of which helped rescue his protegé Clint Eastwood from the scrap heap of TV  and launch him as film star, then director. 

Robert Keith, Eli Wallach, The Lineup

What set Siegel’s films apart from those of his competitors was a forensic quality, an interest in the beliefs and impulses that motivated what would otherwise have been stock characters. In The Lineup,  the hired killer Dancer, played by Eli Wallach, travels with Julian (Robert Keith), a personal manager who accepts bookings and negotiates compensation. Dismissing protests on behalf of Dancer’s victims, Julian chides them for their lack of sociological perspective. “Ordinary people of your class,” he says, “you don't understand the criminal's need for violence.”  Wallach was to articulate the same philosophy as the bandit chieftain in The Magnificent Seven.  Of the Mexican villagers on whom he preys, he argues persuasively “If God had not wanted them shorn, he would not have made them sheep.”

Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry

All my admiration of Siegel coalesced around his latest film. We had hardly dispensed with the pleasantries before I began to express my enthusiasm for Dirty Harry: the majesty of its vision, the characterisation of Eastwood as the retributory figure, seen always in high places, often in bright day, descending to levy justice on the killer Scorpio, who, in contrast, appears  a creature of the earth and night, the twisted Peace symbol on his jacket an emblem....

Siegel held up his hand to stop me in mid sentence. Turning to Mary Lou, he enquired amiably “Is he always like this?”

Well, yes, I suppose I was.

John Baxter is an all-round writer, scholar, critic and film-maker who has lived in Paris since 1989 with his wife Marie-Dominque Montel and daughter Louise. His Wikipedia entry  details the many books he has written which include the first  ever critical volume devoted to the Australian cinema as well as studies of Ken Russell, Josef von Sternberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, George Lucas, Robert De Niro and Luis Bunuel. His most recent book, one of a number of studies of Paris is A Year in Paris, described by the New York Times thus "In “A Year in Paris,” (Baxter) strings together the beautiful beads of the French everyday, all held together by the invisible act of imagination that makes a country cohere and endure."