Speaker 1: This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
Speaker 1: Clint Eastwood turned 96 recently, which means that he is
Speaker 1: older than the talkies. He was born the same year
Speaker 1: that sound in movies came in. So think about that.
Speaker 1: There's never been a moment in the history of movies
Speaker 1: that talk when Clint Eastwood was not alive. That is
Speaker 1: not a man with a career. That's like a geological formation.
Speaker 1: And it got me thinking about a movie of his
Speaker 1: that I love, Dirty Harry, from 1971. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: know it's, talking about this movie, it's one of those
Speaker 1: oily rags in the garage kind of things, dangerous to
Speaker 1: bring up, one little spark and the place goes up
Speaker 1: in flames. But it's a pretty gripping thriller. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty terrific movie. But it is also a
Speaker 1: lot like another movie, a movie that almost nobody remembers,
Speaker 1: called The Sniper from 1952. They are basically... Honestly, they're
Speaker 1: the same movie. They're both set in San Francisco. They're
Speaker 1: both about a guy shooting strangers from the rooftops, both
Speaker 1: with a tense police stakeout on the hills of the city.
Speaker 1: In fact, the rooftop sequences are so similar that you
Speaker 1: have to assume that somebody on the Dirty Harry crew
Speaker 1: had seen the earlier picture and just quietly helped himself,
Speaker 1: which is more than okay to do. I personally have
Speaker 1: helped myself many times to plot devices and scraps of
Speaker 1: dialogue from the Dick Van Dyke show. That's sort of
Speaker 1: how show business works. So Dirty Harry and the Sniper.
Speaker 1: Same city, same crime, same rooftops, but 19 years apart.
Speaker 1: And completely different movies because they were made by and
Speaker 1: for completely different Americas. In The Sniper, the hero isn't
Speaker 1: the cop. It's the psychiatrist. There's a doctor in that
Speaker 1: movie who keeps insisting the killer doesn't need punishing, he
Speaker 1: needs help, they have the right tools and a little understanding,
Speaker 1: this poor lonely man can be fixed. And here's what's amazing.
Speaker 1: In 1952, Nobody in the audience laughed at that. That
Speaker 1: was considered a sensible position. That was the optimistic, modern,
Speaker 1: can-do American thing to believe. We have the technology. We
Speaker 1: can fix this man. Cut to 1971. Harry Callahan would
Speaker 1: have thrown that psychiatrist off the roof. When the bureaucrats
Speaker 1: and the shrinks and Dirty Harry start talking about the
Speaker 1: killer's rights and the killer's troubled childhood, Harry's lip curls
Speaker 1: up and Probably so does the whole audiences, because by 1971,
Speaker 1: America had spent the past 10 years watching riots and
Speaker 1: assassinations and actual Manson family psychos on the actual news,
Speaker 1: and nobody was in the mood to hear about understanding
Speaker 1: or anything like that anymore. They just wanted the 44. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, stipulate it. Neither of those movies is right
Speaker 1: about crime or psychology or Anything else, probably. That is
Speaker 1: not the point. The point is that you could hold
Speaker 1: them up next to each other and read the country
Speaker 1: off of them like rings on a tree. Same story,
Speaker 1: told 19 years apart. That's only 19 years. But the
Speaker 1: whole national mood had rotated underneath it. You could learn
Speaker 1: more about 1952 and 1971 from those two movies than
Speaker 1: I think you'd get from a stack of history books.
Speaker 1: But neither movie was actually trying to tell you anything
Speaker 1: about America at all, actually. They weren't making a sociological argument.
Speaker 1: They were just telling a story. They were just trying
Speaker 1: to scare you for 90 or 120 minutes. The America stuff,
Speaker 1: that leaked out around the edges. Which brings me to
Speaker 1: a word I've started to hate, and that word is dated.
Speaker 1: We use it now like an insult. Oh, that movie's dated,
Speaker 1: meaning it belongs to its moment. It reeks of when
Speaker 1: it was made. You can tell exactly what year it
Speaker 1: was from the haircuts and the assumptions and the clothes
Speaker 1: and the things everybody took for granted. And maybe I
Speaker 1: am sensitive to that word because it was my birthday yesterday.
Speaker 1: Thank you. And I know that I'm dated, but You know,
Speaker 1: so what? So is everything. I am extremely dated. I
Speaker 1: was made in a particular year, out of particular materials,
Speaker 1: and I reek of my moment. I mean that metaphorically.
Speaker 1: And if you held me up next to a version
Speaker 1: of myself from 20 years ago, or even 40 years ago,
Speaker 1: you could read the rings just fine. And it would
Speaker 1: be the same for you, for everybody else. We're all dated.
Speaker 1: We're all stuck right here on the one timeline we
Speaker 1: got issued, giving off the unmistakable smell of exactly when
Speaker 1: we happen to be alive. And again, I use smell
Speaker 1: here in the metaphorical sense. I mean, I hope. Just
Speaker 1: trying to, you know, liven up the language. Look, the
Speaker 1: sniper is dated. And Dirty Harry is dated. Clint Eastwood,
Speaker 1: bless him, at 96, is the most magnificently dated object
Speaker 1: in America right now. A man who has been alive
Speaker 1: for the entire talking picture era. Basically, the entire American century.
Speaker 1: And he carries all of it around with him. And
Speaker 1: the point is, in show business, we run away from
Speaker 1: the dated. But maybe we need to, you know, stop
Speaker 1: running and steer into it. Because here's what those two
Speaker 1: movies understood that we seem to have forgotten in show business.
Speaker 1: Their job was to scare you, not to school you.
Speaker 1: The Sniper is not a lecture on mid-century psychiatry. Dirty
Speaker 1: Harry isn't a position paper on law and order, even
Speaker 1: though we treated it like that, especially the Eastward titles
Speaker 1: that exactly that way but but they are basically thrillers
Speaker 1: and they trusted you enough to just tell the story
Speaker 1: and let you make up your own mind you could
Speaker 1: love both of those movies without signing on to the
Speaker 1: worldview of either one you don't have to agree with
Speaker 1: the shrink and the sniper and you don't have to
Speaker 1: agree with harry to be gripped for 90 minutes by
Speaker 1: a guy on a rooftop with a rifle But somewhere
Speaker 1: along the way, show business decided that every story had
Speaker 1: to mean something, had to teach you the correct lesson,
Speaker 1: and then check that you learned it. And the irony
Speaker 1: is that those are exactly the movies that curdle the fastest.
Speaker 1: Because a lecture is only as good as its moment,
Speaker 1: and the moment always passes. And what Hollywood needs is
Speaker 1: to make fewer sermons, you know, and more thrillers. Tell
Speaker 1: me a story about right now, set it on a
Speaker 1: real rooftop in a real city, and don't tell me
Speaker 1: what to think about it. Just trust that the America...
Speaker 1: will leak out around the edges, because it always does,
Speaker 1: in ways that you can still read years later like
Speaker 1: rings on a tree. You, me, show business, Clint Eastwood,
Speaker 1: we are all dated and getting dated-er by the minute,
Speaker 1: and that is okay as long as we also don't
Speaker 1: get tedious. And that is the only permanent and unchangeable
Speaker 1: rule in Hollywood. You can get old, but you cannot
Speaker 1: get boring. And that's it for this week. Next week,
Speaker 1: the vicar of show business. For The Ankler, this is
Speaker 1: Rob Long with Martini Shots.